Yes, but I’m not going to unlock my phone with a passcode, and unlike biometric unlock they have no way to force me to unlock my phone.
The district courts will eventually back me up on this. Our country has fallen a long way, but the district courts have remained good, and my case is unlikely to be one that goes up to appellate courts, where things get much worse.
There’s an important distinction: the government doesn’t care about what it is allowed to do, but it is still limited by what it is not capable of doing. It’s important to understand that they still do have many constraints they operate under, and that we need to find and exploit those constraints as much as possible while we fight them
They are, but again, district courts have been pretty good, and I would be out of jail in <30 days, unless my case goes up on appeal.
And if I die in jail because I won’t unlock my phone: fuck ‘em, they’ll have to actually do it.
I don’t plan on being killed by the regime, but I don’t think I would’ve survived as a German in Nazi Germany, either. I’m not putting my survival above everything else in the world.
It's telling on yourself that you think compassion for other people, the core idea that other peoples needs might be more important that your own, is objectively a weapon. You're not wrong that there's a lot of disinformation about, but from a purely historical view, the one position that has never been right is fence-sitting.
What you are basically saying is that justice is unjust and vigilantes are the solution, because the legal system operates under the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty.
You don't want to live in a world where you are guilty until proven innocent, because you might like it when you're the one wagging the finger, but you'll be crying for the old ways once it's turned on you.
You're not arguing in good faith, which is clear from your other replies, but I'm not saying vigilantes are the solution, just that compassion is not a weapon.
But also, just within your moral framework, I think it's really important to understand that the systems of justice have been compromised and we are, right now, seeing people treated as guilty until proven innocent. It's just not happening to you. It *is* happening to people like me.
Let me say that again: I'm not saying that vigilante justice is better, only that the legal system has become vigilante justice. People who share my moral values are being gunned down right now. And people like you are spreading excuses about how its shades of grey.
Well, if he's innocent until proven guilty and you agree with that, why do you need someone to prejudge their guilt and tell them they are on the wrong side of history by not prejudging? That really does come across as promoting vigilantism.
You've clarified that you don't support vigilantism...so, what benefit do you get from someone deciding guilt beforehand?
Why is it your position that people should not wait until investigations are done and it has been combed through in court? What purpose does that serve if not for vigilantism?
It sounds like you are aiming primarily for a political benefit or a sort of emotional moral validation through cultural acceptance of your view. This is why we have courts, because people can become very emotional and invested in an outcome. It can become a critical part of your identity and world view that someone be guilty. Those are generally presented as cautionary tales in history books, not the example to live by.
> Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat.
Let me stop you right there. It's not a both sides issue, is it? It's one side forcing gridlock? A party of obstruction, even.
> People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on.
No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is the people thinking he's fit to be in any kind of leadership position.
The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution. And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base. People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.
> Let me stop you right there. It's not a both sides issue, is it? It's one side forcing gridlock? A party of obstruction, even.
There are still things they agree on and pass legislation for, but on many other issues they both obstruct each other. The actual details of that aren't as relevant as the fact that they have trouble passing legislation and can't be relied on for many important issues at present.
> No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill.
If he was an authoritarian dictator king tyrant master emperor, I would care, but he's not, so I don't care. The evidence does not support that position. There's a lot of rhetoric, propaganda, sound bites, teases and more, but those do not produce reality. They produce perspective.
> The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution.
This is false. The supreme court decision did not fundamentally say that he was immune to prosecution. That is what was spread about it to foment anger, but I read the actual language of the decision and it's just a lie.
> And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base.
Unless you're talking about something I haven't heard about yet, they were not legal US citizens and they were not sent to Venezuelan prisons. There was someone who had some kind of temporary legal status and so there were complexities around it, but they weren't a US citizen.
> People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.
I don't know anyone like me. It's common for people to be unable to navigate the gray area. It's either black or white. You are either "with us or against us". That's just purely juvenile. Does Trump have some moral failings? Sure. Is he some kind of arrogant character? Sure. I think on one side, some people will get so stirred up into such a moral panic that they'll believe any false thing about him. On the other, some people get so caught up in his reality distortion field that they'll believe anything he says. If you fully give up and end up settling into one of those grooves, you lose all sense.
"Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat. As a result, presidents have increasingly been leading by executive order rather than legislation. That is not Trump's fault, that is just the state of the country."
"People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on."
So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?
Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king?
Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?
"Talk about taking over Canada or Greenland is just rhetoric to get better deals and improve ally strength, because this is what Donald Trump has been doing since the 1980s. Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?
Just trying to understand.
"Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?
If it's just part of our national strategy, why'd the rational change so frequently and why does no one seem to have heard that before Trump decided to start focusing on it and amassing weapons off their coast?
"This doesn't mean you have to like a current president personally or morally, or even agree with everything they are doing, but at least you can gain more perspective around what is real and what is not."
> So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?
No US president is a king, because the US doesn't have kings. The country isn't structured that way. Most countries legitimately do not understand this, because almost no countries are structured the way the US is.
> Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king? Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?
A king is a very specific thing and you don't need to be a king to have a power which has been delegated to you.
> You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?
When people watch news or listen to world leaders talk, it comes with a sense of authority. Many people are predisposed to automatically think that is the end of it, that they've found the truth. Like clockwork, Trump says some big bold thing that gets people talking and he does this to produce the kinds of results he's after that other people have trouble getting. It gets him a lot of criticism and hate, but he's been doing this since the 80s or even earlier.
He creates a "monument", because he says that nobody cares about deals that aren't monumental. The small uninteresting deals don't get much attention. People don't invest in it. As a result, he thinks small deals are actually harder to do than big deals. So he makes everything a big deal. He's a big deal. Ukraine is a big deal. Gaza is a big deal. Canada is a big deal. Greenland is a big deal.
Now, in order to be credible, he has to be known as a person who does get some big things done. So what you do is you see what can you actually do, and you do the biggest thing you can get done. Now you have credibility. You use that credibility as leverage to make larger claims and people will take your larger claims seriously, even if people who are anchored in reality may have the sense to know that larger claim is a bluff. He bluffs so much. If you remember that old youtube video of trading up from a paperclip to trade all the way until you get a car, it's like that.
So much talk about threatening to leave NATO, or destroying NATO by invading Greenland or any of that nonsense only makes NATO stronger. It makes them say, "hey, we need to be more independent. maybe we can't fully rely on the US if they're talking like this. let's invest more." When they invest more in their military, now the whole alliance is a little stronger. This is important, because World War 3 may be coming and we either need our allies to join us in some way in South East Asia, or we'll need them to be able to hold their own in Europe.
It amazes me the stuff he gets away with, but he's not any kind of threat to democracy.
> Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?
We were already in Venezuela in the 1900s. It is estimated to have upwards of 300 billion to over a trillion barrels of oil. That dwarfs basically every other country. Oil is important for global stability and we still haven't discovered any energy solutions that fully erase dependence on oil. So long as it is needed, it has to come from somewhere. If Russia and China control it, that risks oil being traded primarily in some currency other than USD, even propping up some reserve currency. Venezuela also had Russian and Chinese military hardware, with Russia recently agreeing to send them missiles. That allows for comparisons with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were also a stopping point for the shadow fleets which were breaking international law and helping fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Iranian terrorist groups were also operating in Venezuela. It was also at risk of becoming the next North Korea, but with both nukes and oil. It would've been a nightmare for freedom, democracy and global security.
When the crime is murdering people in cold blood, I will take nailing the “lowliest of perpetrators” (e.g. cold blooded murderers) to the fucking wall.
Yes, I hope future administrators go up and down the chain of command looking at everyone who was involved in the cover-up, and charges them with conspiracy to commit murder, but a future Democratic administration will at least identify and prosecute the murderers themselves. While Republican administrations will conceal the identity of the killers and continue to have them out on the streets
Don't get me wrong, I'd gladly take any small victory. But thinking of it in terms of 2026 or 2028 just means you've kicked the can down to 2030 or 2032.
I mean, these will likely be state cases no matter what.
The question is, can the State of Minnesota put together enough evidence to convict these agents for murder and conspiracy to commit murder without the involvement of the federal government?
If so, we could see cases brought as early as this year.
If not, then the next question is can Democrats get them enough information by controlling one branch of the federal government. In that case, we could imagine a prosecution brought in 2027.
Otherwise, if we need Democrats to control the executive branch to get enough information it might be 2029.
I don’t think it will take long, because the State of Minnesota will have put the case together and be waiting to go. So the question will be how quickly can they get any necessary evidence, incorporate that into their case, and then bring charges.
>The question is, can the State of Minnesota put together enough evidence to convict these agents for murder and conspiracy to commit murder without the involvement of the federal government?
They'd have to fight the feds for jurisdiction and will unfortunately likely lose that fight.
> They'd have to fight the feds for jurisdiction and will unfortunately likely lose that fight.
That’s simply not how the system works. There’s no one assigned entity with “jurisdiction” over a crime.
The state and federal governments are dual sovereigns and each are empowered to enforce their own laws. It doesn’t even violate double jeopardy for the Feds and a state to prosecute the same actions.
The only thing that matters is if the state can obtain enough evidence that they feel they could secure a conviction before a jury of the shooter’s peers.
The federal sovereign can usurp the state sovereign's courts jurisdiction and use jurisdiction removal[] to try the state charge in federal court. This is exactly what happened when Lon Horiuchi was charged by a state for killing (sniping) an innocent unarmed mother with a baby in her hands, and part of how he got off free.
Given the feds are always keen to do this when possible, it's not for nothing that they do it.
No, you didn't understand. Poster claimed they would have to fight the feds for jurisdiction. You argued they didn't. Then I set you straight that they would have to fight for court jurisdiction.
Just parroting back what I've said then simply declaring I don't understand it (despite explicitly acknowledging the state charge would be tried in federal court) just looks terribly misguided when you lied with your smug quip "that's not how it works", when apparently you pretend as if you knew all along jurisdiction was relevant and would be fought over.
> the purpose of the form is to generate convictions for lying on the form.
Yeah but if the immigration officer has reason to question you about those sections of the form then surely they have more than enough evidence of the underlying crime anyway ?
It’s often an easier case to prove that you lied on the form when you said you came to the US with no intent to commit espionage than it is to prove that someone committed espionage.
It basically unlocks a second set of potential facts that they can use to bring a criminal case (or revoke a visa, etc).
Intent to commit espionage is not a crime (but committing or attempting to commit it is) Lying on the form is. It is probably easier to demonstrate intent to commit espionage than to catch them in the act.
Wouldn't it be easier to make those things illegal and then prosecute them instead of the lie? For prosecuting a lie you need to prove 2 things, the thing lied about and the lie itself, so it seems like a more difficult prosecution for no reason. Also how does every other country in the world manage to not have these questions?
> Also how does every other country in the world manage to not have these questions?
You sure about that? Many other countries have what would be considered odd questions on their forms.
Also, saying "every other country" is a mighty wide brush. There are a whole lot of countries where the rule of law doesn't come first and they can simply do what they want if they suspect you of anything regardless if they have a law or not.
This is what happens when a legal system and a political system is taken over by specialists with little to no other skills.
Instead of politics being about setting policy to work toward desire outcomes, politics becomes about ensuring the viability of future political processes. Instead of the legal system being about defining crime, establishing punishment and carrying out said punishments it becomes about ensnaring others in legal "gotcha" moments like lying on a form. Society is not safer because of the outlawed nature of lying on a form. Society is not better off because someone is convicted of lying on a form. The individuals who participate in the prosecution are better off because it gives them an opportunity to advance their career.
My approach to these kinds of things is different: these are really important opportunities to teach moderation and to teach the social skills of learning to have fun things in moderation.
I think it's quite important to introduce these addictive things into their lives, in a way that teach how to enjoy them carefully and in small chunks.
> their vision is still developing and staring at a screen is not good for eye development.
Is that true? The American Association of Pediatrics doesn't list that as a concern on their page "Health Effects Of Young Kids Being On Screens Too Long" (which is focused on children aged 2-11). Do you have a source I could review for that claim?
(The AAP page about media recommendations for 0-2 also doesn't say anything about eye-development, but _does_ recommend entirely against screen-time for that age-group except for video conversations with people)
> I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now."
I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
As a westerner, who believes in the rules based order, I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague.
Our leadership are war criminals, and should be treated as such.
Some, specifically, are war criminals who have committed crimes that carry the death penalty, and should be arrested, tried, and (if found guilty) executed.
> I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague
Simpler: send them to prison at home. There is no world in which the Hague can enforce its law in America without the U.S. government's consent. At that point, skip the extra step and make war crimes actually illegal.
>Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.
But America's armed populace and the stalwart vigilance of its militias are supposed to make that impossible.
Americans were more up in arms (literal and figurative) over Obamacare and Covid lockdowns than anything Trump has done, domestically or abroad. The only rational conclusion is that they're either complicit or else they simply don't care.
Americans are the most propagandized peoples on the planet. Those bullets can’t stop information, and there is a massive information war going on to keep the American people divided.
Those who could effectively field a real protest or uprising are either too busy trying to keep their credit cards from defaulting, or are living on the streets addicted to drugs. General strikes? Forget it, America doesn’t have the infrastructure in place (local food sources) to sustain such a thing…
Populations of far less affluent countries under far more oppressive regimes without a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms and a billion dollar domestic arms industry that flooded their country with more guns than people and a culture of "give me liberty or give me death" have managed it.
The right got Jan. 6th and the left got Portland, so resistance is possible on both sides. In any country that took things half as seriously as the US claims to, Washington DC would look like a war zone. But what are we doing? Twerking in front of ICE in frog costumes?
> But what are we doing? Twerking in front of ICE in frog costumes?
Once again, the people who are broadly approving of violence as a way to solve problems, and who actually have the guns, are largely supportive of what ICE is doing. Many of them are quite literally itching to pull the trigger on some libs. I've been in the middle of that crowd and seen it all close up. Those people are not the potential solution - they are a part of the problem.
Countries with oppressive regimes see revolutions if the population gets discontent enough that a strong majority wants it, or is at least willing to go along with it. That is certainly not true of US right now.
This man did not say he was going to bomb anything until after he was voted in, so the American people were - once again - completely duped by their own hubris.
A third of the American people voted for him, based on a campaign which promised a completely different economy than he has delivered (remember when people were pretending Biden had an egg-price level in the Oval Office?) and no foreign wars. It is unreasonable to look at that election and say a plurality voted for this.
Now this I would like to see, but I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I don’t think the American people have the courage to do something about their heinous, out of control government, personally. Happy to be proven wrong, because it would be a legitimate step to world peace on behalf of the American people, but I seriously doubt they are, as a population, capable of it.
I largely agree with you. Democratic leadership responded to an attempted coup by slow rolling prosecution with the hope that Trump would simply recede from public life and they'd never have to do the hard thing of trying and convicting a former president.
The Democrats have just as much blood on their hands as their Republican counterparts, and that is the problem - the only force capable of dealing with this conundrum is the American people, and they are too busy playing sides to actually confront the reality of their nations heinous war crimes record.
The entire media apparatus is owned by oligarchs: from Fox News to Twitter to Meta, now CNN... All are relaying non-stop right-wing propaganda. There can be no real democracy while information is this captive.
To be clear, war crimes are illegal here. They can carry the death penalty.
I think there's a strong case to be made for Pete Hegseth to be executed for his crimes, according to US Law.
But you're right. There's no expectation that the Hague enforce international law without the consent of the US Government. Our government should either try our leaders in our courts, or hand them in manacles and chains to the ICC and The Hague.
But I agree, I don't expect the international community to be able to do this over our objections. It's something we must do.
There are also provisions in the UCMJ that are applicable to members of the military
---
(I also had a consequential typo in my earlier post, which I've now edited. I originally wrote they "carry the death penalty", but I meant to write "they can carry the death penalty", and it depends on the specific circumstances of the war crimes committed.)
"Murder.—
The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause" [1].
Yes, if you’re curious the DoD’s own Laws of War manual uses shipwrecked survivors of an attack as “hors de combat” or out of combat.
This is very relevant to the second strike on the Venezuelan boat. I think the original strikes are also war crimes, but the second strike on the shipwrecked survivors is like… beyond all doubt a murder
>one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities
Remember when we bombed Yemen and in the Signal chat they laughed about killing a High-Value Target while he was visiting his girlfriend? Sounds like this section would apply for her.
I don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer. All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again.
The US previously never faced real pressure on this, a new administration would see it as an easy win.
> don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer
The U.S. is not a signatory. (Most of the world's population isn't subject to ICC jurisdiction [1].)
> All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again
Nobody is treating the ICC seriously [2].
To be clear, this sucks. But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).
Being a signatory is not required for being subject to ICC jurisdiction, though it is one route to being subject to it, and, in any case, not being a signatory is not an immutable condition. So the upthread suggestion that “All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again” is not rebutted by observing that the US is not currently a signatory of the Rome Statute.
> But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).
No, the US despite rhetorically appealing to it when other countries are involved, has led, not followed, in rejecting the rules-based order when it comes to its own conduct.
The "allies" would have mass riots and six-digit death tolls (shortly after an initial 3-6 month period of adjustment) without the supplies of LNG, fertiliser and payment clearing services the U.S. exports. America has the rest of the west by the balls, with maybe the exception of Australia and Japan. Nobody will even give the C-levels responsible for Grok arrest warrants for the many serious crimes their product carries out.
I hope to god the next administration actually holds the criminals in the current administration accountable. Gerry Ford set a disgusting precedent when he loudly said that those who hold the office of the President should never be be held accountable for their actions.
He believed that within the limits of the political culture of America introducing accountability would lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of imprisonments and executions by each party against the other under the cover story of accountability, with the possibility of gradual escalation towards an end state of states mobilising armored brigades against each other to siege cities and cleanse target populations. Like the Congo, or Rhodesia. His memoirs are wacky stuff.
unlikely. trump didnt held obama accountable for all sorts of crazy things that happened during his administration (bombing libya, drone striking a us citizen minor, using USAID to mount a fake vaccination campaign for DNA surveillance in pakistan e.g.). why would the next administration hold trump accountable?
The Biden administration was prosecuting Trump though. They didn’t complete the prosecutions because Trump’s strategy to avoid accountability was to be reelected and then shut down the investigations, and that worked. But the fact he was indicted by Jack Smith who very likely could have convicted him goes to show lack of accountability is not for lack of trying.
Its very much for lack of trying. They had 4 years, we got no epstein files and they slow walked prosecutions to happen during the election, thinking it would help them. It didn't work, here we are.
It’s clear you didn’t follow these cases if your opinion is the SC slow walked them to enhance Democrats’ electoral out look. They secured multiple indictments and were heading to trial, which they were likely to win. Delays were caused by Trump appointed Judge Cannon and Trump appointed SCOTUS justices.
Securing indictments and going to trial is an instance of actually trying. So you really can’t say they didn’t try, because that is factually false. It’s true they could have done more, but they didn’t do nothing as others are saying.
I'm not a lawyer, and I didn't follow every motion, you're right. Still, in my book, fast walking would have meant moving faster. Venue shop if you have to. Release/declassify documents to make the bad guys look bad. There's lots of "improper" stuff they could have done and are currently getting owned by.
I'm not a lawyer either but I did follow the cases closely. My opinion is that Merrick Garland did a disservice to the country by not appointing a SC immediately, but beyond that Jack Smith moved with lightning speed in prosecuting the cases. Moreover, Congress did make the bad guys look bad -- they held a whole summer's worth of hearings where they prosecuted the case in public, offering plenty evidence. And I encourage you also to look at how it was the Supreme Court who slow walked their decisions, which ultimately benefitted Trump in obscene ways. You can't venue shop SCOTUS.
One thing about prosecuting a former POTUS for the first time is it has to survive the test of time. You can't behave like them if you want the prosecution to be legitimate, because they are lawless. But it was the failure of voters to do their due diligence to not elect a felon who bear the ultimate blame, as they are the final check. Now we bear the consequences. But again, not for lack of trying.
It's late where I am so I don't have a well-reasoned response, just wanted to say I understand what you're saying. It sucks, given what the current admin is getting away with, but I understand it.
i would feel better about that if the biden administration also prosecuted obama. they didn't. besides trump I (nor biden) didnt do any new foreign adventures AFAICT. we had a blissful 8 years of waning US imperialism
It's unclear if most if not all of those things you were actually crimes legally (regardless of how morally and ethically reprehensive they might have been). Regardless there was an established precedent for what Obama was doing. Not so much for the crimes Trump was being accused..
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, a country with which the United States was not at war with.
Please let me know what was the established precedent for allowing extrajudicial assassination of American citizens is.
Edit add:
He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.
A 16-year-old American boy accused of no crimes was killed in American drone attack
pretty sure when obama murdered Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (nb: not talking about the more famous Anwar) that was unprecedented. Trump later murdered Abdulrahman's sister, but at that point, it was "precedented" by obama.
All this fuckery date from at least bush 2nd. Election mess, with heavy involvement of his brother the governor despite promises to revise, crowds attacking poll workers, war crimes, putting incompetent friends at the head of agencies (remember FEMA response to Katrina? Or the initial response to the subprime crisis?), attacks on science programs and schools, and the use of executive orders to bypass congress. Obama was so tame compared to Bush2.
Europe is not the military power that once was at the beginning of the 20th century... aging populations, economic decline, trade deficits, their former colonies are now independent, they haven't waged war in a while.
Negatively. That has always been the problem of the US, it's the reason why they cannot act like the most of the rest of the world. The military has way too much influence on decision making.
Just watch one of the sessions of the UN general assembly. There are many speeches about fixing all kinds of situations. If the best ideas were implemented we would be in a utopia with flying cars, free ponies for everyone and open bar. But we don't live in such world because if one motion somehow makes one of the countries with veto power uncomfortable, they will just veto the resolution and that's the end of it. And countries with veto power are backed by military power. That's the world we live in and it has always been like that.
And things work like this at every level in every organization. For example people in your line of reporting at work can veto any decision you make unless you are protected by law, which is an entity that can shut down your company by force.
That’s just the reality of it. The GDP of Russia and Canada is about the same but nobody cares about Canada from a geopolitical context because it has an irrelevant military.
ICC is a joke though. It can only accomplish anything if the home country of the perpetrator is cooperating. Those allies also have much politically important economic and geopolitical concerns than prosecuting war criminals (unfortunately only small minorities in western countries care about things like that at all)
No, they wouldn't. Not if they're the Democrats as we know them. They fight tooth and claw against the new normal, until it's the new normal, and then they fight tooth and claw to defend the new normal.
There's very little principled opposition to Trump in the corridors of power. There's plenty of opposition, but it's more about which horses have been bet on.
It sadly never happened for the perpetrators of the Iraq/Ukraine/Libya/Afghan/Syria/Yugoslav/... wars. Remember Collateral Murder? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Also, no one really cared about all the veterans back home, many of whom suffered and still suffer from PTSD. The U.S. truly is the biggest sh*thole on earth.
The fact that it didn't happen for the those previous administrations is why it's happening again now.
If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes, and the guilty parties were cooling their heels in a jail cell, then we probably wouldn't be seeing this action tonight.
"If those previous administrations had been tried for their various crimes"
and yeah who is gonna charge them ???? US have (arguably) strongest military on earth, who can put justice to them if not themselves ???? and themselves I mean US Gov. which is would never happen since every administration have "blood" in some form and another
The problem is that nearly everyone in the US national security establishment believes that the US should be involved in lots of wars. You may recall how little sympathy Biden got for pulling out of Afghanistan. I genuinely don’t think you could assemble Washington staff with the foreign policy expertise a president requires without ending up with a majority who support bombing Maduro.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan may have occurred under Biden, but it was Trump who made the decision to pull out. The only change Biden made was delaying our withdraw by a couple of months.
The only 'leaders' that end up in the Hague and convicted are those forcibly captured via military action. And those 'orders' declared by the UN can, and be vetoed by China, Russia, USA, UK, and France. Guess which two use their veto all the time?
And there are not that many indications that we are moving towards that direction or we can even ever have. I guess that sort of idealism might have existed in the late 40s immediately after the UN was established but it never had a chance.
External or internal (which seems rarely feasible unless the government is highly incompetent) regime change realistically is the only thing that worked.
Presumably also the ones who invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan, carried out extrajudicial executions, droned weddings, deposed Libya's leader and laid ruin to the country, trafficked arms and money to cartels in South America and ISIS / "JV team" terrorist groups to destroy the Levant Or was that "rules based order"?
I think you've been had with the whole "rules based order thing". You can keep winding the clock back and it's the same thing. Iraq 1, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia. When exactly would you say this alleged "rules based order" was great?
I don't think you followed the part where they said they believed in the rules based order and I questioned that in a bit of a sarcastic way. It was the entire point of my comment really. There is no "rules based order", the rules based order has always been whatever the wealthy and powerful can do to further enrich themselves and cement their power is the rules, and the order is that they remain on top.
It's not a hoax, it's an empty platitude designed to fool people into thinking their side is in the right. Unfortunately many people are incapable of ever admitting they have been fooled.
Every war criminal should be arrested, and tried. I think they should also be hanged, but they generally don't do executions at the Hague is my understanding.
I think the notion of the comment about westerners is to highlight that as a common person you can believe in rules based order, or you are made to believe in that and live your life by that, however the leaders don't really care about it all that much. They are happy the masses are "ruled" and controlled, but as for their decisions - rules don't always apply.
And in many cases western societies tend to express the idea that inn other, dictatorship countries, people sort of "let the dictators dictate", while "westerners" not.
But I think this current case (and Trump's presidency at large) is an example of how little we can decide or influence. Even in the supposed "democracy".
I wish to believe that voting matters, but Trump showed that you can make people vote for anything if you put massive upfront effort into managing information/missinformation and controlling the minds through populism, etc. Then voting becomes... Powerless. As it has no objective judgement.
And despite possible disagreements some might voice - revolutions don't happen anymore. People can't anymore fight the leaders as leaders hold a monopoly on violence through making sure the army is with them.
Well... We as people lost and losing the means to "control" our leaders. Westerners, easterners - doesn't matter.
In general international law is much more lenient than people are willing to believe. e.g. it's legal to kill civilians if you are attacking a military target which is important enough
Once they declared it a terrorist organization (which is the problematic side of everything), they can claim these are unlawful combatants and do not have any of the protections of the Geneva convention, like any other war on terror assassination.
So I don't think double tapping is a war crime, any more than bombing a car with terrorists in the first place and that doesn't seem to be regarded internationally as a war crime. However, they could have done better to highlight Venezuela actual involvement with terrorism (which is real but not enough for this) rather than magically declare them terrorists just to not go through Congress
That "unlawful combatant" designation was invented by the US as an excuse and has always stood on shaky legal grounds even in the US. Other Western countries don't support this legal construction. That being said, the double-tapping was ordinary murder, not a war crime. Every bombing of those ships could have been avoided by boarding them and presenting those drugs as evidence, as the Coast Guard normally does. But that would only have worked if there had been any evidence to start with...
Western countries that had recently used that clause to assasinate terrorists are the US, UK and France. There is no reason to believe other european countries attacked by ISIS would not do the same if needed or if capable.
Regarding double tapping, that's exactly the modus operandi of assassinations, as the UAVs goal is not the car/ship but the people inside.
That said, the Venezuelan case is a huge overreach
Not a shred of evidence was ever provided that the crewmen of these boats were "terrorists." That alone makes these murders very different from other illegal extrajudicial killings, where this evidence is usually provided or readily available.
That's not to say that I would in any way support extrajudicial killings, in many cases the high civilian/bystander casualties have been completely unsupportable. I just wanted to point out the stark difference between "normal" extrajudicial killings and these murders.
There are some credible war crimes accusations (in fact, some pretty flagrant war crimes), but the most critical crime is actually not a war crime, but one precedent to their being a war at all, the crime of aggression.
Starting a war is generally what is known in modern international law as the crime of aggression (in the language of the Nuremberg Charter, this was, “crimes against peace”, the first listed category of crimes subject to the tribunal, above war crimes and crimes against humanity.)
Rudolph Hess, notably, was convicted and imprisoned for life solely for this crime.
This is a bit confused-if you send them to the Hague, they can’t be executed-because neither the ICC nor any ad hoc tribunals located in that city have the death penalty. As an abolitionist state, I doubt the Dutch government would ever consent to a capital trial taking place on their territory.
On the other hand, in an alternate reality, this could be preventing a North Korea style dictatorship. Or to flip it, had the USA stayed in South Korea and carried on fighting, it might have prevented North Korea and the Kims and saved literally millions of deaths of North Koreans at the hands of their own government.
What do the Venezuelans actually think about this, given that Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?
> Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?
Thats probably true, but trump also tried to rig an election, so its not really up to him to unilaterally decide is it? Especially as hes bumchums with putin who shocker, rigs election, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people invading other countries.
> had the USA stayed in South Korea
Korea was a UN action, not US unilateral. but alos hugely costly in everyone's lives
The number of deaths due to the Kim dynasty is in the millions, including their kwanliso murder camps and man-made famine, and vastly outnumbers war casualties unfortunately.
Considering your post history it's clear exactly what you're doing, but I don't think it's as much of an ideological gotcha as you might think because the answer is yes. We can throw Trump and what remains of the Obama administration in jail; I don't really give a fuck. We can work our way down the list as far as you want and I'd give it the thumbs up if it means we can ensure future presidents and politicians think at least four times before doing something.
>Obviously I was not asking someone to link to my profile.
That's true. I misread your comment. My apologies.
Unfortunately, I can't delete my comment any more, but it should be (and deservedly so) pretty well grayed out by now.
Although I'm a bit confused since your profile as well as every other users' profile is linked by HN in each and every comment you (or I, or any other user) make.
If it's poor etiquette to "link to my profile," why does HN do that on every single comment?
> People keep asking AI coding tools to be something other than what they currently are.
I think it's for a very reasonable reason: the AI coding tool salespeople are often selling the tools as something other than what they currently are.
I think you're right, that if you calibrate your expectations to what the tools are capable of, there's definitely. It would be nice if the marketing around AI also did the same thing.
AI sales seems to be very much aligned with productivity improvement - "do more of the same but faster" or "do the same with fewer people"). No one is selling "do more".
> I think it's for a very reasonable reason: the AI coding tool salespeople are often selling the tools as something other than what they currently are.
And if this submission was an AI salesperson trying to sell something, the comment/concern would be pertinent. It is otherwise irrelevant here.
> It's a plugin that I'm not using, don't care about using, and cannot see any conceivable use for.
> No-one wants this.
So, fun fact about earth: there are lots of people on it, and some of those people aren't you, and some of those people who aren't you actually have desires that are different from yours.
I think it makes the planet a pretty fun and interesting place, but it also does mean generalizing from "I don't want this" (totally fine! Awesome! Makes sense!) to "no one wants this" is usually not very productive.
The district courts will eventually back me up on this. Our country has fallen a long way, but the district courts have remained good, and my case is unlikely to be one that goes up to appellate courts, where things get much worse.
There’s an important distinction: the government doesn’t care about what it is allowed to do, but it is still limited by what it is not capable of doing. It’s important to understand that they still do have many constraints they operate under, and that we need to find and exploit those constraints as much as possible while we fight them
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