There were approximately 800,000 members of the SS throughout WWII. This included commandos, tank units, civilian clerks, doctors, lawyers, rifle platoons, concentration camp guards, and so on out of a total German population of 65 million. By the end of the war, several hundred thousand of those 800,000 were killed. They still murdered 17 million people as part of the Holocaust and killed millions of Allied troops. There were only 52,000 SS when Hitler assumed total control of Germany in 1933.

Even if ICE has small numbers, they get enough support from other law enforcement and the military to continue doing what they’re doing. Trump will need to recruit massive numbers if he wants to create another Auschwitz and fight multiple countries carrying out multiple genocides. But to get the ball rolling? 30,000 may be all he needs given how much automation and computerization there is. ICE doesn’t have to have dozens people going through records looking for undesirables’ addresses. One person can just pull up census data and send an e-mail.

Maduro dodging Trump’s attempts to grab his pajama pant leg with speeds that leave Steven Segal seething would be a funny bit.

Do they genuinely believe that protestors are safer in Palestine or Syria?

Libs are still going on about “Do you condom Hummus?” so they agree protesters should be shot for trying to “genocide Israel.”

But yeah. People in Palestine, Venezuela, and so on are living in worse conditions than the US with far more risk. The things Americans are afraid of happening here already happen in other places. The people still manage to organize resistance efforts, often against the violence of the US military.

It’s not just adopted kids us mixed race kids are getting this shit from our blood relatives who are white, who also like to treat us like exotic pets. They seem to think ICE cares about where you were born or legal status. Now that they shot a white woman, they’re bending over backwards to try and give any explanation that isn’t racist country does racist things.

“They aren’t trained properly!”

“He really did fear for his life!”

“Maybe they weren’t real ICE agents?”

“They get too much adrenaline going and are under a lot of stress!”

“Some of them are probably Trump supporters!”

That line from Raging Grace lives rent-free in my head. “He doesn’t want to love us. He wants to own us.”

I think it caught on in popularity when the Alt-Right was doing the whole “clown world” thing. “Trans people are just clowns in makeup” > clowns are like cartoons brought to life > trans people are cartoons > toon + trans = new slur.

Yes lmao sorry I just heard about the Heineken ad where del Toro tells people he’s not Banderas and it had the opposite effect on me.

The Deer Hunter. It depicts the NVA of doing crimes the US actually did while they torture poor Yankee troops who never did anything wrong. Also what the fuck was that ending where they sing Amazing Grace out of nowhere?

Bridge of Spies. They completely fabricated the conditions experienced by the Americans captured by the Soviets. IRL the guy who the movie is based on said his stay was actually pleasant as they gave him a nice room with good meals, despite the fact he was a fucking spy they had every right to execute.

That one James Bond film where the North Korean officer puts someone in a punching bag to use as stuffing.

Have you seen the study on this? They asked people questions with objectively correct answers (such as “What is the capital of Syria?”) and then asked where they got their news from. People who watched local morning talk shows scored highest, followed by people who watched public networks like NPR or the BBC. Next was people who didn’t watch the news at all. In second to last place? Liberal cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, etc. In dead last was Fox News.

Literally watching nothing made people more informed than people who watched cable news.

They start a shootout in the middle of a traffic jam which causes Emily Blunt’s character to freak out as she realizes they’re CIA doing stuff they shouldn’t be. The scene I think you’re talking about is where del Toro’ character, Alejandro the lawyer turned hitman (a.k.a. sicario), puts a gun to her head and makes her sign a paper vouching they followed protocol.

Josh Brolin’s character is the one who is actually CIA who is using Alejandro by turning him loose on people by saying they were involved in Alejandro’s family getting murdered. Blunt realizes he lied to her about the people found murdered in the house at the beginning of the film and they haven’t been looking for the people responsible at all. He’s just using her as cover to operate on US soil. This casts doubt on whether or not he’s done the same thing to Alejandro, who massacres an entire family who may or may not be the people responsible for his own family.

The film paints the “making tough decisions to protect democracy” shtick as an excuse for sadism and torture. Brolin’s character doesn’t give a shit about any of that and gets off on the power he wields over others. When Blunt tries to call him out, he points out he has the backing of the rest of the government. By the end of it, it’s obvious the War on Drugs is a failure and all it’s done has created a cycle of violence that continues to escalate because it benefits US interests.

But again, it paints the FBI as good people in a bad situation where they try to take the moral high ground. We know that’s bullshit because IRL the FBI does evil shit all the time ranging from MK Ultra to wiretapping MLK to Iran-Contra.

Edit: oh I also just remembered The Ghost Writer, although the CIA isn’t named until the end of the film.

Sicario (2015) has the CIA as bad guys who are complete sadists and do evil shit. Unfortunately, it paints the FBI as the good guys who naively think the other alphabet agencies follow the law. Still pretty good. Very suspenseful and Benicio del Toro steals the show.Also unfortunate that he’s a zionist. (edit: Benicio del Toro is NOT the zionist Antonio Banderas, as he keeps reminding people). Emily Blunt is in it, too. She was married to John “The CIA is the best thing that ever happened to me” Krasinski. Although, they separated a while ago and are now divorced. I don’t think they ever disclosed why, but it was right after October 7th.

Or told them to move their car to another part of the road by pulling forward. That’s basically what they did in Minneapolis.

There was also the Toba Eruption around 74,000 years ago that bottle necked humanity down to only a couple thousand people (roughly 10,000 humans). The majority of this population was between South Africa and Ethiopia. So yeah, the whole “Our ancestors lived here before you and we’re going to steal your shit” Israelis and Americans like to use doesn’t hold up.

Mobilizing of the rest of the world’s industry helped accelerate the end of the war, but I wouldn’t say “required.” Nazi Germany would have eventually lost against the UK, CCCP, or USA and tried to fight all three at once. Any of those could have defeated the Axis Powers on their own. It would have just taken a lot longer, possibly decades. The genocides would have higher death tolls than they did.

As far as actually requiring as many members of the Allies? Doubtful. The US and CCCP production outputs were both greater than the rest of the Axis combined. Britain’s industry was more than Germany and Japan, but less than both together. It was, however, on the world’s largest aircraft carrier.

Regardless, the Axis invaded too many countries, spreading them too thin. Even if the US and UK decide to stay neutral, the Soviets are still being assisted by China, Poland, etc. for troops and logistics while their factories sit well-protected east of Moscow. And eventually, the fascists would run out of stuff to steal, which is what allowed them to start the war to begin with. By 1945, they were running on fumes. Even in this alternate timeline, the Germans are still going to have problems with fuel and food. Maybe they make it to 1947 before they feel the strain. They still didn’t make it more than a year into Barbarossa before running into the kinds of problems from our history.

As pointed out below, I’d be more concerned about rogue American elements using nukes from submarines or other clandestine shit like “briefcase nukes.” I don’t think the US has the industrial capacity to wage war like the Germans did because the US can’t even keep up with the wars it fights against smaller countries like Afghanistan or Vietnam. A peer war with China or Russia or both is the end of the US. I’m not even sure it could do anything significant in a nuclear exchange. China may already have the tech to shoot every missile out of the sky while landing all of theirs.

I would be worried about a sub firing a nuke at Saigon or Hong Kong out of pure spite as the rest of America burns.

Very good miniseries that’s more optimistic about the post-apocalypse. What’s wild is how it was written before covid (IIRC they filmed right before covid hit and released it a while later). It does have its villain, but it feels more “slice of life” with its storytelling.

It’s about a girl who is a young actress and gets trapped with her cast mates as a flu-like virus ravages the world. She survives by going into quarantine as people try to wait out the virus. Years later, she’s an adult and travels with a band of actors who throw Shakespeare festivals around a looped route. They’re trying to keep acting and literature alive in a world that has ended. The woman reflects back on her childhood and the path it took her, wondering if she would trade her life as a professional actress to know what happened to her family.

Whitey try not to have a whitey moment here on Polyursine challenge level: impossible. Just deliberately being obtuse while strawmanning what PoC have been saying.

Seriously fuck this country. I was on a “fuck this country” after Abu Ghraib, later when Abdul al-Awlaki was killed. Again when Tamir Rice was murdered. Again when Breanna Taylor was murdered. Then George Floyd. Heather Hayer. The genocide in Palestine.

Wait I forgot what I was even on about. Did I ever not hate America? Maybe. But maybe I also only hate my past self for not hating the US since the day I was born. Every child’s first words should be “Death to America. Unlimited blowback on the first world.”

Or my family lived under Japanese occupation and we had people die in the Bataan Death March, so I’m cautious whenever Japanese media has racist undertones. There hasn’t been an honest effort on Japan’s part to even acknowledge what they did while their government is trying to recreate the same genocidal projects. It’s very similar to how Black or Native American people have problems with settler-colonialist themes featured in westerns and post-apocalyptic media. Capitalist media is going to have capitalist brainworms unless it is explicitly anticapitalist. This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy something. It’s pointing out the problems as they exist.

But sure. I’m the real racist for pointing out racism in your cartoon slop. Fuck off with this crakkker shit.