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.
6d 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.
7d 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.
7d 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.
7d 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.
7d 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.
7d 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.
8d 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.
8d 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.
8d 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.
8d 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.
8d 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.
8d ago
· Edited 8d 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.
8d 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.
9d 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.
9d ago
Correct.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d 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.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
And not viewable in the UK for legal reasons, which is itself an example of another possible bad future.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
For example, your investment banker friend says he works 9am to 1am every day. OK. Firstly, he’s not in at 9. You could walk through any bulge bracket investment banking floor at 9.05am and not even 20% of juniors would be in.
Or, during periods where "in at 9" is being enforced, turns up, has a quick chat with the VP checking up on juniors being in at 9, and then goes to the onsite gym until there is likely to be work to do.
Note that this is for IBD. The average front office junior in trading is working something more like 7-5 with little or no downtime.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
The "tech bros" who have become an acceptable target for MSM derision are the young men going into software engineering because it promises the most legible route into the upper-middle-class for a smart, hard-working young man from a middle-class background. The same kind of men went into finance in the 1980's and corporate middle management in the 1960's (a period mostly referred to by cultural commentators as "the Fifties"). Some of these guys get lucky and end up as founders, a lot of them end up as Seniors at FAANG grinding out an upper-middle class income in order to enjoy a quite ordinary middle-class lifestyle in a HCOL city.
There is nothing inverse about the snobbery people failing out of a class express against the people trying to rise into it. And given what has happened to media business models since the rise of the internet, pursuing a career as a journalist is one of the easiest ways to fail out of the upper-middle-class.
The Fifties corporate man (note that the ad agents of Mad Men did not work in corporate middle management - their clients did. The Mad Men are the trailblazers the yuppies would follow), the 80's yuppie, and the 00's techbro are all hated by the same kind of people for the same reason - they are chasing money and status at the expense of self-actualisation, and doing so in the way that was boring and conventional at the time.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
When did it become possible to get good French or Italian food in major US cities that were not NYC? My father (born 1952) grew up in an upper-middle class family in London and says he was never aware of a time when you couldn't get decent French food if you could afford it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Emirates regulars in my social circle say London-Dubai is fine in economy because most of the passengers you don't want to be around are connecting between places that are not London. London-Dubai-New Delhi is a different matter.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Modern coffee culture appears in the west coast in the 1970's. Although espresso-based coffee drinks existed in the 1950's (Gaggia introduced the first commercial high-pressure espresso machine in 1947) your average rich American wouldn't have been able to find them without making a special trip to Little Italy.
Faster worldwide diffusion of good ideas is a big part of the progress we have made as a species since the 1950's.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Why the difference between 2003 and today, why Iraq war had to be prepared by two years diplomatic and propaganda offensive, while now the orange man points with his mighty finger on map, says "bomb this" and everyone is fine with it?
I don't think everyone is fine with it - the usual anti-Trump forces both inside and outside the US are responding with outrage calibrated to the fact that this is a shitpost and not an actual announcement of a no-fly zone. But the marginal Trump supporter either ignored it or responded along the lines of "Obvious shitpost - lol TDS if you care about it"
Also Bush needed to the diplomatic prep for Iraq because he wanted the largest coalition he could get, notably including Tony Blair, whereas for Trump attacking Venezuela the whole point would be do to it unilaterally as a way of reminding your allies that you don't need them.
My gut feeling is that if Trump does indeed announce a real no-fly zone over Venezuela, and then sends US planes to Venezuela to shoot down civilian airliners violating said no-fly zone, his domestic political support will collapse rapidly. The absence of Trump-sympathetic voices saying "don't attack Venezuela" (compared to the number of Trump-sympathetic voices saying things like "release the Epstein files" or "be more careful with tariffs") is evidence that my gut feeling is wrong.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
· Edited 9d ago
Ignoring the merits, which other people who know more about than me are debating in the rest of the thread, I think the key point is that this is probably a shitpost. When Trump announces a substantive policy change on social media, it is normally followed up with an official announcement on the White House website within 24 hours or so. In this case, probably an executive order to the National Archives or some other record-keeping office to identify and publish the list of Autopenned Biden admin acts that were considered invalid.
There seems to be a shitposting escalation in the last few days. This is one of the biggest "announcing something that would be a substantive policy if real but not actually doing it" shitposts to date, but the other one is even bigger - the announcement on Truth Social of a no-fly zone over Venezula. This would be, if serious, a literal declaration of war under international law. But it was not serious - US airlines already stopped flying in Venezuelan airspace a week ago after an FAA announcement that it was not safe, and Latin American airlines are still operating flights to and from Caracas as scheduled. I do not think Trump has purported to declare war (as opposed to threatening it) by shitpost yet.
The online TDS crowd are moving towards a consensus around "Trump's shitposting habit is getting worse due to a combination of age-related decline and stress-driven crackup". I think this is plausible, but wouldn't bet on it - assuming my political opponents are sane until proven otherwise is a useful intellectual discipline. The best explanation under this constraint is that the shitposts are trial balloons for various escalations. In that case it doesn't look good - the lack of outrage from fence-sitting Republicans (not MTG, but the people who might be the next MTG) makes a US attack on Venezuela more likely.
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.
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