MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
People (including Elon Musk, who can't be prosecuted, and Lucy Connolly, who quite properly was) called for arson, directed against actual, identifiable human beings who were Muslim asylum-seekers based on a crime committed by someone who was neither an asylum-seeker nor a Muslim.
Some of us think that, morally, facts matter when burning people out of their homes.
Legally, actual incitement has always been a free speech corner case, going back to John Stuart Mill's writing about when it is legitimate to say that corn-dealers are responsible for starvation. (He thinks this is fine under normal circumstances, but not if said directly to a riotous mob outside the home of an identifiable corn-dealer). The US tradition is deliberately overprotective of free speech in the corner cases to avoid chilling effects. "Grass is magenta, therefore you should burn down a hotel with people in it" is exactly the kind of speech you would prefer not to protect, but need to if you want as strong a free speech culture as the US is trying to produce.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
There is an important practical difference between "My opponent won using dirty tricks" and "My opponent won by breaking the law and/or tampering with ballots" which is that, given the laws and traditions of western democracy, one is a sore loser whining and the other is an implicit call to overturn the result. And frequently an explicit one - see 2000 in Florida (everyone), 2004 in Ohio (left-wing Democrats), 2016 (Jill Stein and a few fringe left-wing Democrats), or 2020 (Trump).
Hilary's explicit claim is "Russia hacked and wikileaked the Podesta e-mails with the intention of helping Trump beat me" (almost certainly true) and that this meaningfully affected the results (almost certainly false). It is the same type of claim as "Twitter and the Deep State tried to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and this meaningfully affected the result in 2020" (false, because the suppression did not succeed, but this was not for want of trying), not "Dominion, Smartmatic and GOPe election officials conspired to report results that didn't match the votes cast"
Being a modestly talented politician, Hilary is able to make the less explosive claim while darkly hinting to her crazier supporters that she secretly believes the more explosive one (that Russia hacked voting machines or otherwise corrupted the tabulation of the election). But she carefully avoids making it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Nowhere in the article you link does Hilary claim either of the things I said she didn't claim. I agree she is throwing shade on the election in a way which is irresponsible, but she carefully doesn't say that the votes were tabulated incorrectly or that the law was violated.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Russiagate wasn't election denial - the leading Democrats and Deep Staters pushing it didn't deny that Trump in 2016 had won a plurality of the popular vote in states representing an majority of the Electoral College, or that Trump was the lawfully elected President. (There were some more fringy figures like Jill Stein who tried to overturn the 2016 election, which goes back to @quiet_NaN's point that "not spamming frivolous allegations of election fraud" is somewhere where the pro-establishment left is better than either the anti-establishment left or the right).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Yep - Piggate was eminently survivable, and did more damage to the people pushing it than it did to Hameron. It was hilarious, but everyone including Corbyn knew that it was nothing more than that. The source was an unsourced allegation in a book by a bitter donor who hadn't received the peerage he thought he'd bought and paid for.
Brexit, on the other hand, was total political self-destruction.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.
It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.
Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.
Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.
That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little
This is directionally correct, but European football is unusual among sports in how much less true it is than elsewhere. Large European countries have multiple divisions of fully-professional football, all of which pay the players a living wage. England, for example, has: Premiership (20 clubs, make the big money you expect of pro athletes) EFL Championship (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is around £500k annually, which is more than newly promoted IB MD or Biglaw partner, but less than the average for those groups) EFL League One (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is north of £100k, with stars earning £200-300k and even benchwarmers getting in the upper-middle class range if they play outside London). EFL League Two (24 clubs, average salary around £50k which is comfortably middle-class) Nationwide Conference (24 clubs, not required to be fully professional by league rules but all currently are, salary figures not published but anecdotally most are in the £20-30k range except for a few stars). Plus a few fully-professional clubs, or individual star players with pro contracts at semi-professional clubs, in the lower leagues.
Rosters are 25 per club plus youth players, so that represents a total of c. 3000 players making a full-time income as professional footballers. Essentially all of them are better off (relative to overall lower wages in the UK) than minor league baseball players.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I made a mistake - it was Rubio and not Hegseth. I found it on Lawfare Media. Googling gives many examples of MSM coverage such as this in Politico, although I note that most of the MSM articles don't use quotes, so it is possibly a paraphrase.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
The stereotypical Indian in America isn't a middleman minority - they are a H1B computer programmer.
The stereotypical Indian in the UK is doing some mid-level professional job - pharmacy, accountancy, IT etc.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
even she would not permit Somalis to settle in her state
It is not quite as bad as misspelling a spelling flame, but I think people alleging retardation in their political opponents have a special responsibility to double-check their grammar.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
And Clausewitz wrote a book saying that "War is the continuation of policy by other means". I think Clausewitz is right and Hegseth is wrong.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:
- What is the appropriate level of force to be used when interdicting drug smuggling outside US waters? Or to be pithy, is the War on Drugs a real war like World War 2, or is it a metaphorical war like the War on Poverty?
- Who decides? Is this an inherent Article 2 power of the President, or is it subject to Congress' power to declare war and to regulate land and naval forces?
- Does all this form part of a cunning plan on the part of the Trump administration to start a war against Venezuela?
For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:
- It is a real war.
- Congress decided by passing the AUMF
- It was part of a cunning plan to start a war with Iraq. The Deep State and pro-establishment Democrats were in on the plan alongside the Bush administration. It turned out to be a pretty poor plan.
After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".
But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
This is, in substance, the unrestricted submarine warfare debate.
If a surface warship has found an unescorted enemy merchantman, or driven the escorts off a convoy, it is in sufficient control of the situation that it can reasonably be expected to hail the target, board it, seize the ship, the cargo, or both, and take crew prisoner if necessary. (Warships carry much larger crews than merchant ships). If the merchantman doesn't respond to a hail and gets fired on, the warship is able to rescue survivors and either seize the cargo or allow it to go down with the crippled ship - including if necessary by using a deck gun to pound the crippled ship into flotsam after the crew have successfully evacuated.
If a submarine finds an unescorted enemy merchantman, it could in principle offer the same courtesy (and occasionally in WW1 this actually happened - WW1-era torpedoes were unreliable and you didn't have many of them, so allowing the crew to evacuate and then sinking the ship with the deck gun was the way to go). But obviously the sub doesn't have the ability to seize cargo or take survivors on board in the way a surface ship would so the crew are left drifting in a lifeboat.
But more realistically, the submarine normally has a sound military reason for hitting and running - either the aim is to torpedo a merchant ship in a convoy without being spotted by the escorting destroyer, or to attack an unescorted merchant ship in an area where enemy destroyers are operating so you want to get away fast before one shows up. So in practice, when you use submarines to interdict enemy merchant shipping (which was the main use case for submarines in both world wars) you are sending merchant ships to the bottom with all hands on board. Given the customs of the sea that would later be institutionalised in the 2nd GC, the vast majority of sailors (including plenty of uncucked naval officers) saw unrestricted submarine warfare as per se perfidious and/or piratical. British Admiral Arthur Wilson favoured hanging submariners as pirates, leading to a backlash and ultimately to British submarines proudly flying the Jolly Rodger - the most recent example being HMS Conqueror when it returned to port after sinking the Belgrano in the Falklands War. Ultimately, the world's navies decided that USW was too militarily useful to be illegal, and Donitz was acquitted on that charge at Nuremberg.
Using small drones operated from a safe distance is more like submarine warfare than surface warfare - you don't have the resources to do things the old-school way so if you want to effectively interdict the commerce in illegal narcotics, you have to be willing to send boats to the bottom with all hands. A surface navy or coast guard officer who sank a boat with all hands "to send a message" when he was on the scene and able to board would be considered a moral monster by everyone who has ever set sail - and doubly so if he took a second shot on a crippled boat to make sure it sank without rescuing the crew. This is quite apart from any criminal liability under the UCMJ or 2nd GC - naval law implements sailors' understanding of morality.
Here we have a case where the US has admitted that they could have interdicted the drug boats the old school way with a surface warship, but chose to use drones. Hegseth said that the point was to use lethal force which wasn't strictly necessary "to send a message", which, regardless of legal technicalities, is evilmaxxing for the evulz from the perspective of maritime custom and tradition. If Hegseth is bullshitting and the real motivation is to interdict more boats with less resources, then this is in the territory of "is USW militarily necessary in a way which overrides sailors' gut feeling that it is piratical?"
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
And, in England, the same sort of people objected to Poles. Are they Schroedinger's White too?
"Whiteness" is basically irrelevant to the National Question in the UK. "I'm not racist - I don't like any foreigners" and "The wogs begin at Calais" are cliched-because-accurate descriptions of how the typical working class Reform voter thinks about it. Some people support Polish immigration because they are well-behaved and culturally Christian, some people oppose it because they are foreign.
Historically, the niggers of the UK were the Irish, not blacks.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
There are some black groups which number among the same. This isn't a straight race thing- south Asians rub a lot of people the wrong way.
In the UK immigrants from Christian Africa who came in via selective routes (like Kemi Badenoch) and Indians (like Rishi Sunak) are the leading candidates for model minorities. I don't know why anti-Indian racism is so much easier to run with in the US than the UK - my guesses would be some combination of religion (Christianity is a bigger part of your national identity than ours) and the first wave of Indian immigrants in the UK being people who had collaborated with the British Empire.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Yes - the claim that the vessels are "unflagged" being made by supporters of the "effectively pirates, so okay to dronekill" line of reasoning seems to me to be conflating two ideas:
- The vessels were not displaying an ensign, visible from a distance, while making the crossing from Venezuela to Trinidad - they don't have to.
- The vessels did not comply with the registration formalities in their home country - which wouldn't make then legally pirates per se (because the drug war isn't a real war and drug smuggling isn't fighting) but would bolster the case that they were unlawful combatants.
The drone strike was carried out from a distance where the drone operator wouldn't have known whether the boats in question where displaying their name and port of registry - I don't know the details of the regs but when I was a sailor I did know that if you could read the name on a big ship you were too close. I would be very surprised if the US authorities knew or cared whether the boats in question were properly registered in Venezuela.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?
The administration has said it could have done this, but chose to dronekill from a safe distance without haling the boats in order to make a point.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
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).
As you hint at in your last sentence, the AUMF is the critical distinction. When the Obama administration dronekilled people it was (at least nominally) attacking allies of the guys who did 9-11, as was explicitly authorised by Congress. Both the GW Bush and Obama administrations claimed (correctly) that citizenship is irrelevant to the US's ability to kill wartime enemies on the battleground, and (probably correctly) that the President had broad discretion under Article 2 and the AUMF to decide who was an enemy and where (except US territory) was a battleground. When the Trump administration dronekills Tren de Aragua drug traffickers, he only has his inherent article 2 authority. In non-lawyer's terms, it is the difference between ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in wartime, and ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in peacetime.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
hostis humani generis
Drug smugglers are not hostis humani generis. Perhaps they should be, and unless the international legal position is changed by treaty, making it US policy that they are falls within the Article 1 power of Congress to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations" - it isn't something the President can do by proclamation.
The Trump administration has accused Tren de Aragua of various violent crimes committed on land, and argues that their encouraging illegal crossings of the Mexico/US land border is legally an invasion, but as far as I am aware they have not accused them of anything that would be piracy as a matter of US or international law.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
At the time (pre tar sands and fracking), the US was securing an orderly global oil market with plentiful supply, something that as a matter of domestic politics benefitted you more than anyone else, even if as a matter of economic logic the EU benefitted more than the US as a larger net oil importer. Retail gasoline prices are ultra-sensitive politically in the US, and vary directly with world oil prices in a way which European prices don't because most of the cost is a per-litre tax.
Now the US is a net oil exporter, the US benefits economically from high world crude prices, but the US government probably still loses politically because voters care more about pump prices than they do about oil company profits or oil industry jobs. (Various people have said that the Biden administration was trying to mitigate any upward pressure on oil prices from the Ukraine war because of the US domestic political consequences, despite this working against his climate policy, his foreign policy, and objective US economic interests). In addition, the US benefits geopolitically from the world being a place where the easiest way to get oil is to trade US dollars for it in a liquid market.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
But if they are then they are both non-uniformed and operating flagless vessels in international waters,
There is no requirement for merchant seamen to wear uniforms, or for merchant ships to fly their flags in international waters (unless asked to by a warship of any nationality). For the crews of the drug boats to be unlawful combatants, they have to be fighting out of uniform. Otherwise "they are members of TdA and therefore Venezuelan irregulars" (which I agree is probably the Trump admin's position) would make them combatants currently not fighting - which means the people (but not the boat) would be valid military targets, but subject to GC protections (including against continued attack after being shipwrecked)*
The legal position that makes the boat a military target is that the drug war is a real war which triggers Article 2 war powers and the international law of armed conflict, and that shipping drugs is a belligerent act. And indeed that shipping drugs from Venezuela to Trinidad is a belligerent act against the United States based on the ultimate destination of the drugs. The only people who have historically taken that position as regards shipments of weapons were supporters of unrestricted submarine warfare in WW1 and WW2.
* The distinction the Geneva Conventions make between combatants not currently fighting and combatants rendered hors-de-combat (sick, wounded, surrendered, shipwrecked), while clear as a matter of the current international law in force, doesn't quite make sense in the context of off-battlefield drone strikes. The fact that you can legally (subject to normal considerations about proportionality of collateral damage) drone-kill an off-duty enemy soldier in his bed at home, but not in his hospital bed, doesn't really serve a logical purpose. The fact that you can legally drone-sink a civilian boat (again subject to proportionality) in order to kill the off-duty enemy combatant passengers, but not finish them off once they are in the water, is producing mildly absurd results in the instant case.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
is a whole different question though.
And one with a well-known answer. Merchant seamen are civilians, even if they are transporting contraband. Hence the theory that the drugs and not the people were the legally relevant target - if the drug war was a real war, the drugs would be a legitimate military target and the sailors would be acceptable collateral damage but not a military target in their own right.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Yes. Common Article Two of the Geneva Conventions says that they apply to all wars whether declared or not, providing both parties are signatories or the fighting is happening on the territory of a signatory.
Assuming TdA are Venezuelan irregulars (as implied by Trump's March 15th proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act), this is an undeclared war between the US and Venezuela as a matter of international law the Geneva Conventions apply.
Is there an allegation that
Given the known context, it reads like a claim that "history will discover" that Trump was a Russian-backed Manchurian candidate.
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