Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one has yet guessed multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
In order: I have no idea, I hope not, I would not be the least surprised, and yeah.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
It could give people a fake audience of AI humans who appreciate their wit and wisdom. This technology is definitely coming soon. Already, we see a small group of mostly neurodivergent people who spend hours a day talking to AI chatbots. There's no reason to think this won't grow. In the future, everyone will have an audience of adoring robot fans, hanging on their every word. If you can get over the fact that it's all fake, it might be the best of all worlds.
I'm reminded of... I wouldn't call it a study, but a post I remember that characterizes many of the most popular video game companions as professional sycophants whose role in the video-game power fantasy of the self-projection protagonist was to affirm how awesome and attractive you.
The example I remember was in the Bioware RPG Mass Effect, where the player plays the Super Awesome Special Forces Secret Agent Officer, Commander Shepard in the multi-species galaxy, where you are (allegedly) an amazing leader ready to make the Tough Choices. The first game's gimmick was not only the claim that your Big Decisions would matter in the future, but also the morality system that let you play a heroic virtuous paragon (who consistently deferred to / agreed with the Alien UN authority figures) or a ends-justify-the-means Renegade (who could be a raging racist). There was even a romance system where you could sleep with your subordinates, including a star-trek esque alien blue woman.
The second game's gimmick, among other things, was the ability to re-recruit most of your other alien squadmates from the first game and sleep with them... even if you were a raging racist infront of them. The player romance fantasy for the totally-not-gypsy coded geeky tech girl might be the dashing captain who was a white night who saved her late father's reputation (by covering up crimes that got a lot of people killed), and hey it's totally romantic if she loves you so much that she's willing to risk killing herself before a critical mission just to sleep with you...
...but she'd make the same doe eyes and declarations of love and how irresistibly attractive you were if you were a genocidal bigot who punched women for mouthing off on live television and turned over an autistic child to have his eyes stapled open and be tortured for Science (TM) after sleeping with an abused trauma victim tormented by the same racial-supremacist organization that you are currently working for and can repeatedly voice support for.
The virtual waifu was, in other words, incredibly popular. And like most of the most popular characters in the franchise, was never anything but supportive and/or adoring for the player self-insert protagonist.
So when you say fake audiences fawning over the player/protagonist... I believe it, because we've already seen it. It was just far more limited and harder to program and write for a decade ago... which is to say, should be in the LLM's training data.
Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it, without being so crass as to expect the hosts to. Figure that out, and then we're talking.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
It won't end well for anyone, and ending well for the Americans is what is required for it to be a good idea for the Americans.
This is a bit much. Yes, I agree that cheap drones have really changed a lot of things. Everything about ground maneuver, mounted and dismounted, has changed due to the threat. Helicopters are probably already nearly obsolete in significantly-contested areas. But cheap drones are not yet even close to being capable of taking out F-35s.
They absolutely are... when they are on the ground, as they are most of the time. Hence why the WSJ report on how the mystery drones last year forced the US Airforce to relocate the F-22 squadron from Langley Airbase during the first big mystery drone swarm event.
Drones are not only a credible threat to military equipment when the military equipment is in motion, but also- especially- when it is NOT in motion, or only in slow motion. Drones dropping payloads is one of the easiest modifications to make to a commercial off the shelf drone, and it doesn't take much to functionally ruin things far sturdier than aircraft.
This is why last year's 'drones are flying over airbases' was notable. A drone that can fly over an airbase without permission is a drone that can fly over (or into) an aircraft on the runway without permission, and thus destroy an aircraft without permission.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Yes. The cartels are in many respects far more dangerous, with considerably greater asset potential than the Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan had access to before the US was negotiating its way out, and considerably greater ability to put those assets to use against American national interests, including within the United States itself.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
What math are you confused on?
You are not fighting a direct war with Russia or China, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly. This proposal is a proposal to instigate a direct conflict with cartels, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly.
This is a cost / math consistency: do not instigate a direct conflict against those who can inflict consider costs and losses if engaged directly.
There are certainly other arguments that can be made on how to react to someone else's instigation of a conflict, but many of these are voided if made by the same people proposing direct conflict instigation (and are generally not my position regardless).
He replied before I edited in the ISIS false flag part on a whim. Also, that was not satire. Posting such a video seems like an obviously good idea, since the morale effect is the entire point. Claiming responsibility does not, and sowing confusion seems like it would be effectively free with no appreciable downsides.
I acknowledge my mistake of your intent, and will simply adjust by noting I consider this a terrible idea. Providing global audiences, including competitors, skeptics, and wavering audiences, documentary evidence of American war crimes is quite appreciable downsides for American efforts globally, particularly when trying to hide behind false-flag islamic terrorism in a region that notably has a lack of it (because the cartels have a history of not tolerating it).
Come now, of course it's offering protection, and in a way the principles involved would be entirely familiar with.
And yet, it fails the basic protection racket credibility requirements that American counter-insurgency/counter-crime efforts abroad have run into for decades: everyone knows that the Americans will leave, and when they do the people they pushed back will return. A protection racket fundamentally does not work if the protectors are assured to leave.
Hence why it is critical that any intervention be with the consent / support of the local government, and not in contemptuous indifference to their position, as the OP took.
And this is without the issue of the intervention being framed on principles that the intervention is supposed to mitigate, not perpetuate. The propaganda of 'American gangsters are moving in' practically writes itself.
It is not obvious to me why we can't or shouldn't be, or why refraining from being so is a net-positive. That is not to say that we should begin filming Funky Towns or cribbing from ancient Chinese law enforcement techniques. It is to say that we have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs, that terror and horror come in many flavors and can in fact trade off with each other, and that this is a class of people who have pretty clearly placed themselves beyond most forms of moral concern.
You do not have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs.
Even if you just want to compare raw revenue (DoD funding vs. illegal american drug purchase estimates), you are not even looking at two orders of magnitude (2024 estimates being something on the measure of a 840 billion DoD budget versus a US illegal drug market in the 10s of billions- i.e. 1 order of magnitude). If you want to subdivide collective cartel costs between competing factions and dynamics, you also need to provide the same sort of proportional consideration to the US resourcing effort- i.e. what the actual cost-scale for an intervention is supposed to be.
For a basis of comparison- the US costs in Japan and Korea from 2016 to 2019 were less than 40 billion USD, or 40,000,000, 000. For the cartels to have resources a dozen orders of magnitude less than the resources the US uses over multiple years as part of treaty commitments, the Cartels would need to spend less than $1.
Somehow I doubt that represents Cartel spending... or that the new, supposedly intervention-shy administration will spend magnitudes more money on a (supposedly short!) Mexican intervention than years of overseas security spending.
Am I beating up on this obvious turn of phase? Yes. But I am doing this to pivot to the point that you don't need same-order-of-magnitude resourcing to make something terribly costly, which is part of the ongoing technology revolution of military affairs.
Drones themselves are an asymmetric cost-benefit weapon: you can buy 55,000 $2k drones for the cost of one $110 million F-35. It doesn't matter if you can't buy 1 F-35 or 55,000 drones- it matters if you can buy one drone that can destroy a $110 million asset, and then repeat as needed.
Which is absolutely in reach of targets whose signature ability is "having supply chains to move good worth billions of dollars to and through the United States."
There is a reason that one of the main counter-drone defenses on the Ukraine frontlines is 'don't be worth the cost of expending the munition' rather than 'shoot down the drone.' The US relationship with cartels isn't just 'the US could apply far more violence'- it is also that the Cartels could apply far more violence. It's not worth it to them to pick a fight unnecessarily, but if the US is the one to instigate a fight...
Ideally in this scenario, they wouldn't do either. The goal wouldn't be to kill the market, which you are correct to say would be impossible, but rather to modify the behavior of those participating in the market. Sure, they're willing to accept death for a chance at the good life; but maybe they can be persuaded that the sweet spot is actually a bit back from "public torture murder".
Trying to tear down a cartel in a specific operating zone is increasing, not decreasing, criminal incentives for 'public torture murder.'
Cartel violence in Mexico is often highest where there is not a dominant cartel. The violence is generally about the Cartels competing with each other, not with the state or the public. A spike of cartel violence is typically a result of a push into another gang's territory. Where a cartel is dominant, particularly the Sinaloa cartel, such public violence is neither necessary or sought.
This would be particularly exploitable since the best way to tear down a dominant cartel is... to tell the American intervention force that's bombing cartels where your cartel rivals are. Thus the Americans will do the hard work for you, reducing power disparities and opening the way for public torture murder.
Underneath the theorycrafting and righteous vengeance and repartee, though, there's a more substantive concern: I don't think it's a good idea to foster the creation of a society where corruption and brutality are accepted facts of life. When I look at history, there's a pattern I think I see, where things go bad, evil is ascendent, and all the good people either die, leave, or are corrupted themselves. The results of this pattern appear to me to be very bad in the long term, and I worry quite a bit that this is what we have done to Mexico.
And your view on the historical patterns of when the 'Don't just stand there- do something!' instinct in the face of bad things is mixed with policy proposals to attack outsiders because internal reforms are dismissed as 'too hard'?
Setting aside that corruption and brutality are facts of life, and that this proposed intervention would involve plenty of both, the alternative to Pancho Villa Buggaloo is not 'do nothing and be apathetic.' There are alternative forms of action, and if you identify a lack of virtue in the context then you have identified an alternative method to work on. Just because they are hard / incremental / unlikely to succeed in the short term does not mean they do not work over time. No society starts 'virtuous'- rather, cultivation of virtue is something cultivated over generations, over countless setbacks, often with the help of others and over the hinderance of others.
And this is without the ethnocentricism of framing the issue as what 'we' have done to Mexico. The Americans have plenty of things to be responsible for, none more than the drug trade demand, but you do not have a monopoly on moral responsibility for other people's evils. Mexicans are as much individuals with their own moral agency as Americans, even if they have members who do things you'd really rather they not.
Yeah, seeing just the non-secret developments in new drone and satellite technologies makes this completely non-credible for me.
And that judgement from those developments are why your friend is right to take issue with your proposal.
The most significant point of the developments in new drone and satellite technologies is that the benefits of drone and satellite technologies are no longer a near-monopoly of the American government. Commercial satellite technology gives anyone with internet access imagery on par with what the American government fought not just the first iraq war with, but the iraqi insurgency. Commercial drone technology has introduced an ongoing revolution in military affairs, as the ability to have a militarily effective airpower is no longer something only states can afford to procure. Twenty years ago, the US military's greatest fear was land-based IEDs, and that was a considerable challenge even when the only drone strike fear was of friendly fire.
The fact that Americans have significant satellite and drone technologies isn't what is decisive anymore. The fact that all parties have satellite and drone technologies are what makes it far harder. I fully expect it to take a mauling for American public opinion to catch up with that fact that the Russians aren't uniquely bad or vulnerable to drone warfare, but I would prefer they learn from the Russian example in this respect.
Is this about the Zetas? I don't want to relitigate shit from the 1800s about how America is a bad neighbor. Please let me know when and how the United States has fucked over Mexico to the tune of trillions of dollars of cumulative economic damage, enriching themselves in the process.
If you need to ask, you are demonstrating the lack of awareness- on top of the rather unsubtle dodge of that time of a conquest of a third of Mexico including one of the most economically productive regions of north america.
Afghanistan is 7,300 miles away, Mexico we share a border with. Afghanistan was also a while ago, we have learned lots of lessons, we have much better technology. Will this stupid comparison never die?
I question how many of the lessons of Afghanistan were learned by anyone who dismisses a conflict of nearly 20 of the last 25 years as 'a while ago' and irrelevant.
Based on your proposal so far, I am going to make a very measured guess that you have either never read the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency before, or the source document behind it, or else you found much to disagree with them both.
My plan is that the cartel bosses that continue to not play nice with the United States will keep dying. Sooner rather than later they will learn to order their thugs to wind down certain operations. Maybe just a few to start. @FCfromSSC puts it much eloquently below.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. -Edit- Correction- It seems to not have been satire. I will leave the rest of this post as is, but acknowledge my misunderstanding of his intent.
Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
Moreover, I return to the point that you do not have a good model of cartel bosses. I will attempt to provide a metaphor via a stick comic by Rich Burlew. [Spoilers for Order of the Stick- which is dated, but still quite good.]
In the webcomic Order of the Stick, one of our protagonists, a chaotic-good bard named Elan, learns that his recently-discovered/long-lost father, the subtly named Tarquin, no relation to that one, is actually a lawful-evil tyrant in the equally subtly named Empire of Blood, which is nominally ruled by an evil red dragon. The discovery that his father is actually evil comes after the further unsubtle act of burning a bunch of prisoners alive as part of a birthday gift.
Being the good-aligned and narratively-savvy bard he is, our protagonist attempts to rationally convince his father to stop because, per the tropes of fiction they both subscribe to, the hero always wins and the evil overlord always loses, and thus his father's doom is assured if he chooses to be the evil overlord. Clearly it would be irrational to take a doomed position that will end with his certain defeat (and death).
Tarquin makes the counter-argument that, you know, you can't just be so negative all the time, and you should be more optimistic.
Tarquin: If someone conquers an empire and rules it with an iron fist for thirty long years, and then some paladin breaks into his throne room and kills him, what do you think he's going to remember as he lays dying?
Elan: ...that good triumphed over evil?
Tarquin: No, that he got to live like a god for three decades! Sure, the last ten minutes sucked, but you can't have everything.
Elan: But in the end-
Tarquin: The end of what, Son? The story? There is no end, there's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
Tarquin: Somewhere between "villain of the week" and "good triumphs over evil," there's a sweet spot where guys like me get to rule the roost for years. As long as I go into this accepting the price I may eventually pay, then I win- no matter what actually happens.
In this metaphor, your plan works on the premise that if a few more of them die to righteous American paladins/airstrikes, they will be replaced by people who will change their minds, when drug cartels are filled with people who get into the business knowing it is both lucrative and likely to get them killed, and accepted that long ago.
You are not introducing a risk of death to these people- they have been killing eachother over blood-money spoils for decades, and death by americans is no different than death by other gangs / ambitious subordinates / Mexican actors / etc. You may believe you are willing to kill a lot more than 'a few,' but the number of people willing to risk death for money- particularly the sort of money that Americans are willing to give for that risk- far outweighs the American political capacity to run open-ended interventions.
In exchange, maybe they can receive certain protections, and be guided to switch to economically productive governance.
Lad, you just praised the eloquence of a modest proposal to massacre people by drone strikes and post it online with implausible deniability.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
What does it mean, if anything, allowing you and your neighbors to be abused by some of the most objectively evil criminal enterprises in existence?
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
It also means that you probably have a worldview which views the evilness of the enemy as the determining factor of the wisdom of a policy to attack them. This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons dismissed these warnings because they knew better / had learned the lessons of history / were going to do something about the evils and they didn't find any warnings against their moral cause to be credible.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
What does it mean about the sovereignty of Mexico that it's been infiltrated by and protects these psychopathic paramilitary gangs as they flood their neighbors with the most evil drugs?
It means that Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
The American drug problem is not a result of the sovereignty of Mexico, which is primarily a transit point rather than a source anyway. It is a result of market forces of supply and demand, specifically the American demand for drugs. If you remember your economics, you should also remember that prices are both a signal and an incentive for suppliers to meet that demand.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will you be making the price go up for people already willing to risk death for money, or will you be making the prince-incentive go up for people already willing to risk death for money?
But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
Who says it doesn't?
The Russians and the Chinese both put up with great deals of neighborly behavior they find unneighborly. The Chinese have what they consider an entire secessionist province with substantial foreign smuggling and arms trafficking as a neighbor, and the argument that no, they should not conquer said island is the basis of the most plausible global power war since the cold war. And the Russians have an entire military alliance dedicated to the argument that they should not get to do what they want to the people who dislike them who are right fucking there, and the last time the Russians decided to 'do something' about 'the most vile people' on earth (Nazis!), they are still in fighting that war to great personal detriment as many of their neighbors make the argument that, yes, this argument against intervention does apply to them.
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
Or rather- when Russia decided it wouldn't tolerate a sovereign neighbor doing sovereign policy things, it led to one of the biggest blunders of post-WW2 Russian strategic policy, costing over a million casualties and the loss of significant global power and standing. When China wouldn't tolerate Vietnam's behavior, it invaded the north and had such an embarrassing lack of success that Vietnam has sparked not just a detente, but budding partnership, with China's main strategic rival.
These were both terribly stupid policies by the 'senior' partner, neither of which actually got what they wanted as a result.
The other countries have been less incompetent, and so have generally let their disgruntlement with troublesome neighbors remain disgruntlements rather than casus belli.
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
That would indeed be a real disconnect, and one that strongly suggests a lack of attention to the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast.
And you think this achieves anything... why?
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share. Life is cheap, and the cartel's losses are not your own- instead, the cartel's loss is a chance for your own gang to take out rivals and maneuver yourself for a bigger cut of the American drug-purchasing money. As long as there are americans willing to pay tons of money to buy the drugs, then there is a lot of money to be made selling despite the risks. That other people in the business lose out isn't an issue, it's an opportunity- especially if you can use the American intervention as a way to knock out rivals / settle scores / make way for yourself.
If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
No, it does not.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
I guess what I want to know is, Am I The Asshole?
Yes, though anyone who ironically proposes a special military operation deserves one. (This is a joke, but do be kind to your friend.)
More to the point- your friend is raising relevant points, and you are raising bad geopolitical analogies. There are contexts where it is not war to conduct strikes in a neighboring country's territory, but these are generally limited to very specific contexts- namely imminent threats of which 'routine drug smuggling' generally does not qualify. If you do so anyway, there are many, many, many ways it can go badly, particularly if the sovereign state doesn't give you permission. Given how many things in diplomacy rest of voluntary cooperation, there are many ways for an unwanting state to make their neighbor's life difficult, even without armed resistance, and in the modern era there are also easy ways for that to go very, very costly. (See- drones.) This doesn't even touch how foreign state actors could partake and interfere- such as smuggling weapons (see- drones) to cartels for use against the Americans.
There are a number of reasons an armed intervention would be a bad idea, but let's focus on why it's not a good idea: it's not 1917, Mexico is not in a civil war, the cartels are not Pancho Villa doing cross-border raids into the US, and the Pancho Villa expedition failed anyways.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
In what way? What is the motte, and what is the bailey here?
The Nazi salute was, notably, not unique to the Nazis. They have no particular historical claim to inventing it, or monopoly on it at the time, or exclusivity on the meaning of 'arm outstretched, slightly elevated'- hence the many defenses of Democrat politicians being photographed in a similar outstretch being 'well, you need to look at the video for context to see otherwise,' which is not coincidentally very similar to the context of if you add what Musk was saying to the context of the image (or video) of him. Context can remove the Nazi criteria.
It would seem to me that what makes a Nazi salute a Nazi salute is if it is done for, in alignment with, or in the context of Nazi activities. If it is not done in a Nazi format, it is not a Nazi salute, just a salute (or gesture), the sort of which 'well, you just need to look at the context to see otherwise' is a valid defense.
'You just need context to see this isn't Nazi' does not seem to be the defendable motte, but the more expansive bailey- and one strong enough to not require a retreat to 'actually the Nazi salute is just fine,' which is less defensible, and thus not a motte.
Instead, the motte-and-bailey seems to be more in the accusation side of things- where 'that is a Nazi salute' is the expansive claim, which is forced to retreat into a more defensible 'well, maybe it's not actually Nazi, but it looks bad so should be condemned regardless.'
Which, coincidentally, is a very similar argument structure to the 'the OK sign is a white supremacist gesture' craze of a few years ago.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Frankly if you could achieve that it would be considerably beneficial- the volume differences are just that much- but I have a hard time believing that the Americans would want (a) a Russian kinetic entry into the war on the side of China, or (b) attack Indian vessels.
Rather than 'war will end trade between opposing sides,' a lesson of the Ukraine War should probably be the opposite- that vast amounts of trade will continue. The Russians lost a naval blockade to a country with no navy from a far greater position, and second-party smuggling was such that sanction-restrictions really amount to an cost-increase rather than cutoff of contraband goods.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it.
This hinges on your belief that the modern American political system would be willing to sustain a total naval warfare sinking neutral nation shipping in the face of both domestic and international blowback. Consider me less than convinced.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
And the second lesson should be that you can learn as many contradictory lessons from history as you care to look for, which no one ever bothers to after the first lesson they want.
Jimmy Carter died.
When former US presidents or notables die, it's normal for the US to have a period of half-mast flags.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
McCain and Romeny both were both broadly regarded as highly moral and above-the-board fellows able to rise above mere partisanship, at least outside of the period of their presidential campaigns at which point they were warmongering sexist racists. Afterwards they were once again respected statesmen, at least as long as they criticized Republicans.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
Or even "I know they keep firing on your position. But from my position, well safe and far away, that doesn't make it right for you to shoot people."
Counter-point- pardons are not a bug, but a feature, of governmental design.
The point of American governmental powers is not as a tool for angelic figures, but as a check against other branches. That it can be used to block investigations / prosecutions of 'legitimate' crimes is a merit, not evidence of failure, because 'I'm just cracking down on corruption' is an archetypical basis for political purges of political opponents. The checks and balances of government are far more concerned about the later- the abuse of judicial processes- than they are the former- the ability of guilty people to get off free.
The Pardon-power is an executive check against both the legislature (which could legislate unreasonable laws that none could fail to break, and then use said breaks arbitrarily to disqualify), but just as importantly the judiciary (whose power revolves around process conclusions). Just from a system design, if you want to remove a check on the executive against other branches, you are implicitly either replacing it with a new- and as to date not norms-established power- against the other branches, or you are refusing to replace it. Either of these are destablizing changes to a system.
In turn, the guardrails against veto abuse aren't just voters (note the lame-duck rush as opposed to the years before Biden lost the election), but inter-party and inter-branch politics. If the President, Congress, and Judiciary are on board with the same abuse, there's no particular limit (or need) for the veto regardless. The challenge comes when the President and Judiciary are at odds, and Congress is the wavering party. If Congress supports the President, the Judiciary is at a loss regardless, and the veto is just a means by which it is done. But if Congress opposes the President, the limitation on the veto is the limitation of the President's relationship with Congress- the president needs Congressional support for other things, and even outgoing presidents have political considerations.
In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions. That mitigation can be a way to limit future politically-motivated prosecutions (Trump against Biden; more historically, the Nixon pardon), and mitigate past politically-motivated prosecutions (Biden against Jan 6 rioters, when the Jan 6 cases are contrasted against BLM / 2016 rioters). That you can view both of these (or neither of these) as 'actual' crimes does not change the politically charged nature of the prosecution (or potential prosecution) as viewed by substantial amounts of the public.
By contrast, limiting the ability of a President to grant clemency doesn't prevent the politically motivated prosecutions in the first place, but would make them harder to undo, which is less preventing future abuses as much as protecting them more if not even a change of governing party could reverse them.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.
As long as the Panama Canal was an American imperialist asset, it was a target of anti-American / pro-latin-american groups across the region. When it became a Panamanian sovereign asset, the later half of that interest-coalition disengaged, and became far more supportive, particularly in Panama where national self-interest aligned with keeping the canal running smoothly. Come the 1990 Just Cause invasion, a vast majority of the Panamanians supported the US intervention
Moreover, the turnover of the canal was a significant element on the United States transition from the early cold war period- where the conflicts were often remnants of imperial system breakdowns of managing post-imperial transitions amidst Soviet-backed peasant uprising- to the later cold war, where increasingly established / self-coherent governments gradually garnered more legitimacy. The Panama Canal turnover decreased perception of sovereignty-threat from the US, since if the US was willing to give up a strategic asset like the panama canal then there was almost certainly no asset / port / resource of your own that would be more appetizing to strategic greed.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
Pretty much, and even this doesn't get into the issues of the cyber-vulnerabilities of someone who already controls the computer networks and what that can mean, or the ability to scuttle a ship already within the canal, or the fact that Panama is within drone attack range of various low-governance/hostile-to-the-US regional actors...
...and that none of those really go away if you capture the canal intact, since cyber-vulnerabilities are always there to be found, the whole point of the canal is to bring ships through, and, of course, regional reaction.
Anyone who thinks the Americans seizing the panama canal by force would be quick and easy and good is about as high on their own supply as the pro-Russians going into Ukraine.
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
To better generate political accusations against political opponents while deflecting accusations of behavioral comparisons on aesthetic dis-similarity are certainly solid reasons, but they are not good reasons.
It certainly doesn't have much to do with protecting the rights and liberties of the individual, hence why the antibodies are about aesthetics and not practices such as government attitudes towards political-opposition speech (including use of organized political violence and ostracism to intimidate bystanders into non-resistance), political structure dynamics (incredibly strong governmental influence on private commercial actors to leverage nominally independent entities as tools of the party-state), social engineering at the race-composition level.
Moreover, it is and was particularly important that the cultural antibodies be against Nazi aesthetics, as opposed to the aesthetics of anyone who shared in Nazi-behavior, because during the Cold War when those antibodies were developed antibodies against behavior-aesthetics instead of Nazi-aesthetics would have implicated a not-inconsiderable portion of the Soviet-sympathizing socialist-leaning classes. Who, coincidentally, were significant influences in the cultural-antibody process and many of whom still keep their Communist-derived aesthetics.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.
All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.
Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.
And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.
By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.
And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'
There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.
As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.
Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.
Soros is an American jewish progressive neoliberal whose spends significantly (as in, something like over 30 billion USD) on progressive political advocacy networks that support, among other things, liberal migration policies.
No_one is insinuating that European migration policy would not have happened absent Soros lobbying, rather than Soros having like-minded partners in Europe and boosting already existing political dynamics.
More options
Context Copy link