Thank you for the historical context. I was not aware of his previous stance on the issue, and I ended up putting my foot in my mouth because of it. My impression from the article was that his criticisms avoided moral issues, but that clearly isn’t the case when you consider the entirety of them.
I like how his criticisms have to do with the fact that Russia’s army leadership is deeply incompetent, and how the economy is suffering, and doesn’t even mention the fact that more than a million people have died so far, probably about the same number have been injured, and several million people have fled their country (either to avoid participating in the war, or because their homes were invaded). It seems that he doesn’t care about the fact that Putin started the most ruinous war since WWII based on nothing more than lies and propaganda; he just cares that he’s executing the war badly. Might be criticizing the leadership, but still a fucking orc through and through.
It’s like saying that H. H. Holmes has without doubt broken some laws.
The last time I came through American customs, it was when I was returning from a conference in Spain, and a colleague of mine got detained for 3 hours because he “looked suspicious”. Man’s a fucking engineer, with credentials out the wazoo, but apparently he fidgeted in line or something. Sitting there in the little space available just anxiously waiting for them to release him was harrowing, but I can’t even imagine what he went through. Nobody would tell me shit; in fact, the more I asked about him, the more it felt like they were treating me like a suspect. If they’d ended up deciding that he didn’t pass the sniff test, they could have taken him anywhere, and nobody would know a fucking thing about it for God knows how long.
Man, I’m getting sweaty just reliving that. Fuck I hate this country sometimes.
I haven’t done any international travel for the last few years, but I used to do it a decent amount for work, and lemme tell you: the worst part of those trips wasn’t the long / cramped plane flights; it was going through US customs.
I’m a US citizen, but every time I went through those lines, it felt like I was passing through a military checkpoint into occupied territory. Every time I went through that experience, it made me hate what our country has become just that little bit more.
Yeah, I figured they’d already had contingency plans in place in case the US did the dumbest thing possible in the 2024 elections. I mean, last time this traitor was president, he sent lists of the names and locations of US spies to Russia, and then in a completely unrelated series of accidents that followed, several of them died.
Any intelligence agency worth its salt should know by now that any secrets they share with the US will also be shared with Russia. Or anybody who pays a million dollars to go to a party at Mar a Lago so they can flatter Trump in person.
Every world intelligence agency should consider the US to be completely compromised at this point.
Well, I mean shit - we all get it wrong sometimes. The world is a complicated place, and the worst thing you can do is pretend that you’re infallible. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again (probably many, many times). Best I can do is try to learn from it and do better next time.