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
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists.
The thing is, the legal line isn't where people think it is.
This goes into war powers, specifically the Congressional authorization of use of force against Al Qaeda, wherever it was, which included Yemen via AQAP, which is what those Yemeni-American Jihadists were a part of. Once the United States is in a legal state of armed conflict (colloquially 'war'), individuals start falling under various laws of wars and relevant precedents. The precedents applicable to American citizen joining, say, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, are the precedents established during WW2 with American citizens found serving in the Axis militaries. In Re Territo from WW2 is a relevant case.
The very short version of that is that the legal red line is 'Americans who take up arms against the United States on behalf of parties in conflict with the United States are considered belligerents of that other party, and do not get special exemptions from the normal rules governing conflict.' It is not a violation of constitutional rights to kill a belligerent fighting against the United States, even if that belligerent is an American citizen, any more than taking that belligerent prisoner and keeping them as a POW without an arrest.
The legal issue with hitting a Yemeni-American citizen in a drone strike in a conflict isn't the American citizenship, but the drone strike itself. The American citizenship is immaterial to whether the target is a belligerent- the issue is if you can take the drone strike against a belligerent in the first place.
Now, this doesn't mean that it was a good idea. I myself think it wasn't. But the issue is the awful, not the lawful.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
until Trump can get decimated in the midterms and they can send 100s of billions to Ukraine again,
For the record for everyone else, the National Defense Authorization Act that passed Congress under the Republican trifecta this week has $800 million earmarked for Ukraine military aid across the next two years.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Or, to return to the Clausewitzian classic- war is the extension of politics by other means.
There may well be a theoretical 'pure' war, that ultimate bottom to race to... but that theoretical is stupid, because getting to it requires various disregards of political and even physical considerations and limitations. Even North Korea, the most hyper-militarized country on earth, spends soldier time supporting the harvest, and engineering, and enough other things that after a point you realize the military is also a jobs program for the state.
This, in turn, leads to how politics works in a context of anarchy with no higher power or inherent limiting principle. Unsurprisingly, it leads to cooperation and agreements that often self-limit. These are often unstable agreements, but the reasons that people agree to self-limit, and often uphold such self-limitations, are legion and not exactly new or novel.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Many people are under the impression that deploying mines requires digging into the ground and placing them, but that is outdated. That was truer of older mines, but more modern mines are built to be dropped from air, and even shot out of canon artillery, because the speed is more important than trying to hide them.
If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.
There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.
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