TheDemonRazgriz
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User ID: 3577
TheDemonRazgriz
1d ago
Appreciate the thoughtful response -- I don't think we actually disagree very much here.
I'm pretty sure that if the ship still has significant ability to fight despite it's disability, a belligerent would be permitted, under the rules of war, to continue attacking the ship until it no longer poses a threat. Even if the continued attacks will inevitably result in crew deaths.
Agreed. I was using "disabled" to mean "firmly out of action", i.e. removed from combat and neutralized as a threat. So:
If this is your claim, that it's a war crime to specifically attack the survivors of a ship that is disabled and sinking, then this is a more defensible position.
The ship literally sinking is not necessarily part of my claim, it could be dead in the water, but I agree that if the enemy ship is still moving or shooting it is plainly a legitimate target. I would phrase my claim as "it is a war crime to intentionally attack the surviving crew of a ship which has been neutralized or sunk."
Can you please provide a specific cite to the provision of international law which you believe applies here?
I am not a lawyer and at best an armchair historian, but yes, I was able to find this portion of the Geneva Conventions, which should at least be illustrative: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-12/commentary/2017. This comes from the 1949 version of the Conventions; I believe that there is some similar provision in older versions or in some other older treaty, I think from the Hague in 1899, but I couldn't immediately find a source for that. It is considered applicable today, in any case. I also believe there are similar provisions in some other treaties (e.g. UNCLOS) but again I think the Geneva Conventions are illustrative enough on their own (also, if memory serves, the USA is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions but not of UNCLOS anyway). I am fairly confident that what is formalized in the Geneva Conventions was considered the proper way of doing things by custom for a long time, but I admittedly don't have a source at hand for that, it's just from my vaguely recollected history knowledge. Regardless, the historical aspect is only tangential to what is being discussed here.
Anyway. The relevant portion is the discussion of "wounded, sick, and shipwrecked" combatants, under Article 12. The set of [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] is used throughout the convention as a coherent category, and in short the point of the convention is that [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] enemy personnel should be rescued as POWs and given medical attention, to the best of the ability of the prisoner-taking side, and generally treated as required by all other protections for POWs. This is all pretty clear and straightforward, so what is at issue here is who counts as "shipwrecked". This is defined as follows:
“shipwrecked” means persons, … who are in peril at sea or in other waters as a result of misfortune affecting them or the vessel or aircraft carrying them and who refrain from any act of hostility
Further:
A person does not need to be in an acutely life- or health-threatening situation to be ‘shipwrecked’ for the purposes of Article 12. Persons who find themselves involuntarily in the water or on board a burning ship are covered.
And:
Persons on a fully disabled ship, or a ship that has run aground, whose situation is dangerous but not necessarily imminently life-threatening, are also covered, as long as they also refrain from any act of hostility
So, this quite directly supports my claim. If a US Navy officer ordered a follow-up strike on a neutralized ship in order to kill its crew, that would indeed be a war crime. Crucially, for the act to be criminal, the victorious party must knowingly fire on a disabled ship, and that's what's really at issue in the present case. The Geneva Convention discusses repeatedly that it is important for the defeated crew to be "refraining from hostilities", which generally seems to be interpreted as not firing (not remotely at issue here) and not maneuvering or otherwise attempting to complete a mission. This is what I was trying to get at in my first post. If the Navy simply fired two missiles at the boat, one after the other, that clearly would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, believed it to still be operational, then fired again to sink it, this would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, confirmed through surveillance that it was disabled but had survivors, then fired again to finish off the crew, this would be a war crime.
You dismiss the second case as "pretty unlikely", but that is exactly what the Navy/DoD is being accused of doing, which is why it is being treated as a Big Deal. In previous strikes on drug boats the Navy has released very clear targeting footage from drones and other aircraft showing the weapon impacts and aftermath, so it's unrealistic to think that they outright could not see the boat. In the absence of any released targeting footage it is impossible for the public to determine conclusively whether a war crime was committed. All we know for a fact is that two missiles were fired at the boat. If targeting footage shows two swift impacts that would plainly disprove a war crime. If targeting footage shows an impact, then a clear view of a burning boat with crew either on the deck or in the water, then another impact, that would prove a war crime, or at least would be very strong evidence. They would have to somehow prove that the second shot was fired without knowing that the boat was disabled and/or without knowing there were surviving crew members.
They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.
That’s true, but I don’t think it would’ve been considered “proper” conduct. They might sink a pirate ship and leave without making a rescue attempt but I don’t think they’d finish off survivors. And it would be more a case of “nobody is going to miss them anyway” rather than active policy. Certainly many pirates were captured from sunk/defeated ships, then tried and jailed/whipped/executed according to the law. Admittedly I got a bit carried away with the historical analogies, I have some knowledge but I’m far from an expert and it’s not a perfect parallel to the issue at hand anyway.
Part of the (legal) problem is that the anti-drug operation is being justified in no small part by declaring the smugglers to be irregular combatants (narco-terrorists) affiliated with the Venezuelan government. If they are merely ordinary drug smugglers then the Navy should not be sinking their boats at all, per US law, and doing so would be criminal. But if they are combatants then the strike would be a war crime. There’s no version of modern law where killing the survivors after destroying the boat is legal/acceptable conduct.
Edit: @KMC as well
TheDemonRazgriz
2d ago
You are very right, thanks for adding that. It’s a similar path of Chinese pharmaceuticals -> drug gangs with labs -> smuggled across the land border. The “essentially all through Mexico” theory is a few years out of date; I don’t know how much of that is actual change on the ground and how much is just increased awareness of northern-border drug running. I do think the majority is still assumed to be coming from Mexico but the Canadian side is very much not negligible.
TheDemonRazgriz
2d ago
(It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).
As far as I know, the consensus view is that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl on US streets takes the following route:
- Precursor/component chemicals are produced in China by pharmaceutical companies.
- These components are shipped from China to Mexico. Some of this is smuggled in (e.g. triad-to-cartel B2B relationships), some is legally shipped and acquired by cartels later. The Chinese government may or may not be facilitating this process.
- The actual fentanyl is produced by the Mexican cartels, in drug labs throughout Mexico.
- Fentanyl is smuggled into the US over the land border. The potency of fentanyl means tiny volumes comprise many doses so this is not very hard to get away with on a useful scale, much easier than basically any other drug.
- Once in the US, the fentanyl is distributed around the country through traditional criminal channels until it eventually reaches the street-level dealers.
Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
Simply firing two missiles at the boat would not be a war crime (well, there’s an argument to be made that these operations in general constitute extrajudicial executions more than warfare, I personally have mixed thoughts about it, but obviously for this discussion we’re assuming the combat itself is legitimate). The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off. This is unambiguously a war crime today and has always been considered egregious misconduct. Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.
The concept is the same as how you don’t shoot at a pilot who has ejected from a shot-down plane, and is therefore no longer part of the battle. If you kill him in the process of shooting him down, c’est la vie, but if he bails out and you circle back to blow him away on his parachute, that’s beyond the pale.
TheDemonRazgriz
3d ago
As an aside, this is the biggest source of my AI skepticism. AI will not be able to be useful at scale unless it is truly reliable, which the current state of the art emphatically is not. The problem is not merely that it can fail to complete a task, but that it confidently pretends to have succeeded. In fact the models do not seem to be capable of differentiating on their own between success and pretend-success. This puts a hard limit on what kind of tasks they can perform and at what scale. People like to talk about working with an LLM assistant as like having a fast-working junior employee always at your beck and call (you can offload your tasks but you’ll need to check its work), but for most applications it seems more like having a dodgy outsourcing firm on-call. Not only do you have to check its work, its errors are bizarre and can be deeply hidden, and it will always project total confidence whether the results are perfect or nonexistent.
The lack of progress on this front by any of the major LLM companies makes me think it’s going to take a fairly significant breakthrough to fix, not merely “moar compute,” which makes the aggressive push for AI-everything seem… premature, shall we say. Certainly it does not seem to me that AGI is just around the corner.
TheDemonRazgriz
13d ago
I seriously doubt the average woman who signs up for military service anywhere in the world normally does so at the age of 18
What? Why? At least in the US the large majority of people who enlist do so directly out of high school, or shortly after, so age 18 or 19. What intuition is leading you away from those ages?
Flaunting his flouting?
TheDemonRazgriz
22d ago
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have.
This, in my opinion, is the largest problem facing the modern US public education system: total collapse of standards for the lowest levels (and that level seems to be creeping ever higher over time). The compounding effect of a kid being passed ahead without learning the previous year’s curriculum is ruinous. On top of the direct problems of incapacity, it teaches kids that actually learning things in school doesn’t matter and so there’s no need to try, while also simultaneously teaching the more studious kids that any setback is a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (because if no one ever gets a C on anything then it must be really unforgivably bad). Similar problems with discipline/behavior only compound the issue further.
For example, you may have heard of the “Mississippi miracle”, where Mississippi public schools have gone from rock-bottom for reading skills to top-10 in the country in a very short time (and one of the only states to show improvement at all), and without any significant spending increase. There are two reasons for this, and they’re excruciatingly simple: they changed to a “back to basics” reading-and-writing curriculum focused on core competency at young ages and without assuming the kids were reading or being read to at home; and they made it significantly easier for schools to hold back students who weren’t reading at grade level.
TheDemonRazgriz
28d ago
it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble.
Have you considered that you, too, are affected by a propaganda bubble?
Just a couple days ago there was an ICE raid at a car wash right down the street from where I live. They didn’t have a warrant to enter the building so they simply arrested all the employees who happened to be outside at the time (which is to say, the ones who were drying and vacuuming cars). Many of those arrested said they had legal work permits in their lockers inside, but they were not allowed to retrieve them. In fact the owner insists that ALL of the employees had proper work permits and has been pretty furious to the local media. (For what it’s worth I find this believable, because the car wash is a relatively bougie one for the area, the kind where people bring their nice new BMW— I don’t even always use it, even though it’s good, because it’s more expensive than the others nearby— and so I honestly don’t think the owners are short-changing the workers, which is the primary motivation for hiring illegals.)
This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested! Trying to convince people this stuff isn’t happening (and it’s good that it is) is ridiculous an extremely ineffective messaging strategy.
I am not completely unsympathetic toward ICE, I don’t want to see it abolished and I certainly acknowledge the reality of the problems we have with illegal immigration. Most people being deported very much deserve it, and I have limits on my sympathy even for the sympathetic cases. But the impunity being given to ICE is genuinely very bad, and raids like the one I’ve described (which very much ARE happening) are pretty much indefensible. If nothing else, people need to have the opportunity to show their papers if they’re being accused of not having papers! If the response to that is “well we can’t let them go get them because they might run, and we can’t escort them to their locker because we have no warrant to enter this building”, too bad, you should’ve thought of that before you started.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Fuentes has the most popular podcast, bar none. Yes, more popular than Rogan.
Wait, what? Do you have a source for that? I’ve never heard this before and I find it quite hard to believe.
I know several people in real life who listen to Joe Rogan at least occasionally. He’s a household name, or at least close to it. Most people have never even heard of Nick Fuentes, and if they have it’s as “some neo-nazi freak from the internet.” I know Fuentes has an audience but I would be outright shocked if he gets more listeners than Rogan, or the big true crime or news or sports podcasts.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
Have you seen the photo of the flag? This is a sincere question, because the article you linked doesn’t include the photo.
If you do, you’ll see that the “optical illusion” defense does not hold water. At all. The swastika is very obvious in the middle of the flag. It looks like something from an old comic book where Germany won WWII and took over America. The idea that a staffer would get that flag in the mail, open it up, hang it on the wall, and never see the swastika is ludicrous.
I am willing to extend some charity to the congressional staff involved here. I don’t think they were literally declaring an intent to Nazi-fy America, or pledging allegiance to a secret clone of Hitler, or whatever. I can easily imagine a scenario where they received the flag, thought it was a funny piece of hate-mail, and hung it on the wall in a comedic spirit, then forgot it was in frame for a zoom call. I can also easily believe that the congressman himself didn’t know about it. But I don’t for a second believe that nobody saw it, and the “optical illusion” statement is blatant ass-covering and honestly just silly.
TheDemonRazgriz
1mo ago
However, the biggest instance of joinmastodon.org is mastodon.social, which is left-wing and blacklists other instances that its admins don't like. Commentators often fail to explain this distinction, leading to confusion among onlookers.
Thanks for this, I’ve noticed my own confusion about this distinction occasionally when people were talking about Mastodon, but had never bothered looking into it. Makes much more sense now.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation
If you don’t mind my asking, how/why did these interactions happen? How high up in the office were you dealing with, or did you literally deal with him personally? Had you dealt with other secretaries of transportation?
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
You are pwned. You cannot unsee it. You can only feel rage and vow not to click on it.
This is an excellent way of putting it. Even worse is when the video topic is something I actually do want to see, and then I have to decide if it’s worth the dirty feeling of clicking on it…
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data
I recall seeing this once or twice in the wild from online-left types a while back, and it was tremendously funny to me, because if it were true that the mass protests didn’t cause a spike of covid cases, that would mean the lockdowns were totally pointless in the first place… which never seemed to be the point being made…
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I mean, how do you surprise your live in romantic partner with a political assassination? They really didn't see any signs?
I think it is entirely possible that Robinson had been mentioning that he wanted to kill Kirk for a while and the partner assumed he was just being edgy and joking around. This would be entirely consistent with the slightly weird text logs, where there’s (imo, at least) a clear tone of “oh god please tell me you didn’t actually go out and do this”, even as Robinson is talking about it in a tone that’s more like “lol obviously I did, why are you so surprised?”
By all accounts the partner started talking to the police/feds almost immediately after Robinson was identified/arrested and turned over the chat logs voluntarily. I suppose it is possible that the partner was involved and either regretted it or decided to play innocent, but that seems to require a lot of epicycles compared to the simple scenario where the partner knew Robinson hated Kirk, but didn’t know about the actual assassination plot. Any signs he may have given off would be much more readily explained at the time as “edgy jokes” than “literal murder plot”, until he went out and did it.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I disagree with this on baseline free-speech grounds. I think it’s gross and stupid to be publicly posting your glee that a pundit you dislike was killed, but unless you are in an exceptionally public-facing position (like a spokesperson, or an executive, or a government official), or you are actively harassing your coworkers, I don’t think that should have any bearing on your employment. The idea that doing things in poor taste should lead to any consequence worse than social shunning is, in my view, flatly toxic to society. Employers should not be making a judgment that something is intrinsically beyond the pale; the social role of Goodyear is to provide tires, not to act as referee about what is and isn’t acceptable in civil society.
If I found out that an engineer at my company had been fired because he posted “Charlie Kirk had it coming” on Twitter I would be extremely disappointed. Even more so if he was just making edgy jokes about it. As long as he’s not bringing it into the office and making people uncomfortable, I don’t see why my company should give a damn.
I'm happy if you cancel me for celebrating the intentional murder of a political figure. If the price of that was removing all other threat of cancellation, well I would be giddy with a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in 13 years.
If that was the tradeoff, I’d certainly agree with you. Unfortunately in reality this is not an option on the table. Perhaps an escalation of right-leaning cancel culture in a “your rules applied fairly” sort of way is needed, or at least inevitable, in order to get a de-escalation of cancel culture broadly, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
Huh. I think I remember that guy actually, but not the FLCL iconography. Thanks
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references
Wait, when did this happen?
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse
If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I agree it’s more likely than not, but I wouldn’t yet rule out the Democrats managing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I have seen some lefty friends and acquaintances calling him a “notorious transphobe” and similar. I have no idea how true this is, but there seems to be a perception among lefties (highly online ones at least) that he was a particularly virulent anti-trans figure and thus deserving of special hatred.
Honestly I doubt that he was any more anti-trans than any other vaguely right-wing figure, but that’s the perception I guess. Maybe because he was known for talking on college campuses and therefore getting into spaces where even mild pushback to trans talking points is normally forbidden? Or maybe he really did make a point of being aggressively anti-trans, again I don’t really know. But the “unique” accusation I’ve seen leveled at him is transphobia, not being pro-gun or pro-life or a Zionist or whatever.
I will say, if it turns out the shooter is trans, that’s going to be a whole new shitshow.
Under modern customs, irregular combatants are not considered total outlaws and are still expected to be treated properly as POWs. I'm not sure if this is explicitly codified in international law or in US military policy, but it is certainly the general case. For example, even when fighting Al Qaeda or the Taliban, coalition forces were not allowed to summarily execute surrendering enemies (which is essentially what the Navy is being accused of in this case). The clearest example of this is the case from a few years back where an Australian special operations unit was found to have executed a group of Taliban prisoners because they could not fit them into their helicopter. The fact that the Taliban troops were neither regular military nor civilians did not protect the Australian soldiers from prosecution.
This doesn't even get into the question of whether the drug runners should really be classed as "combatants" in the first place as opposed to merely "criminals". If they are properly classified as criminals then these strikes are summary executions (or arguably just murder), not legitimate combat, and would be illegal anyway... but that's not really what's at issue here.
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