Shall We See The End of Tweeting Soon?

Welp, all my efforts as a Gen Xer to stay hip and cool with all the newest social media apps since 2007 have all gone for naught, because one of the apps I've gotten addicted to in the past 15 years might finally crash and burn now that another oligarch has seen fit to buy his way into media domination.

In short: Greedhead Elon Musk just bought out Twitter for 44 BILLION DOLLARS. Via Lauren Feiner at CNBC: 

Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday...

The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval...

Okay, my first thought was "Crap, they're letting the narcissistic billionaires in, there goes the neighborhood."

Second thought was "WHERE THE HELL DID MUSK DREDGE UP 44 BILLION DOLLARS in the first place???" Was that pocket change hiding in the sofa cushions or something?

Seriously, you know anybody with 44 BILLION DOLLARS lying around they can use to just buy a large-scale social media app like they were buying groceries?

Why even bother to spend so much in the first place? Musk tried buying his way onto the company's board a week or two ago, only to get thwarted by some of the regulations set in place for publicly-traded companies. So, his solution was to sledgehammer the entire process with a massive buyout and take Twitter private.

Why the hell is he so desperate trying to buy this social media app?

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse.

While Twitter as a social media app eventually became a business looking for ad revenues and profitability, it still served as a relatively free and easy-to-use app that people rallied to as a means to get instant news and updates from people they know, in a way faster and more satisfying than other major apps like Facebook. Its limited character count required savvy messaging in short sentences, allowing for clever snark and witty repartee (but also the trolling nightmares of direct insults and death threats).

For ill and for good, Twitter became a dominant means of getting news AND opinions out there, which mainstream media scooped up and gobbled for all its worth. On the bright side, it connected the world in ways other social media apps couldn't, passing along news of tragedies and victories faster than professional reporters could. It got the messages out in places and situations where dictators and despots couldn't stop them.

On the dark side, it got us donald trump tweeting out his racism and sexism and bullshit gaslighting. It got bad enough to where even Twitter had to suspend his ass because trump crossed the code of conduct lines too many times.

Rumor is Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter so he could open up the rules of conduct and allow the likes of trump back on it, possibly seeing money to be made on ragetweets attracting more views than ever before. It seems unlikely, given how eager a lot of current Twitter users are about to jump ship if Musk ever invites that Shitgibbon back on. It's more likely Musk would make an attempt to overwhelm Twitter users with his godless Bitcoin crypto scams.

Either way, we're seeing an end to a troubled yet useful social media app getting bought out by a billionaire ready to twist that product into an unrecognizable mess. Sort of like what happened to Tumblr, which never recovered from unpopular policy changes under new management. 

The talk now is about escape plans. Saving your Twitter history to a zipped archive for future civilizations to find. The next social media app everyone can congregate to that won't be threatened by an oligarch's buyout anytime soon.

It's not TikTok by the way. China owns THAT already.

Fight Back: DeSantis Can and Should Lose

Well, Governor DeSantis signed the bill this Friday ending Disney's special tax district, basically giving every resident of Osceola and Orange Counties the middle finger regarding their property taxes going up 20 percent. He's also violated Disney's Constitutional rights (thank you Mitt Romney - oh GOD did I just say that - for reminding us "Corporations are people, my friends."), if Ian Millhiser has the right info on this (via Vox.com):

Florida’s decision to strip a government benefit from Disney because, in DeSantis’s words, Disney expressed “woke” opinions and “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda,” is unconstitutional. And it’s not a close case.

As the Supreme Court said in Hartman v. Moore (2006), “official reprisal for protected speech ‘offends the Constitution [because] it threatens to inhibit exercise of the protected right.’” Nor does it matter how the government retaliates against a person or business who expresses an opinion that the government does not like — any official retaliation against someone because they engaged in First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional...

The "Don't Say Gay" law that's at the crux of this fight, according to Millhiser, is unconstitutional itself:

The law is unconstitutional because it is so vaguely drafted that teachers cannot determine what kinds of instruction are permitted and what kinds are forbidden — although it remains to be seen whether a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees will strike the law down...

So there is a big "If" attached to that possibility, although we've seen Roberts' Court reject some of the more extreme Far Right attempts at legislation due to such vagueness. Back to the fight:

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns a bar in Orlando. One day, José tells the local paper that he dislikes Ron DeSantis and plans to vote for DeSantis’s opponent in the upcoming election. The next day, the state sends him a letter informing him that “because you disparaged our great governor, we are stripping your business of its liquor license.”

José does not have a constitutional right to sell liquor for profit. And the overwhelming majority of Florida businesses do not have a license permitting them to do so. But if Florida strips José of his liquor license because the government disapproves of José’s First Amendment-protected speech, it violates the Constitution.

Disney’s ability to govern the Reedy Creek Improvement District is no different from Florida’s hypothetical decision to take away José’s liquor license. If Florida has a legitimate reason to strip away this benefit from Disney, the Constitution most likely would permit it to do so.

But no one can be punished because they express a political opinion...

If DeSantis and his fellow Republicans had come up with some valid excuse - some evidence of criminal misdeeds involving those special tax districts, financial evidence that removing those districts is a benefit to the state and its residents in some way - then they ought to be able to pass that bill and get it through judicial review.

Problem is, DeSantis and his fellow Republicans have made it clear in public that this law is meant to punish Disney for their public opposition to DeSantis' anti-gay agenda. DeSantis openly accused Disney of attacking him promoting their "woke agenda," and his Lt. Gov. Jennette Nunez admitted on Eric Bolling's Newsmax show that all Disney has to do is change their position on gay rights and they can have their tax district back (it won't expire until 2023). There's no true reform element to what DeSantis is doing: He is straight-up kneecapping Disney as a warning to everybody else to stay out of his way.

DeSantis thinks he's in full control of the situation, and he thinks he's untouchable.

But he's not untouchable. He can lose, not only in the courtrooms where his actions can turn on him. He can lose at the ballot box, especially because he's more vulnerable than he wants to admit.

In 2018, he only barely won election as Governor by barely 35,000 votes, in an election with 8.2 million voters out of 11.5 million or so registered voters.

Orange County has roughly 854,000 or more total voters, Osceola has 245,000 or so voters. Granted, a sizable majority in both are registered Dems (361,000 / 98,000), but how many of them are going to show up to vote now to express their displeasure? How many No-Party Affiliated (NPA) voters (264,000 / 86,000) are now willing to show up and vote their displeasure? How many of them are now willing to join the Democratic Party?

Because what DeSantis and the state GOP did legitimately hurts them, strikes at their incomes and their businesses: They are now looking at the possibility their tourism industry will take a huge hit.

All those county residents gotta do is, they gotta go get their Voter Registration forms - county elections offices have them, your DMV offices have them, your public libraries have them - and get them filed this Monday. Register for the first time, or otherwise re-register and change their affiliation to Democratic. Hell, let's see how many registered Republicans in those counties (214,000 / 56,000) decide to re-register to NPA just to send DeSantis a message?

Because they STILL have a First Amendment right to send DeSantis a message saying "You Suck." He can try to retaliate all he wants, but he deserves to lose that fight if he keeps pushing it.

Punch back, Florida voters. Your votes matter, your voices matter, and DeSantis deserves to lose for what he's doing to our families and to our businesses.

The Battle for Florida: DeSantis Declares War On the Mouse

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below and peruse the rest of the blog, thank ye!)

When my family moved to Florida, I was seven. We lived in a part of Florida that had just exploded with new housing and thousands of relocating Americans, at the forefront of the 1980s population boom that turned Florida from a swamp-infested minor state to the third most-populated in the nation.

Part of that boom relied on the development of a major tourist attraction called Disney World, built outside of Orlando by Walt Disney's corporation in an attempt to expand his theme park empire. The popular Disneyland of southern California brought the company fortune in the 1950s but when he needed to add more rides, all the surrounding land had been bought up by developers who added their own businesses to feed off the tourism trade. By the 1960s Disney realized the next time he started a theme park, he needed to buy up all the land possible first, then start the theme park and expand from there.

The best place he could do that was Florida, where land was cheap and few people lived because the heat and humidity of most months made it untenable for non-agricultural or shoreline living. Picking a spot where a big enough airport existed to help with the flow of tourists and near an interstate to handle traffic, Disney quietly bought up as much as possible between Orange and Osceola counties in order to ensure construction of multiple theme parks and associated hotels/resorts under the company's control.

All of that land development still required a lot of corporate control, so Disney's company worked out a deal with the state of Florida by 1967: Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district run by the corporation. Disney would be responsible for paying and managing the infrastructure costs and constructions, much like its own city/county: In return, Orange and Osceola residents didn't have to pay anything towards the district, which benefitted both counties when businesses grew up around Disney's area and the population/work force grew to fill all those tourism jobs.

Everybody - except for the massive income inequality that non-union labor has to cope with - kind of won with that deal. Today, Orlando is one of the largest metros in the nation, only second behind the South Florida (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach) area in the state itself. Florida generates more money from tourism dollars than any other industry. And its allure has drawn in other industries - aeronautics, health care, energy, financial firms - to employ hundreds of thousands more. 

There may be a Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, a Legoland in Winter Haven, a... well, does Coral Castle count as a theme park? No, it's a roadside attraction my bad. (Big thanks by the way to Neil Gaiman for shouting out the mermaids of Weeki Wachee in his work American Gods) There may be a Universal Studios park in Orlando itself, a Sea World park just down the road, and a hundred attractions along International Drive, but EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING in the Orlando metro revolves around Disney World.

They don't call it Mickeytown for nothing...

This makes it all the more insane that the Florida Republicans running our state - basically operating as one-party rule since 1998 - led by autocrat-wannabe Ron DeSantis have decided to nuke Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District from orbit.

To the Tampa Bay Times (linking to the Associated Press reporting):

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday gave final passage to a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government, handing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory in his feud with the entertainment giant over its opposition to a measure that critics have dubbed the “don’t say gay” law.

The move could have huge tax implications for Disney, whose series of theme parks have transformed Orlando into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, and serves to further sour the relationship between the Republican-led government and a major political player in the state. Disney did not return an email seeking comment Thursday...

See, what happened is that DeSantis is angling for the 2024 Republican nomination for the Presidency - he's hoping that current overlord donald trump will be in handcuffs by 2023 - so during this legislative year he pushed for a lot of culture war laws he could sign to win over the GOP's racist/sexist voter base.

That not only included a racist "anti-CRT" law that essentially made it illegal to discuss the history of racism in both Florida and the United States, it also included the "Don't Say Gay" law that makes it illegal to "discuss gender identity" to the point where teachers could get fined saying the word "gender" on school grounds in front of students, and regardless of grade level due to an "age appropriate" clause vaguely worded enough to threaten even high schoolers. When that "Don't Say Gay" law was finally discussed in the legislature and passed by the GOP-controlled House and Senate, there was a lot of media discourse about how Disney World - Florida's biggest private employer - would handle the matter.

See, over the years Disney has garnered a reputation for being Pro-People i.e., a megacorporation that actually thinks about marketing to gay/lesbian/transgender audiences as well as the other demographics (yes, there is always a profit to be made). There's been Gay Days organized at the theme parks since 1991. Disney has never openly denounced the appropriation of popular characters - especially Elsa from Frozen - as gay icons, which helped maintain the fanbase. They market it all - even as they sell themselves as "family-friendly" - as an inclusive community where love and acceptance matters more than culture war posturing.

However, Disney is still a business, and a pretty big one at that: So they've always had their eye on keeping their corporate taxes low and government regulation off their backs. This means a lot of campaign contributions to Republicans on a regular basis, especially at the state level to ensure nobody messed with the flow of revenues.

So when Disney's head honchos were all asked about how they felt about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, their first response back in March was... well, hem-hawing at best. Which led to a major walkout of Disney employees angered by the spineless owners. Shamed by the public display, the CEO took a harder stance early in April, after which DeSantis still signed the bill into law while accusing Disney and others who opposed it of "grooming" kids, like the theme park was staffed by registered sex offenders.

And at that point, DeSantis called for a special legislative session - usually the state legislature works for six weeks to pass bills, and if it misses anything they have to hold special sessions at taxpayer expense - not only to force the legislature to approve his gerrymandered nightmare of a Congressional map but also to remove Disney's special tax district as punishment. Back to the AP article in the Tampa Bay Times:

The bill passed by the legislature on Thursday would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, as the 55-year-old Disney government is known, as well as a handful of other similar districts by June 2023. The measure does allow for the districts to be reestablished, leaving an avenue to renegotiate its future. The bill now moves to DeSantis’ office to be signed into law...

Democrats have criticized the Disney proposal as clear retaliation against the company and warned that local homeowners could get hit with big tax bills if they have to absorb bond debt from Disney — although such details are far from clear.

Disney is one of Florida’s biggest private employers, last year saying it had more than 60,000 workers in the state. It is not immediately clear how the company or local governments around its properties would be affected if the district was dissolved...

You can kind of see the carrot the Republicans left in the bill, where they could re-institute the special district if only Disney would behave like a good little puppet for DeSantis' political ambitions.

But the Republicans are risking a lot on this brash and open assault on a major economic revenue source for the entire state. If Disney World is curtailed, shut down, reduced in any way, that's a serious hit to the surrounding hotels and restaurants responsible for the hotel and sales taxes flowing into Tallahassee. 

One noted effect of losing the special district status is that Disney would have to fire the county-level emergency services people - the EMTs, the fire fighters, the police - working within the district. The district itself disappears, meaning the counties it's in - Orange and Osceola - would have to pick up the slack and staff those services themselves. Those counties would start have to paying for all that, not Disney.

Adding on top of that is a bond liability Disney has tied into the Reedy Creek finances, a massive debt worth around $1 billion (it might even be $2 billion) that those counties - not the state, which is really rubbing it in hard - would have to cover. If we refer to that CNBC article by Robert Frank:

Reedy Creek has bond liabilities of between $1 billion and $1.7 billion, according to the district’s financial filings. Under Florida statute, if Reedy Creek is dissolved, those liabilities are transferred to the local governments — either Bay Lake or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

State Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further study of the bond debt, but the amendment failed on a voice vote.

Farmer said the bond debt could total more than $2 billion and that tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek’s outstanding liabilities.

“This is a very real impact, the extent of which we don’t fully understand yet,” Farmer said.

If the liabilities of $1.7 billion or more are transferred to Orange and Osceola counties, he said, the debt could amount to $1,000 per taxpayer...

In short: If Reedy Creek goes, the state government gets all the money while the local counties are forced to pay the bills.

All of this damage happening all because DeSantis and his fellow Republicans are vindictive assholes.

This is only part of the stuff that can happen if (more like when) DeSantis gets his revenge on Disney.

What happens when the Walt Disney Company, megacorporation generating around $68 billion a year, decides to fight back?

Remember at the beginning of the article when I mentioned my family moving to Florida? We moved to the Tarpon Springs area, and during those early formative years I witnessed up close the Disney company going after a day care center right off Klosterman Road. The day care had painted on the exterior a number of kid-friendly cartoon characters, among them Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Disney did not approve, because they were not affiliated to that day care. I didn't fully understand as a kid what trademarks meant and "controlling the brand" was all about, all I knew was a big business in Disney was going after a tiny local business on the side of the highway.

What I learned back then was something a lot of people understood over the decades that Disney turned into the media behemoth it is today: You do not fuck with Disney. You NEVER fuck with Disney. They go after day care centers, for God's sake.

This is an international company, with a reach extending to nearly every country on the planet. They hire hundreds of thousands of workers at theme parks across the globe. They make movies and television shows every minute of the day. They own the franchises of nearly every cultural foundation - their own animated characters, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, they just bought 20th Century Fox a couple years ago to seize the X-Men characters for future MCU planning - of modern fandom. They only things they don't own are Star Trek and Dr. Who, and Gods help us if they ever buy those up.

And they have on staff hundreds of lawyers all working to ensure protection of their trademarks, to brush aside lawsuits and damage claims, with a ruthlessness that would impress Sith Lords.

In terms of this retaliatory - and rushed - law DeSantis is about to sign, Disney can easily send an army of lawyers to poke enough holes in the law to where the courts - even the Republican wingnut ones - can invalidate it. 

On top of the legal fight about to ensue, Florida Republicans ought to start realizing that Disney - and a number of Disney's corporate allies - may not be sending fat checks to their campaign war chests, which is an important thing this midterm elections cycle. It wouldn't be logical of Disney's CEO to help pay for a political party that just kneecapped him and stripped one of the most profitable pieces of Disney's corporate empire of its power.

While businesses may think the Republicans are the "Pro-Business" party, what DeSantis and the Florida GOP just did demonstrated that when it comes to pandering to the voting base on culture war issues, the Republicans will sacrifice and abuse their corporate "buddies" for cheap political points. Republicans, it turns out, are NOT really Pro-Business: Republicans are Pro-Power, and they are not going to share that power with anyone...

Would Disney roll over on this issue? I wouldn't expect them to: Show DeSantis or any other bullying politician that you're willing to cave, and all the other state governors and elected officials will pile right on. So I would expect Disney to take stock of the state political landscape, take a deep breath, and begin funding Democratic candidates - especially the centrist Pro-Business ones - with truckloads of SuperPAC funds and ad support and voter turnout efforts.

For all the gerrymandering the state Republicans have done, they are still vulnerable to voter turnouts (DeSantis barely won in 2018 by little over 3,000 votes). This stunt the Florida GOP is pulling is about to hit the wallets of hundreds of thousands of residents - and not just in Orange and Osceola counties - in a way that they'll view as unforgivable. No amount of culture war fearmongering can distract from families coping with higher property taxes and lost jobs.

If the Florida Republicans are kneecapping you with punitive laws to make you suffer, you fight back to make sure those Republicans are out of office by the next election (which is this November).

And that's all the LEGAL stuff Disney can do to punish DeSantis for starting this culture war fight. You might expect some of the illegal stuff like literal kneecapping to happen over the next couple months.

In the meantime... well, in THIS fight between Wingnut Assholes vs. Corporate Overlords, I'm gonna have to side with the Corporate Overlords. 

#GoDisney 

and #SayGayFlorida

Every Leaf In Wartime

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
- Martin Luther

It's Easter Sunday today, so let's talk war.

We're more than 50 days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and to say it hasn't gone well for Russia is an understatement. Estimated losses are up to 20,000 troops, with 20 percent of that officers who are part of a chain of command that can't afford to fall apart. Ukrainian troop losses are around 3,000 troops but an ungodly number of civilians - nearly 5,000 innocent lives - caught in Russia's genocide.

Russia has lost an incredible number of its tanks and heavy armor vehicles within the last two months, due to Ukrainians' effective use of Javelin anti-tank weapons supplied by Western Europe. And word is, Russia's arms manufacturers can't replace what's been lost thanks to sanctions cutting off much-needed materials.

Russia may have command of the Black Sea, but Ukrainian forces are striking without fear and with success. Above all, the sinking of the flag ship Moskva has been a huge win for Ukraine. Not only was it the largest class ship Russia had in those waters, but due to Turkey barring military ships through the only strait in and out of the Black Sea means Putin can't send any ship to replace it.

It's also a huge win for Ukraine because Moskva was the warship that threatened Ukrainian troops - merely a handful, around 13 or so - defending Snake Island off the coast of Odesa during the earliest stages of Putin's invasion. When confronted with a ship that could pound the tiny island into rubble, the soldier in charge - Roman Hrybov - decided there was only one sane response:

"Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself:" The defiance of the Snake Island soldiers was note-perfect for this meme-friendly media environment, the "Nuts!" of the 21st Century, and easily marketable for t-shirts and mailing stamps (I'm not kidding! It's already a collectible!)

I know a couple of people who collect stamps,
I totally want to buy a couple for them, I swear.

While the early reports were that the Ukrainian defenders were killed, it later turned out they surrendered after the Moskva's barrage flattened everything, and then were taken to Russia for a month's worth of torture before a prisoner exchange was worked out. Still, the defiance mattered, their survival in the face of incredible odds mattered, and we should expect the Michael Bay biopic to wrap up filming next month for an early January 2023 release date.

Speaking of defiance, one of the reasons why Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine was to spook other neighboring nations like Finland and Sweden into not joining NATO. Well, on that front Putin is getting humiliated even as he rattles his saber ever louder (via Thomas O Falk at Al Jazeera):

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden have sought the protection of NATO and are considering a paradigm shift of their respective security policies: the abdication of neutrality and military independence.

In January, Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin declared in Helsinki that Finland could not be expected to seek NATO membership during the current legislative period. However, Russia’s invasion has laid bare the disadvantages of being a non-member...

There are indications both Finland and Sweden are heading towards a genuinely historic change of course in their respective security policies. During the Cold War, Sweden and Finland were essentially considered neutral states, albeit for different reasons.

“Sweden’s neutrality was much more part of their national identity, whereas Finland’s neutrality was more pragmatic and virtually forced upon them by the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance signed between Finland and the USSR in 1948,” said (senior lecturer for European security at Aberystwyth University) Alistair Shepherd...

“Polling in Finland found 53 percent in favour of NATO membership and 41 percent in Sweden. More recently that has risen further with over 50 percent now in favour in Sweden [rising to 62 percent if Finland joins]. In Finland, 68 percent are in favour of joining NATO [rising to 77 per cent if the government recommends it],” said Shepherd...

In essence, their memberships would further enhance NATO’s presence and security within the Baltic region. Both Sweden and Finland bring advanced and well-trained militaries into NATO.

“It could create some long-term challenges because having 32 members can slow down or hamper consensus decision-making. It also indicates how far Russia has isolated itself from the rest of the European community,” Alexander Lanoszka, assistant professor in international relations at the University of Waterloo, told Al Jazeera...

“In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, it’s likely to be approved quickly and membership fast-tracked to show the unity and strength of the alliance in the face of Russian aggression,” Katharine AM Wright, senior lecturer in international politics at Newcastle University, told Al Jazeera...

Putin's belligerence towards Ukraine and open talk about rebuilding a Russian Empire that would dominate all of Eastern Europe isn't winning friends and influencing people. Neutral nations like Finland and Sweden now realize their neutral status means nothing to a bullying autocrat, and nations like Poland that are NATO members now remember all too well the bleak despair of being Russian puppets from the Cold War years (and even centuries before all that).

Russia is making noises about elevating hostilities with Finland and Sweden - by placing nuclear-capable warships in the Baltic Sea - in a desperate attempt to stall any NATO vote. There's a rule in NATO's charter they can't accept any member with a standing border dispute with another nation (the legal reason why NATO can't just speed-track Ukraine as a full member right now), and Russia hopes to exploit that against Finland/Sweden to stop them from joining. Thing is, NATO will see the farce for what it is (Russia may have the dispute but Finland and Sweden don't) and proceed on the vote.

The only other hope Russia has to stop Finland and Sweden from joining would be a friendly nation like Hungary - where fellow autocrat Orban just won another election - using its veto power to stop the vote. Thing is, Hungary may be friendly but it's also part of the massive European Union: Hungary cannot afford to isolate itself economically in the middle of that behemoth.

There are few options left for Putin to survive his genocidal folly, at the rate things are going this spring. Things will arguably get bloodier as he doubles down on the madness and death.

But there will be another spring. Another turn of the seasons as his madness fails and his war collapses on itself. Another chance for sunshine to return and for the leaves to turn green again. 

Always another chance for hope.

The Stupidity Plus Racism Plus Fearmongering Divided By Republicans, It All Adds Up In Florida

I am waking up to THIS STUPIDITY from my state's Department of Education:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

Yes, our Republican-controlled state government led by Uber-Panderer DeSantis is going after Critical Race Theory again, even WITHOUT evidence that CRT was getting taught in our primary schools in the first.

And the Republicans are so afraid of CRT, so afraid of white students learning about how systemic racism has been throughout our history at the national and state levels, that these wise learned assholes are going after MATHEMATICS as though Florida's pre-Algebra classes are full of race theory.

...

Yes. Republicans are going after MATH now.

You know, I'm 50-something now, it's been ages since I studied mathematics, but I'm pretty sure when I took Algebra I in the Ninth Grade at Tarpon Springs High that there was no racism being discussed in the class.

I mean, I can recall we studied stuff like 2x + 3y = z, or the emphasis on parenthesis in equations, and I vaguely recall word problems like "If Monique goes shopping and finds that cereal boxes of Lucky Charms are selling two for $4.00, how much would it cost if Monique buys 9 boxes of Lucky Charms?" At some point we learned IF = THEN calculations for variables, and then we learned about fractions and percentages, but we NEVER learned about the Rosewood Massacre and its effects on early 20th Century population trends in our state, and we never learned about the economic effects of Redlining and the Ghetto as Financial Policy.

These Far Right wingnut Republicans are so intent on finding "reverse racism" or anything that would make White folk uncomfortable about the long tragic reality of systemic racism in our nation's existence that they will wipe out entire sections of learning to root out such fears.

DeSantis and his lackeys will be going after Biology (because God trump forbid Darwinian Evolution will make religious White folk worry they evolved from apes) and Physics (because God trump forbid learning about potential and kinetic energies might teach kids about passive political resistance used in Black Lives Matters protests) next. Maybe after Chemistry (because trump forbid that our kids learn about mixing things like interracial dates) as well. 

The stupidity of all this is excuse for Florida Republicans to degrade and demolish enough of our public education system to where our public schools are broken, useless, and incapable of preparing our children to higher education or well-paid jobs that require actual learned skills.

The madness of all this is that too many of my fellow state residents aren't paying attention to how Republicans are driving this state right over the cliffs and into the sharp pointy rocks below.

If only there was a mathematical equation that would explain the damage that happens when our entire state crashes into those rocks.

No Debate: trump Was Lousy At It Anyway

In minor news today - since all the major news like Putin's genocide in Ukraine gets a bit overwhelming - the Republican Party voted this week to stop joining the 4-year farce of Presidential debating because as it turns out trump is too much of a pussy to risk it anymore. Well, that's MY take on it. Let's hear from the official reporting from Reuters (via The Guardian link):

The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.

“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.

What McDaniel means by "bias," by the by, translates into "the moderators wouldn't let trump go bugfuck psycho like he wants to."

The move, which followed months of wrangling between the RNC and the commission, will potentially deprive voters of seeing Republican and Democratic candidates on the same stage.

Millions of Americans usually watch the presidential debates and many viewers say they help them to make up their minds about whom to vote for, according to research by Pew Research Center.

The RNC’s decision follows grievances aired by former president Donald Trump and other Republicans about the timing of debates, debate formats and the selection of moderators.

Defenders of the debates say they are an important element of the democratic process, but critics say they have become television spectacles in which viewers learn little about the candidates’ policies.

Trump refused to participate in what was supposed to be the second of three debates with Biden in 2020, after the commission switched it to a virtual contest following Trump’s Covid-19 infection.

What the article didn't mention was how the first debate between trump and Biden in 2020 turned out: A complete and utter disaster for trump. Don't take my word for it: Every other pundit who watched it were sickened by trump's bullying behavior. Here's the link back to what David Frum documented for The Atlantic:

Instead, he talked to Facebook conspiracists, to the angriest of ultra-Republican partisans, and to violent white supremacists. He urged the Proud Boys to “stand by” because “somebody’s got to do something” about “antifa and the left.” He refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the (likely) event that he loses. He threatened months and months of chaos if the election does not go his way.

Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted—and changed nothing. All he did was confirm the horror and revulsion of the large American majority that has already begun to cast its ballots against him.

Correction: Trump did one thing. On the Cleveland stage, Trump communicated that he will seize any opportunity to disrupt the vote and resist the outcome. He communicated more forcefully than ever that the only security the country has for a constitutional future is that Biden wins by the largest possible margin...

Even Frum could see by September 2020 that trump was plotting a coup to hold onto power even when he lost the election that November.

Many people will criticize how the moderator, Chris Wallace, managed the debate, and surely he could have done better. But really, nothing short of a shock collar around Trump’s neck would have disciplined the man who is, after all, the president of the United States. A president who does not respect tax laws, does not respect the FBI, is surely not going to be constrained by a debate moderator. It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates...

It was the worst public behavior out of a President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) in modern memory. There had been times when Presidents like LBJ and Reagan were combative or defensive during public pressers, and in private the likes of Nixon behaved so much worse. Those were mere flashes compared to trump's performance: trump heckled, he interrupted, he spoke out of turn, he YELLED out of turn, he did everything except physically assault Biden. If trump had been graded by the Toastmasters for his debate behavior, they would have flunked him in the first three minutes.

And it wasn't like trump was masterful in his debates against Hillary Clinton back in 2016. He flared out in the first debate, he acted like a bully during the open forum format of the second debate, and he failed to impress during the third debate. 

You have to remember: trump never won the popular vote in 2016 and in 2020. If debate performances are meant to sway undecided voters to your banner, trump only succeeded in rallying his base. His Democratic opponents were able to do that as well, and in Biden's case rallied an uptick in voter turnout that trump couldn't surpass.

This move by the Republicans has all the markings of a sore loser - trump - deciding he wasn't going to play the game on a level field. Either he's hoping that this will force the Debates commission to revise their policies and grant him more power to set the rules his way, or he's hoping he won't have to face the embarrassment of losing debates in 2024. It'll probably be the latter because the commission is supposed to be non-partisan managed between both major parties, and the Democrats on the commission will refuse to yield to trump's antics.

Part of me even wonders why the debates still matter. I understand the optics of it - a public demonstration of the American electoral system, the spectacle of holding elected officials accountable to the issues that matter to the voters - but the mechanics of it have broken apart the past twenty years as partisan hackery took over the democratic (small d) process.

It's not as though our Presidential elections needed these debates over the nation's history. Impractical back in the day before railroads or cars or airplanes that could allow a large gathering to watch a debate of that scale, it would take something like mass communication of radio and television to pull it off. 

Previous elections didn't even have the candidates campaigning all that hard: Late 19th Century tradition made it that they didn't even leave their front porches. Most candidates still stuck to their individual campaigns, avoiding direct public forums as though to avoid giving their opponent any validation.

There aren't any full explanations I can find why candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy agreed to televised Presidential debates in 1960. Kennedy had his reasons because he was trailing the polls as a still-obscure figure, while Nixon was better-known due to serving as Vice-President under Eisenhower. It could have been that television was still a new technology and both sides saw potential in reaching national audiences. We were in the middle of a Cold War versus Communism, so there may have been the appeal of debating with a free exchange of idea(l)s between candidates to market the virtues of elective democratic republics like the United States.

The results were disastrous for Nixon. He debated well enough on the issues, but his image paled in comparison to Kennedy's charisma. Nixon lost his polling lead and then lost a close election. It should be telling that the following elections in 1964, 1968, and 1972 there were no Presidential debates at all (as Nixon ran in '68 and '72, there was no way he was going to fall for that trap again).

It took Nixon's Watergate, and the distrust in elected leaders, for the debates to return in 1976, as President Gerald Ford and Candidate Jimmy Carter both needed them to appeal to an electorate that barely knew both of them. But the rationale - the open discussion of ideas and opposing views on how to answer crises - for hosting these things quickly devolved.

By the 1990s, the focus of the debates were to avoid getting pinned on any ideological position that would get used in attack ads by your opponents, and to basically avoid saying anything dumb to ruin your poll numbers. The Saturday Night Live skit in 1992 aptly titled "Debate ’92: The Challenge to Avoid Saying Something Stupid" pretty much spelled out how bland and boring these debates became.

Nothing's really ever gained in these spectacles, to be honest. The candidates appearing at these debates are prepped into one-sentence ten-words answers that don't say anything, oft-times stuck with those one-liners creating gaffes of their own. Undecided voters tuning in to watch are mostly watching for those gaffes, not for leadership potential or for policies that matter to them. Decided voters don't want to tune in because we already know why we're voting for our candidate. The partisan nature of our nation's political parties have gotten to where the issues don't even matter (look at how the Republicans didn't even create a new platform for the 2020 elections).

We don't need these debates anymore, or at least not right now. Not when the choices are already too stark and the issues are so easily ignored.

It's actually a good thing donald trump doesn't want to do debates anymore. It means less airtime on my television screens to where I and millions of others don't have to look at his orange-painted lying face.

DeSantis' Map to Electoral Hell

Update: Many thanks to driftglass for including this article in Crooks&Liars Mike's Blog Round-up! 

If there's a "Things I Despise" list, somewhere in the Top Five is a seething disgust for my state's pandering demonizing governor Ron DeSantis, he of the Culture Wars obsessions in a desperate attempt to outmaneuver the likes of trump himself for the 2024 Presidential primaries.

Somewhere just slightly above him is a raging disgust for the constant corruption of state-level gerrymandering, where every ten years the Far Right Conservatives running Florida and half the other states intentionally skew the population numbers to carve out party-friendly districts to where Republicans will have enough "safe" seats to hold onto political power even when statistically speaking their numbers put them in the minority.

(And yes, I hate the hypocrisy of Democrats configuring their own gerrymandering in response. It's a downward spiral where only partisans survive while moderates who can't campaign in any districts get kicked to the curb)

I had been hoping across the years of blogging at this place that eventually the gerrymander would face enough legal scrutiny in the courts that the damn thing would expire, but alas in 2019 the conservative-bent Supreme Court decided to not only spare the gerrymander but gave it a nice home and a full pension.

From there, it was only a matter of time - the 2022 Midterms which OH FCKING GOD IS THIS YEAR - that the gerrymander would come back to mock my pragmatic sense of electoral fairness.

So of course I was dreading how the Florida Legislature - dominated by Republicans since the 1990s and looking to enforce that dominance for another ten years - would carve out new state-level and federal Congressional districts even with the constitutionally-mandated Fair Districts amendments limiting how they could twist population zones into five Republican districts for every one Democratic even though the party split statewide is close to 45-45 with 10 percent third-party/no-party registered.

(If the redistricting process was truly fair, you'd think at least ONE No-Party-Affiliated district would pop up at the state level out of 120 Representative districts, but nooooooo.)

Apparently, for the state districts - House and Senate - the voting was done along party lines and the Florida Democratic members questioning the lack of transparency although it doesn't seem like there's much room to challenge the final maps. The state maps were sent to the State Supreme Court for final review and apparently that Court - as Republican-leaning as they are after 20 years of one-party rule in Florida - were cleared this March.

What happened to dial up the redistricting drama this cycle was an unusual veto of the Congressional maps, something that DeSantis could interfere with and did so. Previous governors never insisted on drawing up their own redistricting maps, but DeSantis did that this time and with a map a little more partisan than even the legislative Republicans were comfortable with. 

At first it seemed like the Lege were going to put up a ruckus when DeSantis called for a special session - which costs extra to the taxpayers, by the way - to get them vote his way... and then this week the GOP legislators pretty much rolled over and agreed to support DeSantis' map. To Joe Hernandez at NPR for more:

Republican legislative leaders in Florida say they're going to give up trying to redraw the state's new map of congressional districts and instead consider one offered by Gov. Ron DeSantis during a special session next week.

DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential aspirant, has been pushing a map that's considered more advantageous to his party.

The announcement on Monday by state Senate President Wilton Simpson and House Speaker Chris Sprowls came two weeks after DeSantis vetoed a map that had been approved by the legislature.

"At this time, Legislative reapportionment staff is not drafting or producing a map for introduction during the special session," the lawmakers said in a letter. "We are awaiting a communication from the Governor's Office with a map that he will support."

The ACLU of Florida condemned the legislature's decision to punt the responsibilities of redistricting to DeSantis, calling it an "unprecedented" and "undemocratic" move.

"People should pick their politicians, not the other way around," the group said in a statement...

DeSantis is arguing that the Lege's map carved out two Black-majority districts in North Florida that he feels should be more "race-neutral," but in the process he's looking to redraw everything else around that to skew the results more in favor to Republicans. To refer to Jane C. Timm and Marc Caputo over at NBC News:

The map — which would carve up a Black-held district — was released Wednesday afternoon, just days after state legislators said they would defer to DeSantis, a Republican, on the new congressional boundaries. The Republican-controlled Legislature drew maps that would have created less of a GOP advantage, but DeSantis vetoed them last month.

DeSantis' map would create 20 Republican seats and eight Democratic ones based on 2020 electoral data, according to Matthew Isbell, a leading Florida-based Democratic data consultant who analyzed the maps Wednesday evening. Florida’s congressional delegation consists of 16 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the House. The state was apportioned an additional House seat after the 2020 census.

“It’s so blatantly partisan,” Isbell said. “The only way you can create a 20-and-8 map... was to basically say, ‘Screw Black representation.’”

As I've mentioned earlier, in terms of voter numbers there's a near-even balance between registered Republicans (5.14 million) and registered Democrats (5.03 million) so in a 28-seat situation it ought to be 15R - 13D (if you calculate the No-Party count of 3.8 million, it ought to be 11 Republican, 10 Democrat, and 7 NPA).

Yet this gerrymandering by DeSantis would give Republicans a 20-to-8 advantage in Congressional seats. It's insanely wrong, and gives too much power to Republicans when it shouldn't.

And it's unconstitutional as hell. Those Fair District Amendments I'd mentioned earlier require that the redrawn districts do not conflict with minority (read: Black and Latino) rights, and those districts cannot be drawn in such a way as to "favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent." The map that DeSantis wants clearly over-represents Republicans, and by breaking up two districts that were designed to protect minority representation he's violating that rule as well.

It's clear that this is a matter heading to the courts, but it's also under a deadline because these midterms require the electoral maps be in place for the Congressional primaries by September (meaning August at the very latest). Even if this matter gets sped through the appeals process, there is a very dark possibility that at least for 2022 DeSantis' map will be the one used for the national election cycle this November.

And that could seriously impact on which party controls the U.S. House heading into 2023. If the Republicans regain control of the House even by one seat due to DeSantis' manipulations, we are likely going to see the swift retuning of Congressional investigations into baseless allegations of unproven voter fraud and meaningless impeachment inquiries against President Biden out of sheer spite for what legitimately happened to donald trump (twice).

This is why I hate gerrymanders. Instead of voting for actual representation on issues that matter to constituents it's all been turned into an exercise of map-making to let partisan hacks seize control, and wield power for their own selfish needs and NOT for the people living back home.

I hope to God DeSantis' map fails and that sanity - even if it means a 17-11 Republican "majority" that still doesn't represent us - prevails.

In the meantime, the only remaining way to defeat a gerrymander is to GET THE VOTE OUT and override the statistical disadvantages that the Republicans try to force on Democratic voters. Rise up, Democrats, turnout still means everything...

Grooming Hypocrisy

In the past month or so - especially as the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation like "Don't Say Gay Florida" got signed into law - we've witnessed an uptick in a particular form of Republican attack, where they go on the offensive (by being offensive) and accusing their political opposition of crimes they haven't proven.

You've probably been overwhelmed by now from the Far Right Narrative that the Republicans are passing all these anti-gay bills to protect our families and children from the dread threat of Communism The Big Scary Blacks Satan Worshipers Feminazis Baby Parts Factories and now Groomers. The accusation is that the gays and lesbians and trans people are infiltrating our schools in order to "groom" the next generation of teenagers to be gay/lesbian/trans themselves.

It's as though the Far Right still believe that homosexuality, or any alteration of gender identity, is a "choice" rather than the personal psychological self-awareness that every person - straight, gay, bi, trans, or fluid - goes through growing up. We've had decades of studies providing some evidence that the self-identity is biological, internal, that you're born to it, and it's not something you can plug into another person like teaching them math or history.

It may stem from the fear/belief that the Far Right has - given their religious absolutism and devout faith - that such sexual identities can be programmed into people the same way churches program people into their dogma. It ignores the hard-wired nature of self-identity, and it's all projection and hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy comes from the facts that 1) there's no proof of wide-spread grooming conspiracy going on (remember Pizzagate?) and 2) the Republicans are willing to overlook how heterosexuals - especially older men - are willing to chase after the younger generation of women to "groom" them as their second (or third) wives / mistresses on the side.

These Republicans yelling and screaming about "Gays grooming yer kids" have no problem rewriting state laws like the one in Tennessee, where they were trying to create loopholes to deny gays right to marry... while at the same time getting rid of the restrictions that protected girls as young as 10 from forced marriages. Nationwide outrage finally pushed the state legislature to re-insert the age restriction, but this was how the Far Right religious bastards wanted to take it (via Jon Skolnick at Salon):

H.B. 233 gives Tennesseans "an alternative form of marriage" between individuals who have a "conscientious objection to the current pathway," according to state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, the bill's Republican sponsor. 

As WKRN ​​reported, the GOP bill, first introduced in January, establishes a common-law marriage between "one man" and "one woman" but omits any age requirements for the union, an omission that Democrats have blasted.

"I don't think any normal person thinks we shouldn't have an age requirement for marriage," said Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart. "It should not be there as it's basically a get out of jail free card for people who are basically committing statutory rape," Stewart. I mean it's completely ridiculous, so that's another reason why this terrible bill should be eliminated..."

The measure is a significant step back from a Tennessee law passed in 2018 that prohibited minors under the age of seventeen from getting married. 

According to Unchained at Last, Tennessee ranks the 13th highest state in child marriages per capita. Nearly 10,000 children were granted marriage licenses in the state between 2000 and 2018... 

While the original intent of that law - which is still getting voted on - was to get around the gay rights to marriage, the fact that the Far Right didn't care they had removed the protections for children vulnerable to older sexual predators spells out their utter hypocrisy when it comes to "think of the children". The fact they didn't address this as a problem until 2018 (!!!) and were happy to undo what they had done just six years prior ought to horrify people.

Republicans - especially the religious wingnuts - look at gays and lesbians and bi and trans going public with their gender identities and scream "THEY'RE GONNA BRAINWASH YOUR KIDS INTO TEH GAY." Those same Republicans will then look at hetero men in their 20s and 30s chasing after 14-year-olds to get them pregnant and proclaim "Well this is the natural order of things as God intends."

Statutory rape means nothing to them. Actual rape - where the young girls are abused one way or another (physically or emotionally) into submitting to those men's wills - means nothing to the Far Right. The age differences between the sexual predators going after teen girls means nothing to them. Republicans pushing their religious wingnut agenda are going to make sure rape victims are forced to bear babies they didn't want for the glory of the sons-of-bitches who raped them. All they see is their sexist "make 'em barefoot and pregnant" agenda regain its "proper place" in the goddamned Patriarchy.

They've been like this for decades. We've seen their behavior in public over and over again. This blog has railed against the likes of Roy Moore - who was chasing after teenage girls while in his 30s, so much so a local mall had to trespass him to stop him stalking girls there - and other religious extremists like the Duggar family, which had sided repeatedly with their sexual predator son Josh who molested his own sisters (the parents' own daughters!) and was convicted in 2021 for possession of child porn. 

That is all young women are to these forced-birth zealots: Sexualized targets regardless of age, whose only purpose in their Christian Utopian is to breed. As often as possible, as early as possible.

The threat of "gay grooming" is a fake news story compared to the real threat girls and women from the ages of 10 to 50 are facing from the wingnut Religious Right the very minute Roe v Wade gets nuked by this ultra-conservative Supreme Court.

Gods help this nation the minute we turn half of our population into cattle.

April 4: Martin Luther King Spoke About Violence

What Reverend King said about violence holds true on this anniversary of the evening that violence claimed his life:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that...

The violence of war we see every day will not end until the haters are gone.

The violence of mass shootings we endure every day will not end until the haters are gone.

We all have to make that moral choice to stand up and fight, not for the sake of hate but for the sake of those we can love.

Update: Christ. I looked back at my other memorial blog articles for MLK and I keep quoting this same paragraph. I gotta get fresh material next time...

War Crimes

Dear fellow Americans:

Do yourself a favor and go to the nearest city.

I'd suggest a place with a lot of towers, a mix of apartments and condos, a decent mix of residential housing and business places. If you're like me living in Florida, downtown Orlando would be an appropriate place, maybe Ft. Lauderdale along all those beach condos.

Take some time and just sit there, in the middle of the day, a busy day, maybe a Saturday with some planned activity taking place like a street fair or a party.

Take some time and look at all the people, the families, the crowds, the bustling humanity that makes up our communities, our cities, our states, our nation.

Once you've taken that all in, take another minute or two to picture that entire scene around you turned into a hellish warscape.

Think about what it would be like to have Putin's Russian armies roll up in their tanks and artillery and rocket launchers. Think about all the shelling and missiles blasting into the condo towers and the office spaces full of people. Think about the families on the streets around you, fleeing for shelter that they can't find because the debris is everywhere and there's no safe places left.

Think about a month of that hell, running out of food by the first week, fresh water all gone due to busted water pipes, sewage backing up, no electricity, no heat for the cold nights no air for the hot smoke-filled days.

Think about what it would be like living in an occupied city, even in the suburbs where all the homes and grocery stores are. About Russian checkpoints every other street intersection, where the troops can pull you to one side and shoot you if you're on their blacklists, or worse, if they just want to make an example out of you.

Think about what's happening to Ukrainian women getting targeted for rapes. Think about the children huddling in bombed-out buildings without any parents to watch over them or find food and water, all because the parents died first from starvation. Think about the sick and the aged who couldn't flee in time and are suffering to death because hospitals were targeted under Russia's inhumane refusal to respect such places as safe zones.

We can't comprehend just how hellish a world it could be, all safe and cozy here in the United States, so far away from war zones like Syria or Yemen or Libya or hell half of Africa... and now Ukraine.

And yet, war zones they are. The cities in Ukraine may not compare by population to the likes of Orlando or Chicago or San Antonio or Seattle, they were centers of life, large communities of families who never asked for their homes to be bombed out and never asked for their loved ones killed.

And as we get into one full month of Putin's bloody decision to launch a full invasion of Ukraine, we are starting to get reports of how violent and vile the Russian invaders are handling their victims. Adam L. Silverman's oft-updated reports at Balloon Juice provides links to all these other documenting the atrocities:

1/2
Maria Genkin:
Pictures of some villages freed in Kyiv region, specifically Bucha, are devastating. Dead people lying outside of their houses, in what can only have been a “zachistka” - systemic execution of the men of each house. One body in front of every house. pic.twitter.com/6dQmp849tc

— Stanislav Aseyev (@AseyevStanislav) April 2, 2022

Silverman provides a definition of "zachistka":

The word “zachistka”, which literally means to sweep, is the term applied to Russian cleansing operations...

The zachistka embodied more than a military practice, however. It was a mind-set. And this was exemplified in the proliferation of the word itself. In the same way that the term ethnic cleansing (etnicko ciscenje’) was coined in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the term zachistka found a distinct voice in the Russian popular vocabulary and in the official addresses and speeches of military and government personnel. By late 1999, the use of zachistka in the press and everyday speech had reached an infectious and alarming level. From September 1999 to 2005, zachistka appeared 787 times in the headlines of Moscow’s central newspapers in relation to the second war in Chechnya...

This is what Putin wanted. Ownership of Ukraine, and a cleansing of any Ukrainian who interfered with his dreams of a great Russian empire.

Everything Putin and his armies are doing in Ukraine are honest-to-God war crimes.

Can we Americans think of anything - outside of issuing our own declaration of war, of sending our armies in Ukraine to fight back - to force Putin to stop?

There still haven't been enough economic sanctions, for one. Putin/Russia is still making money off of oil/gas agreements, something the West ought to consider shutting down to take a serious hit at Putin's own wallet.

The international courts are investigating Putin's decisions and his army's actions as war crimes, but as Russia hasn't agreed to many of the treaties that define those courts, Putin would laugh at any attempts to bring him accountable before a court.

To hell with Putin. I would argue to go ahead and file those charges. Put that albatross around Putin's neck. Make Putin in the eyes of the law the war criminal his actions already condemn him as. 

He might laugh it off but the rest of the world - the nations that adhere to the reality that wars are crimes - won't.

Make Putin a global pariah. Make it impossible for him to travel abroad for fear of getting arrested even in a nation he believes is an ally, make him paranoid enough to understand the rest of the world hates him enough to ignore any diplomatic protections he hopes to deploy.

Make it easier for every nation - even China - to ignore any diplomatic offers, any trade deals, any demands that Putin might insist of them.

Force Putin to hide in a fallout shelter for the rest of his miserable life, terrified of his own generals and political lackeys who might turn on him, no matter how cowed and boot-licking they may seem.

Putin and his handlers may try to twist the narrative, gaslight their Russian citizens that it's all Western propaganda, EU envy of their greatness, and assaults on Russian purity. But they won't convince enough of the Russians who are at heart desirous for world peace, and they'll lose more people over time whose BS detectors will get tired of the lies.

People are dying in Ukraine. Families are getting wiped out, entire cities destroyed. All for one man's criminal ego.

Putin has to answer for the crimes he's committed. Sooner or later, that must happen for the sake of our own nation's safety and future.