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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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If there’s one thing I know about what goes around it’s that it never comes around
This week, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure and desalination plants — the facilities that keep civilian populations alive. When critics pointed out that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international law, the White House waved them off. The President, his spokesmen assured us, was engaging in tough diplomacy.
But the man wasn’t bluffing. He’s got an almost obsessive attraction to the idea of maiming civilians. I know. I’ve personally heard him propose the most inhumane acts.
There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.
There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.
And that was in his first term, when that room full of aides still existed. Now they've all been replaced by ghouls just as monstrous as he is.
When is someone going to get fed up enough and [ Removed by Reddit ]?
I'm sure there are thousands of people unhinged enough to be willing to try that. If I read the news of that happening I'd celebrate, but I'm not personally trying to throw my whole life away for that.
and [ Removed by Reddit ]?
Okay, that euphemism made me snicker.
If I had the skills. . .
And if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp.
Don't drag other countries into this, there is no "West" including the USA anymore. You're on your own.
This is part of what the article is saying, in a way at the end.
The ‘west’ needs to hold the pariah to account and demand change or formally disassociate with the pariah completely in order to have any scrap of moral ground in this. With each day that passes - hell with each fresh atrocity, further erodes that ground into complicity.
Saying "I don't care what you do, not my problem" is very much losing "moral authority".
For decades (really centuries but...), The West (Western Europe and North America and the paler parts of Oceania) have claimed to be the moral arbiters of the world. Much of colonialism was built around the idea of "civilizing" savages. And many of the wars (cold and otherwise) of the 20th century were similarly built around this.
The US is speedrunning the erosion of any form of credibility or high ground. But The West as a whole aren't that far behind. But the "good" news is that this is nothing new? NOBODY cared about Palestine until it got caught in the news cycle a few years back (and the Uyghurs, among others, can pound sand because anything else might hurt the supply chain). And there is a reason we all expected the most recent War in Ukraine to end with russia murdering a bunch of people, stealing more land, and doing it again in another decade.
Because intervening would have been messy.
I think we've been well past that point for a while due to the western support for Israeli genocide. No one lifted a finger and Israelis can still travel the world being acting like the worst tourists in the world like they always have been.
For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)
This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.
“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. [...] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.
“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”
If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it's because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.
We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn't understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump's id currently doing the latter two's jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.
The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump's power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don't even rate as humans to these people.
unspeakable
he told me
The guy that went on TV and advocated going after terrorists' innocent family members in retribution strikes and has spent the last year killing and deporting innocent people in his own country wants to kill innocent people in other countries? Shocking.
if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva Conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule. We have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.
Looks like we announced the rules are dead then. Israel and the US killed them. :/
Moscow already wipes it's ass with the Geneva Convention. Only a matter of time before Washington does since it's Russias puppet.
But at least tankies can be justified about their morals.
The best Trumps are dead Trumps.