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
4hr 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- this is 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 again 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).
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
13hr 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
13hr 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 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 were significant influences in the cultural-antibody process and many of which whom still keep their Communist-derived aesthetics.
Dean
Flairless
1d 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.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.
Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).
The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).
China is developing methods to target Starlink satellites
This one was funny.
'If we had a hundred militarized satelites in orbit with lasers and EMP we don't have, we could take less than 1500 satellites in 12 hours. Out of a satellite constellation expected to rise to over 42,000. Assuming there were no Americans anti-satellite systems trying to inhibit ours.'
Similarly, if you assume the enemy has no air defense capabilities, you can simulate a lot of bombing runs with your own airforce.
It was also a near-disaster: no reports of injuries, but (unconfirmed) reports of property damage from shrapnel, and aircraft having to do emergency diversions away from the hazard area, are not things that should ever be consequences of a launch failure.
...what? No- that's the standard precaution of a missile launch (or re-entry) failure. It's literally a 'something my fall through the air in this zipcode we already warned you about.' It's the physical consequence of things that are high up falling down, and the predictability of which is why airspace is routinely categorized with restrictions when missile tests and such are going on. Your 'emergency' diversion is just a standard precaution when different airspace needs overlap, same as how divergences of aircraft to specific airports (whether from mechanical or medical emergency) lead to redirections of aircraft intending to go there. This has literally been going on since the advent of space travel, where failures (and successes!) on the way up or back down leave bits to come back down.
Saying that shrapnel should fall through airspace or onto property as a consequence of orbital transition failure (going up or down) is either a demand that there should be no failure, or else a demand of inversion of physics (such as that things should not fall due to gravity).
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Indeed. Pan-Arabism was well towards dying at that point, but it's hard to find a better case of screwing over one's co-ethnic co-religionists for the sake of national interest.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
We'll see. There has been a lot of talk over the last year and a quarter of ceasefire / hostage release deals, and while I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas were to time a deal with the US presidential transition, I also don't believe that the American politics angle is the most relevant to either Hamas or its key foreign enablers, some of whom have more FU-feelings for the incoming Trump administration than the outgoing Biden administration.
In the nicest possible way, if you would like a discussion I would appreciate it if you made your point simply and clearly.
You give bad moral framing arguments that, if internalized, gets more people needlessly killed.
As a result, it is not a good defensive argument, since it does not defend (minimize costs to) recipients internalizing it, particularly in the context of the Hamas-Israel War.
Not intentionally. I didn't realise what you were getting at. Yes, obviously, if someone is defending you then you have to defend yourself against them, which may well mean killing them. It's unfortunate. I'm quite capable of feeling pity for the soldiers of an aggressor. And, yes, a little bit for actual Hamas terrorists, depending on exactly how vile they are - I remember the al Qaeda child suicide bombings and whoever set that up deserves to burn in hell. But I hate the insistence that because the Russians/Nazis/Napelonic forces are the enemy then they must be evil monsters with no soul.
There is no insistence that the enemy must be evil monsters with no soul.
The proximate argument regarding souls or lack thereof (lack of humanity) was one that was leveraged unliterally against one side of a conflict, and not even the conflict's aggressor.
I am not a combatant in a propaganda war, nor a lawyer.
You are the former, by virtue of adopting and propagating metaphors and paradigms that are part of the propaganda war. You may not be a witting propaganda war combatant, but this is both a purpose of propaganda and a mechanical means of how propaganda wars work.
I meant in Gaza,
The hatred within Gaza for the Israelis has little to do with the post-2023 conflict, far predating it, nor would it have reasonably been expected to decrease from its pre-2023 levels under the governance structure of the aggressors of the October 2023 conflict, who were initially met with significant public and political support both domestically and from many of their current-war-supporters on the success of the October 7 initiation.
Far more relevant factors of anti-Israeli sentiment in Gaza include the decades of ideological shaping, including religious, educational, information, youth-mobilization, and even refugee policies, that were constructed to build and sustain an ethnic conflict. These were factors which substantially contributed to not only the October 7 conflict which has seen a lot of Palestinians killed, but for the Gazan political acceptance of governors like Hamas preceeding it.
Whereas American geopolitical dominance is natural and snuggly, of course. In any case, you seem to be agreeing with me: the understood laws of moral responsibility were destroyed retroactively to justify what our new overlords wanted. All hail.
You would misunderstand the argument: 'our' new overlords did not retroactively destroy 'our' understood laws of moral responsibilities, the old-overlords were destroyed by the consequence of their self-justifying framing of moral responsibilities, which then led to their inability to continue brutally suppressing subjugated peoples around the globe and arbitrarily impose their model of moral responsibilities onto them.
The culture shock of WW1 and WW2 was that the Europeans were not, in fact, more civilized and moral than the rest of the world they justified imposing their empires and values upon on the basis of cultural and moral superiority. It was a great culture shock, but the trench warfare of WW1 and the industrialized slaughterhouses and eradication camps of WW2 were not the result of quote-unquote 'civilized' peoples, even as they were done by people who both prided themselves and considered each other civilized. It also broke the ability of the European empires to maintain control of their empires, and their increasing reliance on force itself seemed less and less the action of civilized cultures and more banal evils motivated by greed and pride cloaked in sovereignty.
The question of 'how do we never have a war of such scale in Europe again' became the defining political question in Europe for generations, and part of the eventual answer of what led to those tragedies was the role that a lack of moral responsibility- and thus moral duties- of those who not only acted in an immoral sovereign's name, but also those who supported and enabled the immoral sovereign. In order for there to be more duties / responsibilities, however, required the space for consequences for failure to meet those duties / responsibilities- consequences prohibited by prior understandings of sovereign immunity, and which were invoked and had been used to protect the perpetrators of the delusion-shattering world wars.
The sense of cultural superiority and thus appropriateness of normalization was not destroyed retroactively- it was destroyed contemporarily, repeatedly, by the European sovereigns themselves.
I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else.
I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.
The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.
As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.
Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.
This would be a great deal of wishful projection.
Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.
The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.
People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.
Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.
And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.
Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.
Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.
And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?
Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.
Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.
The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.
As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.
The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.
What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.
This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).
That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.
Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.
Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.
A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.
Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.
This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.
It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
I don’t want to treat women as having agency. They have far less than men.
And?
Having less of a thing does not mean you are lacking in the thing, let alone that you are so deficient in the thing that your possession of the thing should be disregarded.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
I remember that at least two, possibly three, of those were specifically articles of the same Guardian writer.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
(see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).
I am genuinely curious, since advice columns aren't my thing and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't even be looking for the right ones. Could you please provide what you would consider three archetypical examples from the era?
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Thank you for further demonstrating your habit of misrepresenting the position of others by insisting they make claims they have not made.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Thank you for further demonstrating the points of my previous posts for the audience.
You are arguing that USA is innocent by default of its warmongering because it chooses to not accept the sovereignty of international courts.
Alas, international courts do not have sovereignty.
I will submit that this attempt to reach for a trumping buzzword is demonstrative of why you do not understand the argument being presented, or even the nature of international law.
The reality is that obviously you want to support USA and Israel to commit any and all criminal actions and to oppose any valid criticism of such. While you also desire to promote one sided narrative as you have done towards other countries.
This would be incorrect. My want is to highlight that your position is not based on international law, but the sort of selective and increasingly emotional appeals to international law that see it so often misused as a geopolitical cudgel.
In a few posts you have-
-Mis-identified the legal international bodies taking actions
-Mis-identified the legal actions taken by international bodies
-Mis-identified the conclusions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal basis for international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal limits of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal responses to the actions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal implications of certain states not abiding by certain international bodies
-Mis-identified the provided legal basis of non-compliance with international bodies.
Upon correction, rather than even contest disputes by counter-citations, you have transitioned to ad hominem attacks that ignore the arguments provided.
This is not atypical of people with less interest in international law than in making strong claims about international law.
You seem to try to impose your own corrupt understanding on others. It isn't mine or anyone's idea but there is an objective criteria into which warcrimes, genocide, causing civil wars, can be defined and understood.
Except, of course, there are not objective criteria- hence why ICC claims jurisdiction over territory not a part of any ICC member despite the objective limitations of the ICC's jurisdictions under its own laws to its own members and their territory, and why the advocates of the case against Israel in the ICJ submitted alternative and broader definitions of genocide, rather than the older and more established forms.
Which is why textualism is so important for advocates of law. Acknowledging the limits of the law- what you deride as the loophole or innocence- is what protects against corrupt re-interpretations of law by taking items beyond their scope, or ignoring what is there.
By contrast, ignoring the text of what is or is not provided for in international law as convenient (or inconvenient) to advance your desires is the paradigm that leads to systemic abuse of the international law by powers that have more power to shape when and what sort of selective interpretations are advanced more often.
So, I would encourage those who care about the truth of the matter to not treat as even a tiny bit impartial what are essentially extreme 100% partisans for Globalist American Empire and Israel. Because they will always support their actions, no matter the consequences and what moral rule or laws they violate. When you break it down, they are completely against international rule of law but completely in favor of abusing the concept against their targets and for their supported regimes and their actions. And that is all there is to it.
My encouragement for the audience is to consider whether Belisarius is making a legal argument on the nature and nuances of laws, or an emotional appeal more motivated by their geopolitical hostilities.
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.
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