Shrike
4d ago
Sure, agree with all of this. But even if they were clearly hostis humani generis, summary execution would not have been the usual means of dealing with them if they were not offering resistance or threatening violence.
Shrike
4d ago
To your point, I suspect there are already problems with that. I agree that The Company Formerly Known As Blackwater is unlikely to have a corporate policy saying "steal cocaine illegally" and their guys probably aren't particularly less trustworthy than cops/soldiers, so if you screened organizations carefully you could probably weed out people going into it specifically to exploit their access to drugs.
Shrike
4d ago
It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.
Sure, but two Hellfires (in a double-tap situation like the one at hand) is going to run around $300,000, so you are probably losing money just to save time, if you contrast it with the cost of putting four guys that you're already paying in a speedboat out there or what have you. Granted, some of that depends on the specifics of the situation, and granted also that the .gov will allocate a certain number of Hellfires for firing as practice every year, but until the cartels start shooting back it's mostly just a question of if you want to give the Chair Force guys or the Coast Guard/high speed low drag types a live-fire exercise. It is true that sending the Navy SEALS or whoever out to arrest them is more dangerous than simply bombing them, but they do a lot of dangerous training anyway.
The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death.
Yes. Dronestriking people is more theatrical, but it would be better (assuming for the sake of the discussion that it's good to execute drug smugglers) to do it via arresting and trying them, if only because we aren't going to drone strike the guys we apprehend at a border checkpoint. (Well, probably not, but see below).
coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.
Caveat that this is under-researched and I would be glad for pushback:
See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).
Which, frankly, wouldn't be surprising given the incentives. But I oppose it because I don't actually think it's a good idea to drone strike Americans in Kansas or wherever for drug-running, and also because I do not think the US government is nearly as good at determining if someone is actually "a bad guy" as TV would have you think, and finally because if the government can drone strike American citizens without having to show proof that they are actually doing bad stuff (which is the point of a trial!) then it's pretty tempting to just...blow people you don't like up and say "they were bad guys trust me bro."
Shrike
4d ago
I support this purely because of the vibes.
I suspect the real flaw in this plan has to do with ensuring that the privateers simply don't keep the drugs and sell it on the street. Unless the US government is offering a price above street value, the temptation to do this would be powerful (and even if the US did offer those sorts of bounties, I suspect that you'd still see problems with guys trying to take home narcotics and whatnot).
Shrike
4d ago
Historically, though, while using military force against pirates, slavers, etc. was commonplace, you executed hostis humani generis after a trial if they surrendered or were in a position to be captured. You weren't supposed to just summarily execute guys you thought maybe were pirates or slavers if they weren't actively committing piracy, manstealing, or resisting arrest. This actually mattered historically - for instance, several people who were tried for piracy because they were part of Blackbeard's crew were acquitted, so the trials weren't just pro forma. But the ones who weren't acquitted were generally hung pretty promptly.
There's no real logistical obstacle to taking these guys in and trying them for smuggling drugs, the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them. But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.
It is not hard to understand. "Modal Christians" of pre modern trad age were not theologians, but illiterate peasants who never heard about any "creeds" and practiced their faith mixed with various village traditions and superstitions (often extremely unchristian).
Even if this is true (and I suspect it's greatly overstated: the Christian of the past you describe, far from never hearing about any creeds, could probably recite the Nicene creed from heart because he learned it during Mass, albeit in Latin), this has no bearing on the post I was responding to. In my country even 200 years ago the majority of citizens could read.
Furthermore, there's a category error in measuring modal by time rather than population. Thanks to population growth, the modal Christian by population - which is the correct way of measuring a the most frequent number - is actually much closer to the megachurch than to the medieval mass than one would think. Exactly how close is an interesting exercise, and probably worth much more time and attention than the minimal effort I've put into it, but:
The entire population of Europe in 1600 was around 80 million, smaller than the population of Germany today. Or, to look at it another way, the world population only crossed the 1 billion mark in 1800; the Catholic Church alone reports over a billion practicing members today. It looks like (napkin math based on guestimates of population growth over time so this could be wildly off) only about 50 billion people ever lived worldwide between the time of Christ and 1950 (Novus Ordo, the current Catholic mass in the local tongue, came into effect around 1970) and the vast majority of them I think we can safely assume were not Christians, with Christianity really only taking off outside of Europe and the Middle East during the Age of Discovery (say 400 years ago).
So if you actually measure by the number of Christians then you'll find that the modal Christian is actually skewed surprisingly close to the present - with around 2 billion Christians alive today, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox holding service in the local tongue, and the Catholic Novus Ordo kicking in around fifty years ago, it's possible the majority of Christians who have ever lived received their teaching in the native tongue, and the majority of those likely read or heard (at a minimum) the Nicene Creed, which is looked up to by Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox.
Obviously you could litigate to what degree those numbers represent committed Christians. But obviously the clergy and committed Christians are going to be the ones doing the gatekeeping, and they will be more familiar with the creeds than the average layperson, not less.
This is how real trad life looked like, and it is irretrievably lost.
I think this sort of life is alive and well, just not where you live.
Shrike
14d ago
In reality the modal church of 100-200 years ago is so far removed from the modern modal church that there is no real reason to comparatively consider anyone Christian today.
I honestly don't understand what you mean by this. There are creeds from more than a thousand years ago that Christians today still hold to - those are what have traditionally been used to gatekeep Christianity, and churches today still hold to them.
Obviously a lot of cultural things have changed (for instance, we speak English now and dress funny) but (to pick a random culture war issue) one of the earliest Christian texts (the Didache) specifies that Christians are not to commit abortion: this is a stance the largest church in the world (the Catholic church) still agrees with, and the largest Protestant denomination, at least in the United States, also agrees with it!
To maybe bring it home just a bit: [as per Wikipedia, I don't think this is controversial] the big fight between the fundamentalists and the modernists in American Protestantism started in the mid-1800s when higher criticism crossed over from Europe and really blew up in the 1920s (so: 100 years ago). By the way, whenever you see people talk about mainstream Protestantism versus evangelical or fundamentalist Protestantism, this is essentially what they are nodding at: the mainstream Protestant denominations (that are currently in decline) were the ones were the modernists won - a fight so important that 100 years later it is still referenced in e.g. Pew's polling. This clash of worldviews prompted a guy named Bob Jones to found a university (Bob Jones University); established in 1927. A guy named Billy Graham (b. 1918; d. 2018) attended Bob Jones (before transferring). And as it happens, so did the pastor of the church I went to last Sunday.
At least in the United States, then, not only would Christian time-travelers moving backwards and forwards in time 100 - 200 years be able to understand each other and have theological conversations from shared texts such as the creeds and Scripture, and not only would they largely find that people in their denominations agreed with them on important matters such as what constituted a Christian, what was necessary for salvation, what was and was not sin, etc., but the time-travelers from 100 years ago would find that people today are studying the writings of their contemporaries and they would find that the institutions that they had created were absolutely instrumental in shaping the landscape of 21st century America. They would find that the pastors and preachers went to the institutions that they created because they shared their theological convictions. And if they went to those institutions, they would probably find people they knew teaching there, or if not, people who had learned from those they had taught.
I don't recall if you're American; maybe you aren't and your experience is different. But where I am, the church politics of 100 - 200 years ago are still very much alive, and the doctrines and creeds that are taught go back much further.
Shrike
20d ago
If you believe in God, then being morally scrupulous is much more reasonable, I think.
Shrike
20d ago
And I'm sure Russia would like to achieve a similar outcome in this case via "denazification" although achieving it might be more difficult.
Shrike
21d ago
Russia also can't achieve its goal (rapid overthrow signalling rebirth of the empire)
I don't see the need to stretch for some 4D chess signalling goal when Russia's actual and obvious goals (ceding territory, neutralization, demilitarization, "denazification") have been stated openly and repeatedly and are borne out by their actions.
I maintain that the Wests continued interest in Ukraine is not (just) to continue poking the bear but to ensure the bear doesn't get kidney punched and does a nuclear spergout. Leashing the dog is better than letting it run wild in its dying breath.
What nobody seems to have contemplated is how Ukraine is going to feel about all of this in the aftermath, although quite possibly they will be so reduced to a nonentity that it will not matter if they grow to hate the West for precisely this attitude.
Shrike
21d ago
This time Russians are only fighting Ukraine and have basically no need to accept anything beyond complete submission, for now, unless the costs become too large.
It seems to me that the demands made of Finland and the demands made of Ukraine are quite similar, although I suppose it's a bit debatable because Russia's postwar relationship with Finland was hammered out over a period of time.
-
Ceding territory: Ultimately, Moscow got half of Karelia (more than their prewar demands) and other choice parts of Finland, amounting to nearly 12% of their total territory. This is similar to Russian territorial demands of Ukraine (which it looks like amounts to something like 15% - 20%?), although it seems Putin may be climbing down from earlier demands for the totality of four full provinces.
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"Denazification" - Finland paid war reparations, had to remove German troops from its territory, ban parties that the USSR considered fascist (and legalize the Communist party) and hold war-responsibility trials. The Reuters' story I linked to does not mention any details of "denazification" of Ukraine. It's been a public Russian demand in the past, but perhaps they've backed off of this as well.
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Neutralization/disarmament: Finland had to accept limitations on its armed forces as per the 1947 Treaty of Paris and neutralization in the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948. Similarly, Russia is demanding limits on the Ukrainian army and essentially neutralization by forcing Ukraine to give up its NATO aspirations.
Shrike
21d ago
Worth asking what the goal of a defensive war is.
Shrike
21d ago
I agree that neither of these are ridiculous.
I actually think it is reasonably clear that some version of #1 has been correct ever since the attempt to seize Kiev failed: it would be extremely hard for Russia to seize all of Ukraine and this has been acknowledged by the Russians in their negotiation proposals (and I don't even think their attempt to seize Kiev was an attempt to do this). Thus, if by "Ukraine continuing attritional warfare until Russia gives up" we mean "until Russia comes to the table and negotiates," that's already happened.
If however we take "Russia gives up" to mean "Ukraine accomplishes their war goals" - yeah I don't think Ukraine is getting Crimea back.
Shrike
21d ago
Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI?
I don't think religious conservatives are best described as anti-AI per se; I think it might be better to call them AI skeptics. I think this is downstream of both their beliefs about the soul ("AI has no soul or spirit, so can it truly be intelligent?") and due to the uses it might be put towards (obviously even if AI progress somehow stalls tomorrow it has already advanced sufficiently to generate pornography, for instance). So you see skepticism about its potential and concerns about its application.
Obviously people's views about AI are changing and it seems quite possible that religious conservatives (or any other group) will rapidly shift or crystallize.
Shrike
21d ago
Ukrainians sometimes deliver up to 300 drones and ballistic missile strikes a day.
Nitpick-y point, but I don't think the Ukrainians actually have any ballistic missiles left at this point, or if they do it's just a handful. I think you're thinking of cruise missiles (which is what the headline of the linked article references).
Not to worry, the Russophiles may have a counterproposal, "Your country and women will be raped anyways, wouldn't you rather spend your few remaining years in a nice camp in Siberia rather than the frontlines?" — @No_one, probably
I just don't see how this is helpful or productive.
I'd be much more interested in reading an argument against No_one's past positions - and honestly, although your assessment that the Russian press is prepping the people for hard years ahead is interesting, I'm interested in more from you on what you think this "bad-news-for-Russia" round up amounts to. There's been no shortage of bad news for Russia ever since their initial attempt to blitz Ukraine failed. If you think this collection of bad news will reverse the trajectory of the war, or how you think the war will play out from here, I would be interested in knowing why you personally think this.
Shrike
23d ago
Has the Trump administration actually changed the way the O-1/EB-1A visas work?
Shrike
27d ago
Unless you think that every unsolved murder in Washington, D.C. is also such a conspiracy I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's quite possible to evade D.C.'s surveillance footage even if you don't have an inside person, and having one would make it even easier.
Frankly, that's all that needs to be said here. But I'm going to go further than that. Remember when I said
That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity.
You're doing this here! "The government" and even "the FBI" doesn't have access to all of the footage from D.C.
There are going to be three types of cameras in Washington, D.C. - government, public, and private. Government cameras will be split between different agencies - no single agency will have custody of all of them. Public cameras are livestreaming on the internet. Private cameras' footage is not available to the government without a request.
This means that when the FBI-ATF team is put together to deal with the bomber, they don't have access to ~any of the relevant footage. They have to go around and get it: speak to other government agencies, knock on the doors of hotels and restaurants and ask if they have video surveillance footage, etc.
Now, I don't know how large the team working this is (it likely fluctuates based on the need) but my guess is that probably you have a small core team, plus subject-matter-experts and analysts that are tapped for specific tasks.
This means that the group of people who have access to the footage that is relevant to this event is possibly quite small! Call it an agent-in-charge, a six-man team, and about two dozen SMEs and analysts who are tapped with specific tasking at the discretion of the team lead.
And the minimum theoretical amount of people on that team that can gatekeep access to the video footage is...one. Potentially whichever agent raises his hand and says "I'll do it" when the lead agent asks who wants to go round up the video footage, that guy is your chokepoint. Any cameras he decides weren't rolling that day weren't, any livestreams that he decides to ignore are ignored, any footage that was regrettably scrubbed the day before he happened to knock on the door was scrubbed. As long as he doesn't get caught ignoring any obvious leads, what are the odds that someone double-checks his work? The Bureau isn't drowning in free time.
Now, I don't know how the FBI does things. I hope they have procedures in place that make this difficult or impossible. But I do know how research and analysis works. A single eye can blind the whole body.
Shrike
28d ago
Why would you tell the MAGA true believers about Operation Bring Down Trump?
That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity. But "the government" doesn't do things, people inside the government do things, and sometimes they do things unofficially and/or illegally.
The threat that people are trying to get at when they talk about "the Deep State" isn't that "the CIA" will "decide" to screw over an elected official. You think there's some internal CIA policy that says "it is the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency to bork This Guy in Particular"?
No, the threat is that some guys at the CIA who don't like This Guy in Particular will use their official position and resources to bork him. I mean, look at Watergate. There wasn't an official FBI position of "we will leak evidence of the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post," Mark Felt took advantage of his position as Deputy Director to do that. And it would be the same with the DC police - IF this theory is true (and it seems too soon to tell, to me) it's not "the DC police" doing this. It's a group of DC police officers who, by virtue of not being completely stupid, aren't going to tell DC police officers who would disagree with their plan any more than they would post it on the Internet.
That's not to say that there's never been an Official Policy To Do Something Bad (there has), but the Stringer Bell's rule applies doubly so to people in the government. (If only conspiracy theorists would actually watch and pay attention to The X-Files, which actually understands the dynamic here decently well.)
Shrike
29d ago
“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”
Hilariously, if you dig into the links, you'll find that one of the reasons Watson said this is, apparently, because of an experiment where injecting melanin directly into men had Viagra-like results.
Your takedown of Watson (...shortly after his death) doesn't ask if any of his kooky views might be true or why he believes them, it just holds them up and says they are bad. Some of them were probably wrong (which, for a scientist, is arguably worse than bad) and some of them were probably insensitive, but aren't you a little bit curious to know more about the effects of melanin on sexual desire?
Shrike
30d ago
I'm just trying to understand the epistemology that makes this all work. Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?
I think Red Tribe distrust in the mainstream news media has always [within recent memory] been high, perhaps even higher than Red Tribe distrust in the government.
So yes, all of the things people are saying about arguments as soldiers and people wanting to believe what they want to believe are true, but it's pretty consistent for Red Tribe to see a news story and assume there's a massive and substantially misleading spin involved.
Why distrust the media so much? I think this is the perception:
The government always lies to protect its own interests. Sometimes that hurts Red Tribe. Sometimes it doesn't. But when the media lies, it is always to hurt Red Tribe or help its enemies.
Shrike
1mo ago
For me, the problems you describe make parallel institutions more appealing, because you are correct that Christianity is oriented towards serving God, which means that it will be treated with hostility by the world (Christian Scripture says this specifically!) As I said on a prior occasion, "you might as well be weird."
That doesn't mean, though, that you should tie one hand behind your back and not talk about the good that your religious group does. (And just as an empirical matter, nondenominational churches are actually growing in membership, even while most other denominations are shedding membership – so I am not 100% certain the choice for churches today is necessarily between quickly shrinking and slowly shrinking, as I think you are suggesting.)
Shrike
1mo ago
Personally what I hope for is a combination of the evangelical view of the world as mission space and its non-hierarchical, liberal approach to conversion with the focus on interior cultivation and community practice of Orthodox communities, but it is very rare that I get what I hope for in any field. So it goes.
I tend to agree with you. We're here on The Motte, and it seems to me that in theory there's a very clear synthesis with parallel institutions serving as a motte from which believers can sally forth to evangelize and retreat to in times of hostility. Dreher chose the name Benedict because the Benedictines ended up preserving so much literature that was later extremely influential on changing the course of history (if memory serves).
I think that, just in general, parallel spaces serve a potentially valuable role in terms of providing vital back-ups or redundancy, as well as a bulwark against tyranny and disaster. A city with a firmly established religious benevolence network will do better caring for the needy if government services shut down than one without; if the government oversteps its bounds, a place with alternative or parallel means of communication, organizing, and moving money will be much better prepared to resist than a place where all logistical and ideological endeavor is essentially routed through the same small cluster of institutions that, fundamentally, rest on a few fragile datacenters that can easily be accessed, subverted, and denied by a powerful government.
Obviously religious groups and institutions are not the ONLY institutions that can provide this. But I think it's important to note this because a lot of times Christians building parallel institutions invites hostility, and I think it's helpful to note that these organizations can actually provide a real public good (even if they are to some degree motivated by a desire for insularity).
And this sort of comes back to the Motte itself, I think: the Motte was created, as I understand it, precisely due to the perceived need to create a parallel institution without having to worry about a way of life discourse being strangled in its cradle by a hostile culture. The Motte is the Dreher Option in action, albeit not intended for religious conservatives (which to be clear I am not complaining about!)
even if I think it is often wide open to heretical teachings or pseudo-idolatry
I hear this a lot from Catholic intellectuals, but empirically it seems to me that Catholicism is far worse at teaching proper catechesis than evangelicals. You can see this in polling that shows that Catholics are more likely to reject core Christian doctrines, or in polling that shows they are less likely to go to Mass than evangelicals are to go to service (even though as I understand it this is much more of a religious obligation in Catholicism than in evangelicalism), or in polling that shows that a majority of US Catholics support abortion (performing worse on a cornerstone Catholic issue than evangelicals!) and birth control, where in practice Catholics are nearly as likely to say it is morally acceptable as Protestants, or in personal anecdotes (for instance Dreher talks about a priest counseling him and his wife to use contraception!)
Part of this, of course, is that Catholics who are essentially secular will still identify as Catholic in surveys, whereas lapsed evangelicals, I think, often won't bother to pretend. However, I also think there's a broader lesson here about human nature. People like control, and are entranced with the idea that a clear, rigorous body of rules, disseminated through a hierarchical organization, can give them some measure of control. But the facts on the ground often play out differently.
Now to be clear, I don't think this is the end of the story for American Catholicism – I suspect it's going to essentially shed most of its non-serious members and end up smaller but with a more committed (and conservative) core that will continue to have an outsized impact on US culture – but I think it's important to realize that just because the Catholics have One Big Book with all the answers to doctrine written down and evangelicals don't (or, if you prefer, have 2,184 competing One Big Books), doesn't actually solve the problem of getting people to read the book, let alone convincing people that the book is correct.
Shrike
1mo ago
If you are carrying a handgun or a knife openly and someone tackles you, you are at risk of being shot or stabbed.
Shrike
1mo ago
Keep in mind that Electoral College votes are determined by population (which would include illegal aliens), so even if no illegal aliens vote their presence, if large enough, does skew the Electoral College. Not coincidentally, the President has been calling for a new census.
Gerrymandering and court cases and deportations might be unseemly (or they might be politics as usual, I suppose that depends on the specifics and your personal judgment) but all of them are at least done under the color of law, unlike outrider voter fraud.
I think Trump running as Vance's VP as a backdoor into a third term would go against the spirit of the 22nd, but whether it's actually forbidden would be something the courts would have to decide.
This would be extremely funny, and I hadn't considered that seriously, but I suppose it is possible. The 12th Amendment bars people ineligible for the Presidency from the position of Vice-Presidency, though, which might be ruled to put a damper on the idea.
I agree with this, but at least in al-Awlaki's case, there wasn't any allegation that he was on the battlefield, except I suppose in the very broad GWOT context in which the entire world was the battlefield.
It's not clear to me that the AUMF isn't in play, since the Trump administration hasn't released their legal reasoning yet, have they?
Nor is it clear to me that the AUMF is actually a very clear bar on to strikes on narcos. Didn't the AUMF give the President leeway to go after anyone that aided those who assisted in the 9/11 plot (all broadly defined)? It doesn't seem crazy that TdA and the Taliban, for instance, might have done e.g. a drug or arms deal. At which point you could probably invoke the AUMF.
Returning to the Obama administration again, we see that they used the AUMF as their justification for strikes against ISIS. That seems less ridiculous because ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban all sort of look the same if you squint but is that really the case legally? I'd need to do more digging into the question to have a very strong opinion, but from my admittedly pretty superficial understanding of this all it looks like the AUMF has already been stretched all out of proportion to provide a legal fig leaf for doing whatever the President wants, so I would not be surprised if this is being done again.
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