Musings is Fun & Politics — Tech is just Tech 🙂
Bottom Line Up Front: Russian military modernization has been described as a “rebirth” more than once — in the 2000s, again before the 2022 Ukraine invasion, and now once more in 2025. Each cycle promises reform, new technology, and force generation, but the results often reveal the same weaknesses in logistics, corruption, and sustainability. The latest ISW update on Russian force generation and technological adaptations is only the newest chapter in a long-running pattern of déjà vu moments.
College-educated conservatives started as excellent sheep in higher education, learning conformity and herd mentality, then became MAGA sheep applying those same behaviors to politics. From campus groupthink to political conformity, education trained them to follow rather than think independently.
Rule of law became America’s favorite weapon for creating instant criminals out of entire ethnic groups – Chinese with opium, Mexicans with marijuana, Catholics with alcohol, and Black Americans with heroin. While lawfare dates back to ancient times, America’s drug-based version has been the playbook for 150 years.
America perfected the art of weaponizing law enforcement long before anyone coined the term “lawfare.” The pattern is brutally simple: identify a group you want to control, associate them with a substance, criminalize that substance, then use selective enforcement to destroy their communities. It’s not conspiracy theory when Nixon’s own advisor admitted it in a 1994 interview.
Rule of law and lawfare aren’t opposites – they’re two sides of the same ancient coin, and AI assistants completely missed it. Without one the other could not exist. ChatGPT, Claude, and others treat lawfare as a “modern concept” from 2001, ignoring 4,000 years of evidence stretching back to Hammurabi’s Code in 1750 BCE. The truth? Legal systems have always favored ruling classes over subjects, creating systematic bias disguised as neutral justice.
This three-part series reveals how rule of law and lawfare operate as partners in organized oppression. Part 1 exposes ancient foundations from Babylonian class-based punishments to medieval French officials using legal processes to “clog administrative systems” and “bury English officials under a deluge of legal cases.” The evidence is overwhelming: whoever controls the law gets to cram it down opponents’ throats. The “rule of law” isn’t justice – it’s organized power disguised as neutrality.
False dilemmas and Russian expansion dominate MAGA commentary about Ukraine, creating dangerous straw man arguments that ignore both logical reasoning and historical reality. Commenters like Niketas Choniates at the New Neo blog twist Ukraine’s requests for military aid into extreme misrepresentations about “sending American boys to die” and “taking nukes” – classic false binary thinking that serves Russia’s interests while undermining America’s strategic position.
Many MAGA bloggers and commenters bash Ukraine while unknowingly supporting America’s longtime enemy, Russia, who has been responsible for countless American deaths since WWII by backing Communist countries and terrorist-supporting nations. These voices ignore Russia’s documented expansionist history and resent Ukraine for not delivering Trump’s political opponent Biden “on a silver platter” – while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for Trump’s 2020 loss.