MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13hr ago
To the extent that more expensive lawyers are actually better at winning cases, it reduces the role of raw monetary advantage in deciding who wins.
Loser pays doesn't prevent lawyers representing poor clients with strong cases working on contingency - in fact loser pays is complementary with contingency fees (called "conditional fees" in England) because the contingency only needs to cover the "uplift" over a regular fee to compensate the lawyer for the risk of not getting paid, whereas US-style contingency fees need to cover (in expectation) both the basic fee and the uplift.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
And this is the point of the "First Island Chain" logic.
If the anti-China coalition controls Taiwan, then they can maintain an effective blockade of China using mostly land-based aircraft operating out of bases in Japan (and its islands), Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysian Borneo. If China controls Taiwan, then maintaining the blockade means either bringing US carriers within range of Chinese land-based aircraft operating out of Taiwan, or engaging Chinese short-range fighters with American long-range fighters. Both of these are generally believed to be insta-lose conditions against a peer competitor.
China appears to be building a blue-water navy. This only makes strategic sense if they can break out into the Pacific beyond the First Island Chain, which either means they plan to take Taiwan, or that they know something we don't and think they can run a blockade.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
(state governments as proxies for)
general principle of self-governance
This matters - in no Confederate state did the pro-secession majority of whites represent a majority of the whole population. The Confederate states were (in most cases explicitly) seceding in order to prevent self-governance by numerical majorities of their multiracial populations.
You can argue that secession was legal based on respect for actual existing sovereignty, but that gets you into the obscure historico-legal argument about the de jure division of sovereignty between the Feds and the States and whether the 1789 Constitution was intended to be irrevocable.
To justify Southern slavery at all, you need to start with a position of "No Good, only Law" which means you are arguing about what rights the South did have under the Constitution, not what rights they should have had. The only rights the southern slavers should have had under the general principles we believe in in 2025 were the right to a fair trial and the right to execution by long-drop hanging or some other civilised method.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15hr ago
The interaction between historical preservation and disabled accessibility is particularly problematic. There are a lot of buildings where the options boil down to "stay in the lane that allows you to be grandfathered out of disabled accessibility" and "abandon the building and the lot it stands on because it is too historical to refit or demolish".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16hr ago
I wouldn't say the US forced him to abdicate - he was couped in the 1970's by his Prime Minister. But if the question is "why did the US not put Zahir Shah on the throne as part of their policy of building not-the-Taliban?" then per Wikipedia the answer is that Pakistan vetoed it. That the US deep state still (wrongly) considered Pakistan an ally who might have a better sense of Afghan politics than they did was obvious if you were paying attention in the noughties.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Is it? The US spent two trillion dollars trying to spread liberalism to Afghanistan.
That is how they justified it to themselves. But what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan was spending two trillion dollars to (unsuccessfully) spread not-the-Taliban, in order to punish the Taliban for harbouring Osama Bin Laden pre-9/11. The not-the-Taliban the US spread included a bit of liberalism, but rather more drug dealing, bacha bazi, Pashtunwali, and stealing of US aid money. This was not a problem, except for the Afghans, who quite sensibly brought back the Taliban at the first reasonable opportunity.
I remember the pre-9/11 days when the treatment of Afghan women under the Taliban was a big deal (a fake petition against it was the first big viral fake e-mail) among Blue Tribers who wrongly considered themselves to be elites (undergraduates at top universities and suchlike), while the actual Blue Tribe elites of the US Deep State was turning a blind eye because friends of friends of the Taliban were on our side against Iran. Counterfactual (but obviously true) premise: The US would not have bombed Afghanistan without a 9/11-scale Al-Qaeda outrage. Conclusion: The US did not bomb Afghanistan for feminism.
The US power elite remains entirely comfortable with the treatment of women, gays, and journalists in Saudi Arabia for crissake. Because the al-Saud keep the oil flowing and hand out the DC largesse on a grand scale.
Countries without American racial politics also eschew judicial corporal punishment of adults. Although a number of backward former British colonies still have caning on the books, Singapore appears to be the only non-Islamic country that actually does it on a regular basis. For whatever reason, the taboo against judicial corporal punishment is stronger than the taboo against the death penalty.
If I had to guess, it would be some combination of:
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