Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
I just don't understand the difference between going out and taking a boat or taking, say, a plane.
There is no special legal immunity / inviolability for planes either. The reason states don't board planes in mid-air is because it's dangerous and murder / reckless endangerment is bad. If you could do so without killing everyone aboard or putting people at great risk, there is no special legal obstacle. This is seen most often when planes are directed to land so that law enforcement can get to someone identified in the plane.
Like ships, planes are subject to the national / sovereign jurisdictions of both [sovereign state they are in] and [the sovereign state of the owner]. When in the territorial space (air or on the ground) of a nation, they are subject to national authorities, which does include things like 'following air traffic controls' but also 'you can be inspected for smuggling or committing crimes.' They are also subject to the national regulations that apply to their owning interest, which also includes things like 'you will pay taxes for business you do elsewhere in the world' but also 'you are not allowed to smuggle or commit crimes.'
Let's call the [sovereign state of the owner] the first country. Let's call the [sovereign state they are in] the second country.
Where third countries come in is that other countries can have their own lists of crimes that people violate. And when someone does commit a crime against that third state, that state can seek access to the criminal party (or ship, or plane) through either the first country, or the second country.
Second countries have sovereign rights too, and that includes the right to cooperate with other states.
Like, could we send special forces to an airport in Brazil and have them fly out with a dozen Boeing jets and it's not an act of theft or war?
Why would it be an act of theft or war if it is in compliance with Brazilian and American law with the consent of the Brazilian authorities? Is Brazil declaring a war against itself if it receives the American request, considers its various interests, and then goes 'okay, sure?'
Now replace [boat/plane] with [person]. Kidnapping is a crime. Human trafficking is even a crime under international law. But does that mean an extradition for an arrest warrant in another country in accordance with an extradition treaty 'actually' a kidnapping and that extradition is illegal under international law?
[Theft] is not merely 'taking something'- it if it was, then giving gifts would be theft on the part of the recipient because they are taking something being offered. But [theft] is not merely 'involuntary taking of something'- that would allow anyone with an objection to object, whether they were the owner or not. It would also mean that a state is engaging in theft if it recovers stolen goods, or seizes contraband, or collects taxes over the objection of the dispossessed.
You need a bounded concept of [crime] in order to understand what would be a [not-crime].
Something like that would be legal?
Under whose legal jurisdiction would it be illegal?
Jurisdiction in international law requires one of three things: territoriality (it has to happen in your national territory), nationality (such as the victim being subject to your sovereignty), or the nature of the crime itself (such as your country being the victim).
Now apply this to the context of a ship at sea.
If the vessel is outside of territorial waters, there is no territoriality jurisdiction. International waters are owned by no one. There are degrees of territoriality for ships, such as economic zones versus territorial waters, but this is no different than nations having air defense identification zones that go beyond territorial airspace.
Nationality of the ship derives from the flagging of the ship, not the crew. When a ship takes on the flag of a nation, it is subject to the laws of that nation for not only tax and wage purposes (the part most companies care about), but also law enforcement purposes (the things that the flagging state can do / agree to let others do).
The nature of the crime generally requires you to be the victim. In international law, the primary victim of a ship boarding is the sovereign of the ship, and to a different degree the nationalities of the crew, but cargo is cargo. States can take their merchant disputes up in their own courts or other channels, but they have no sovereign standing over the sovereignty of the flagging nation of the ship carrying the cargo.
Now apply this to any given at-sea boarding.
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Is it done in the territorial waters of a sovereign state that refuses?
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Is it done against the sovereign assent of the nation that flagged the vessel?
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Is any other sovereign right being unduly violated?
If the answer too all of these is 'no,' there's little legal obstacle to a boarding. And even if the answer to some of these is 'yes,' it may still be a legal boarding, if there is other international law enabling it- see UN resolution law when the UN bans various exports like weapons proliferation and authorizes members to take actions to stop it.
Or do boats sit in a weird conceptual space?
International law is a weird conceptual space in and of itself. The anarchic nature of the international order means international law is very much 'if it is not forbidden, it is permitted,' when significant parts of the national legal order in most nations is 'if it is not permitted, it is forbidden.'
Unlike most legal contexts, there is no higher appeal authority or source of [international law]. The fundamental legal basis for all international law is the principle of national sovereignty allowing states to enter into agreements with other nations, including the international laws that restrain their own actions. Everything else- including international courts- derives from 'this is international law because a bunch of countries said it should apply to themselves.'
The flip side is that if the states themselves do not agree to establish a limit, there is no other authority establishing the limits. Even when they do agree, it generally does not apply to states that did not agree in some form. Even UN-law ultimately derives from the fact that the sovereign states agreed to join the UN, and in doing so conceded to letting the Security Council do things under the UN charter that says the Security Council can do things.
I genuinely don't understand and am not intending to sound like I'm taking a side here. I'm not intentionally doing the noncentral fallacy. I just want to understand the difference between this and stealing the crown jewels.
Again, you have to have a legal concept of what [theft] is, distinct from [non-theft].
Stealing is taking someone's property without permission or legal right. The authority who has that legal right depends on the sovereign legal jurisdiction. Sovereign jurisdiction at sea depends on the national flag on the ship. The national flag of the ship brings with it the national and international agreements of the state of that flag.
There is nothing legally special about [national crown jewels] where, if you placed them in the sovereign jurisdiction of another country, that other country could not handle them in accordance with its own laws and international agreements.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Young Taiwanese who enthusaistically identify as Taiwanese abroad as opposed to broad Chinese diaspora are nowadays volunteering themselves for PRC targeting. Those overseas police stations aren't just for monitoring 'Chinese of non-rebellious provinces.'
Taiwan's youth unemployment isn't great (about 12%), but it's not exceptional for the region either, and it's considerably better than China (about 20%). There may well be some 'the grass is always greener,' but 'our economy will be so much better if we join China!' would be more of a 'maybe China will hyper-subsidize the populace while installing the police state' as opposed to reverting to a higher median.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
No and no, assuming I am reading you asking only two questions.
The difference between law enforcement at sea and piracy is the nature of law enforcement versus theft. It's fine to claim taxation is theft, but most people will recognize there is in fact a difference.
In turn, countries don't attack objects in a political sense. States have relationships with political actors. War is the extension of politics by other means, and all that. There is no country being attacked if a [Country A] gives its sovereign ascent to [Country B] to board a ship that is / claims to be under the sovereign aegis of [Country A].
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Very publicly. You can google 'issues with American FMS' to get entire thinktank and policy reports on systemic issues that would be moritifying admissions from other states.
Again, the American failure state tends to be 'people go elsewhere rather than sign the deal' rather than 'the deal already signed falls through.' But a potential deal falling through before it is signed is what leads to, say, Turkey buying the Russian S-400 air defense system, because it wasn't getting traction for more NATO-compatible air defense systems, which in turn led to Turkey being suspended from the F-35 system, which is its own saga.
Or the purchase by Middle Eastern american allies of Chinese c-UAS systems, instead of American equivalents, since the US was prioritizing US and European ally orders over Arabs- an understandable choice on both ends, but American critics (when they can be found) will blame the US prioritization rather than the Arab need and urgency.
Or the current-year saga of various European, especially French, lobbying to lock the US out of the European arms market in the European rearmament spending. This is done with the rather popular, and not undeserved, line of argument that Trump-like Americans might suspend agreed-upon weapon deliveries to pressure European states into security concessions... because that is exactly what Trump did to the Ukrainians after the white house summit fracas, and what parts of the DoD tried to do (though that was a rogue administrative power play that got rolled back hard). A lot of Americans, let alone others, will place more blame on the American side than the Europeans, regardless of other arms trade frictions.
Or the displacement of the US by China as Pakistan's military aid patron. A quick google search suggests China now provides something like 80% of Pakistan's military imports. While there is a considerable number of Americans who view this as a 'good riddance' dynamic, when someone wants to criticize that sort of dynamic, it tends to be from the American-hypoagent 'Who Lost Pakistan?' as opposed to 'those Pakistanis are so unreasonable.'
Now, none of these may count as 'extremely embarrassing' to you. But that's a social framing that itself may indicate an implicit bias of sorts. It's not extremely embarrassing for the Americans criticizing other Americans for an arms deal failure, because they tend to come from a position of 'but if it had been us, we would have done differently and succeeded.'
And that can easily include 'well, we would have honored the original contract instead of trying to change it after the initial agreement was publicly signed,' if the non-American side claims that the deal fell through because of back-end meddling to change the contract.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Another variation is the kickback schemes to bribe someone to certify that you deserve the aid. So if the state has an inspector or certifying authority to sign off that you qualify, you give them part of the welfare to attest that you actually deserve it. So if the welfare check is 1000, you kick back X00 back to them so that you both profit.
This later form is easier to scale in an organized crime / corrupted institution way, such as with the recent Somali fraud ring in Minnesota. While the typical risk of scaling is a defection risk of someone wanting a bigger cut and bringing down the whole system, if you can use something like familial/social networks to coordinate, you can mitigate the defection risk and increase the scale of the corruption. All the more so if you can leverage political influence to deter local investigators.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
You and what occupational army?
The Americans were worn out by a decade trying to occupy a country of 30 million when they had the ability to walk in from friendly buildup areas at the outset. Occupying a country of 1,300 million is just a wee bit beyond the capacity of the modern United States, even without the literal and figurative fallout of a nuclear war.
You're more reversed the direction than not. If you want a mental model, think more status quo bias that is both anti-reunification and anti-independence.
In Taiwan, it's the older people who are more open to reunification in the sense of 'there might be a deal they'd accept without the threat of death and oppression as the alternative,' and the younger generation who have less familial/emotional attachment to the continent. This is why the KMT, the party descended from the nationalists opposed to the CCP, have increasingly become the 'pro-China' party- they still identify themselves as 'Chinese', whereas the rise of self-identification as 'Taiwanese' is coming from the youth cohort. This is also the cohort who have have had their formative exposure to China being things like the Hong Kong crackdown on what remained of the democracy there, and recognize that they would be on a similar receiving end if they joined the sinosphere. The two-system system was the potential compromise, and the CCP renenged on it.
The age dynamic, it's a similar dynamic to the Korean views of reunification. It's the older Koreans (and increasingly dead) who fought against the North who also had the memory of families on the other side of the partition. Younger Koreans have no such familial sentiment, and are more concerned with the bad effects a reunification could have on them, even if it was from the top.
The relevance of this back for Taiwan is that the youth aren't necessarily 'pro-independence.' Formal independence would credibly mean a war which would be bad for them. The status quo preference bias that works against reunification also works against formal independence. The status quo- which is neither independent or unified- is preferable, and they are open to politicians who maintain that.
Even as I sympathize with that general line of argument, Ghost of Kyiv is a poor example to use for that argument. It had about as much relevance in the Ukrainian media sphere of the time as the Iranian AI-claim of shooting down a skyscraper-sized F-35 had in the Iranian sphere during the 12 day war. It existed, people cheered (or jeered), but it wasn't the reason people involved felt the way they did, as opposed to the many other things going on at the time.
The reason it makes a bad example is because the presentation presents as if it was the cause of the Ukrainian faith. The opening days of the Russian invasion weren't exactly lacking in verifiable, faith-building reasons for the Ukrainians to believe 'Ukraine can do it' when the 'it' at the time was 'meaningfully fight back.' The Ukrainians crushed the Hostomel Airport air assault, the Bayraktar TB2 drones hunted Russian air defenses, Ukrainian volunteers were hunting Russian armor with anti-tank weapons in the forests, Ukrainian farmers dragging mud-dragged Russian equipment, and of course the many shoot-downs that did happen away were all much more influential in the Ukrainian media-sphere. The Russian and a fair deal of the global expectation at the time was that Ukraine was days from collapsing, the Ukrainians disagreed, and nearly four years later one side's belief that meaningful resistance was possible was vindicated.
I fully agree that such media stories helped motivate Ukrainians to believe that resistance was not futile and that others had their back and would risk alongside them. But that social perspective was far more because of things like the mixing of molotovs in the streets of kyiv, something that a large part of the country's political and social centers had direct visibility of, than the Ghost of Kyiv propaganda. Ghost of Kyiv was never load-bearing on the Ukrainian willingness to fight on the ground, and it wasn't exactly long before the video game origin was recognized and circulating.
Ghost of Kyiv's cultural impact was more of a western obsession. First in the 'we want it to be true' sort of the pro-Ukraine camp, but over time in the 'Ukraine is lying liars and we can't believe anything they say' anti-Ukraine camp, where it regularly emerges as a reason to dismiss Ukrainian success (they claimed the Ghost of Kyiv, and it was fake!) and to believe pro-Russian framings.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
It may be better to say the accusation of racism, and thus its ability to decide arguments over things like micro-aggressions which had to be defined below the level of 'typical' racism in the first place.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
The Europeans did not merely shoot themselves in the foot. The Europeans shot each other in the foot, femur, stomach, gut, chest, arms, hands, necks, and face, while some Europeans made a point of double-tapping the survivors. Some of the Europeans may have done so with often American ammunition, but that was ammunition they were desperately willing to buy to fight the Europeans who were doing so to them and who would also steal any salvagable organs and giblets if they won.
A much sounder argument for American agency and responsibility for destroying European industry primarily rests in providing the British and Soviets the ammo supplies more generally to shoot the Germans and Italians, rather than letting the British and Soviet war economies grind to a halt and be unable to fight for as long as they did. In turn, and especially for the Soviets, a Nazi victory over continental Europe would have meant... industrial-scale looting (and demographic slaughter) of the continental economies and industries through the typical state-looting policies, and an incompetent grand plan for German future prosperity that would have run the long-term industry into the ground as surely as communism did.
That the Americans took advantage of the European actions that destroyed the European states and empires does not mean the Americans had the agency, responsibility, or even the ability to stop them. Attributing their loss of industry to the Americans is a wrong claim of history.
Indeed I was not. I view it about as dimly/lacking in competence as I do the nuclear holocaust scenario. And you are correct in that I was referring to the occupational role alone.
I can absolutely model a nuclear exchange scenario between the US and China, but 'we're going to nuclear genocide 99% of the population and impose a new constitution like this is post-WW2 Japan and no one will resist it like Japan' is enough of a difference in starting positions that I felt it better to simply not to return to the topic.
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