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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
1d 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.
2d 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.
2d 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.
2d 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.
2d 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.
2d 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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
If Trump is telling the truth about what is going on, the drugs in question are cocaine being smuggled overland from Colombia through Venezuela, and then by boat island-hopping across the Caribbean - most of the boats sunk were travelling from Venezuela to Trinidad, and they don't have the range to reach the US directly. The fentanyl comes in from Mexico across the land border. (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).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
The short answer is that housing markets have a failure mode where all the family homes have pensioner couples living in them, and all the two-bed flats have families with children living them.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
When I was a schoolboy, the slur for Down's syndrome kids was "mong", not "retard". "Mong" was also used to describe kids of normal intelligence who did something unconsionably dumb in a moment of weakness.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.
Consider for example the way the current President of the United States treated employees, contractors, lenders, wives etc. in his pre-political life, paying no meaningful price for it. "Hustle" (used upthread as a term for what high-trust societies don't do) is an American English word for behaviour that is as American as school shootings and trillion-dollar software companies (American old wives in my social circle blame PT Barnum). There was an American culture which told white boys from good families that hustling was beneath them. Now you can get >$10 billion in VC money for a company with the motto "Always be hustlin" (Ebonic spelling in the original).
Northern Europe (partially including the UK) was high-trust by default in a way which makes us quokkas when dealing with untrustworthy immigrants. America was high-trust by choice and effort (a British snarker would ask "why do you think they need so many lawyers?"), and it feels like you stopped trying starting at some time during the Clinton administration*. I don't know enough to know if the book about how it was done or how and when it stopped being done has been written, but I suspect Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage has a better idea than most.
* High trust is of course still the default in some closed or semi-closed social circles like individual small towns or the Silicon Valley elite. That doesn't mean society as a whole is high trust, but I suppose it is a big improvement on real low-trust families where only kin can form that kind of local trust network.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes
You can't build new urban places either - the City that Builds in 2025 is Austin, TX. The dynamic isn't urbanists vs suburbanites, it's builders vs blockers. And it is, unusually, Red State (builder) vs Blue State (blocker) political culture, not Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers. As far as I can see, Blue Tribers in Austin are making sure the new building happens in a Blue way, not trying to block it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
I don't think group pardons like the Carter Vietnam draft dodger pardons or the Trump Jan 6th pardons reflect a broken process - in both cases they reflect a system working as advertised, followed by a retroactive decision by the person with the authority to do so that it should not have done.
In neither case would the President (or a high-level advisor) spending time looking at each individual draft dodger or Jan 6th rioter have improved the process.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Correct.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
I suspect a family with kids with an income of $800k has a nanny, which would count as a full-time domestic servant under the rules used back in the day. In many cases the total hours of hired-in domestic services consumed by said family would be sufficient to support a full-time housekeeper if servants-as-a-service businesses were less widespread.
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.
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