Sunshine
3mo ago
There are lots of reasons to host a US base and loudly proclaim that you're their ally, especially if you're a tiny little oil-rich Middle Eastern country with neighbours who might covet that oil for themselves. There are even more reasons to give the US President a free airplane, if you can afford it and want to ingratiate yourself with him. Qatar literally only exists because of the rules-based international order backed up by US military power.
From my perspective, the fact that Qatar has already invested so heavily in the USA is all the more reason the USA can kick them around without consequence. If Qatar abandons the alliance then all the money they've spent building credit with the USA will be wasted. It's more likely that they'll use this as a bargaining chip, "Remember that time you let Israel bomb us?"
Sunshine
3mo ago
I don't think the American public would really believe that a Chinese bomber could get into US airspace without being intercepted. The Americans are supposed to have the best air force in the world. If someone gets bombed by a stealth bomber in the the mainland USA, I think most people would rightly assume that the Americans must have done it (or allowed it).
Under what circumstances would you feel that a foreign drone strike targeting a terrorist living or operating in the United States was justified and acceptable?
If a terrorist was living in the USA and a major allied country wanted them disposed of, I would expect the USA to do the arresting and/or whacking with their own troops. If Qatar was really an ally they should have offered to assassinate Hamas' leadership themselves. As for Fethullah Gulen, he's not a terrorist, he's a pretender. Coup attempts and terrorist attacks are generally mutually exclusive, and sheltering pretenders from semi-friendly powers is a practice as old as civilization itself. Like the Romans sheltering Arsinoe to have a backup Egyptian queen, the Americans might have a strategic interest in keeping an alternative Turkish government in their back pocket.
Zelensky has traveled to the United States multiple times, if the Russians blew up his limo would that be acceptable? What about the reverse, if Ukrainian nationalist psychos had shot down Putin's plane over Alaska?
If the Russians blew up Zelensky on American soil that would be a poor strategic decision. It would give the Americans a legitimate reason to intervene, which is the last thing Putin wants. Likewise, Qatar now has a legitimate reason to intervene in or even declare war on the United States if they so choose. I don't think that they will, for obvious reasons, but the option is open to them.
If Ukrainian terrorists shot down Putin's plane over Alaska that would be awesome. It would probably escalate the war in Ukraine, which would be bad for the Ukrainians, but from an American perspective it would be great. The Americans would have no real involvement but their rival would be weakened, and anyway it's not like Putin's successor is going to start a nuclear war on his first day as dictator of Russia. That's the capstone of his career, he's the last person in the world who will want to rock the boat.
Sunshine
3mo ago
Lefties more or less OPENLY suggest that it'd be morally good to kill him and his associates.
I'm not much of a lefty, and if I had a button that would make Trump die of a heart attack I would press it on utilitarian grounds. A few QALYs from an old man who's already lived a life of ease and luxury, compared to the political chaos he causes? Easy trade.
Then again, maybe I am a lefty. The Motte is more heretic blue tribe than it is red tribe.
That aside, I think people catastrophize about what would happen if a President were assassinated. The President is like a Jedi - if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. If President Trump is shot, what do you get? Acting President Vance with emergency powers. If you kill Trump and Vance, what do you get? Acting President Mike Johnson leading a unified (and terrified) House and Senate, declaring martial law and putting tanks in the streets of Washington DC with the overwhelming support of the public.
The US Federal Government is one of the only institutions in history that becomes more powerful when its leader is killed.
What we know is that India was a rich nation turned destitute over centuries of colonialism. India suffered from preventable famines that killed millions in a few decades. Famines of magnitudes that the nation hadn't seen for centuries prior.
Pardon me, but I don't think we do know that. I would be surprised if we have such complete and accurate data about famine in pre-British India that we can confidently state that they didn't have famines that were as bad as the ones they had under British rule. Furthermore, do we all know that these famines were preventable? I don't.
Finally, did British rule actually cause India's economic growth to slow down? Because if so I was also not aware of that.
Naively, I would assume that being ruled by one of the earliest countries to industrialize (Britain) would mean that India had better access to the technologies of the Industrial Revolution than a country outside the British sphere. Since industrialization turns every other variable into a rounding error, I would expect early access to British technology to similarly drown out any damage the East India Company or the Raj were capable of doing. Bear in mind that the number of British people on Indian soil was always tiny, and for the most part the British were just occupying the top rung of a pre-existing power structure that was, and remained, populated almost entirely by Indian people who were carrying on day-to-day business as they always had. I would be surprised if such a small number of people could have a significant impact on India's economic growth.
Sunshine
3mo ago
That description does not seem like a match for what I saw in the video. If there had already been a physical altercation before the video took place, why didn't the two girls run away?
It seems clear to me that there was some kind of altercation which took place off-camera before the video starts in which the girl showed the hatchet and knife to the migrants. It was only after this that the male migrant started filming, which is why he already knows about the hatchet and knife when the video starts. Since the girls stick around and engage in trash talk rather than running away screaming, we can presume that no significant blows have been exchanged before the video begins. If there was violence then it must have happened after.
I would also not be surprised if a fundraiser bent the truth a little bit to make the victim more sympathetic.
Sunshine
4mo ago
with Vance simply refusing to debate any challengers
Vance did extremely well in the last set of debates. I would expect him to agree to debate challengers even if he is coronated. The challengers get to build their national presence, Vance gets to build momentum. When debating is one of your strengths you take the free airtime.
Sunshine
4mo ago
It's not unusual at all for a pedophile to be assisted by a wife or other adult female accomplice. There was a recent case of a grooming gang in Dundee that involved a woman. That was in January of this year, in the exact same city (Dundee, Scotland) as this incident.
Sunshine
4mo ago
I would classify a small knife and a hatchet as tools rather than weapons. If she had a gun then sure, call the police. A hatchet, though? Where do you draw the line? Can she have a butter knife? Can she have a mallet? Can she have a stick? What if it's a sharp stick?
At some point you have a long and pointless list of banned items, and yet anyone who wants a "deadly weapon" of equal effectiveness to anything on that list can easily get one by just hammering nails into a baseball bat. What have you accomplished?
Sunshine
4mo ago
(and the shooter would walk free)
I highly doubt that, especially in Scotland. If a gang of ten armed men covered in gang tattoos come after you with RPGs and AK-47s, and you use your ninja skills and your licensed bread knife to dispatch them all nonlethally, then maybe you'd avoid charges on the grounds of self-defense. But shooting a 12-year-old-girl who has a blunt piece of metal she probably found in a ditch? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Sunshine
4mo ago
This just sounds like a fun afternoon for me and the pals when I was a kid. What kind of statist nonsense is this, that you want to deprive kids of the right to yell and wave harmless "weapons"?
Sunshine
4mo ago
Of course, I have every confidence that some corners of the internet, including select denizens of The Motte, will find this hopelessly unconvincing. If your current epistemic stance is “If she floats, she’s a witch; if she sinks, she’s a witch,” then no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice. If your model of the world is that everyone is lying except you and your Telegram group, my ability to shift your priors is probably limited.
This hardly seems fair.
First of all, saying that "no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice [to shift your priors]" is like saying that "no combination of tanks, nuclear missiles, or hugs will ever suffice to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine." If all you've tried are hugs then you're not allowed to handwave tanks and missiles as equally useless. Likewise, if all you have are official statements, please don't demean our intelligence by putting them on the same level as facts or logic. Official statements aren't evidence of anything. They're just statements made all the less convincing because they emanate from the officials who are under suspicion in the first place.
Secondly, I already know the Bulgarian guy who was holding the camera phone is a creep. Do you know how I know? Because pointing a camera at a 12-year-old girl and following her around while she's clearly trying to disengage is A-tier creepy behaviour. You can try to "shift my priors" all you want, but I think he's a creep because he filmed himself acting like a creep. The video itself may not provide evidence that he's committed any particular crimes, but if that pattern of behaviour was repeated over a longer period of time I think it would rise to the level of criminal harassment. It would also invite justified suspicions of pedophilia.
Sunshine
4mo ago
People on this forum are arguing that Tao deserves to be caught in the blast radius because of his speech, but that's separate from the formal legal justification that the Executive used for its actions against UCLA. Freedom of speech is about what powerful institutions are and are not allowed to do, not about whether individuals who suffer misfortune did or did not have it coming.
Sunshine
4mo ago
UCLA isn't being punished for its speech. The grants are being revoked in accordance with a long-standing legal precedent that allows the Federal government to take away public money from institutions that illegally discriminate on the basis of race. The only difference between previous applications of this strategy and the present one is the race of the people being illegally discriminated against.
The First Amendment does not actually guarantee the rights of large institutions to discriminate against Asian kids.
Being a professor at a California university is like being a soldier of the new Red Army. Terence Tao signed the open letters, took the government money, parroted the party line, and made the libations. He should not act so shocked that the other team is treating him as an enemy soldier, because he is one.
Hasn't he ever heard the saying, "And them that take the sword shall perish by the sword"?
The academic establishment has sinned against America and America must administer its punishment. Burn it all! Fire and sword and no mercy! Let the funding be cut, let the tenured professors be thrown out to seek work in the private sector, let the student loans no longer be backed by the government, and let the hollowed-out ruins of the academic establishment of the 2020's stand forever as a warning to future scientists about the dangers of taking sides in politics. Taxpayer money is a privilege, not a right.
Diplomatic immunity is the legal fact, but there's also a layer of diplomatic discretion underneath it. Sometimes you sweep things under the rug to keep your friends happy. If anything it's more effective as a gesture because you didn't have to do it. "Sure thing Benny old chum, I'll take care of this as a personal favor to you."
'Guy with connections gets off with slap on the wrist' is a story as old as law itself. It happens all the time and needs no special explanation.
It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. They aren't vulnerable to the normal ways of forcing public servants to follow instructions from above. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.
Sunshine
4mo ago
As a Canadian, I would be in favor of this on the condition that you get your own shit under control before you start messing with ours. When I make a list of possible solutions to Canada's political dysfunctions, "Invasion by US military under Donald Trump" does not rank highly.
Sunshine
4mo ago
I would like to see someone do some kind of analysis of whether writing style is genetic. How you would adjust for the confounder of culture, I have no idea.
Sunshine
5mo ago
Maybe they found it easier to kill him when he was trapped in a prison cell unable to escape, than when he was free to move around at will? Contra to the memes, I don't think Hillary Clinton actually has an organization of John Wick style super-assassins at her beck and call ready to hunt down inconvenient witnesses wherever they may hide. Killing someone and making it look like an accident or suicide isn't exactly easy.
They can pull back, but they'll be fighting again when Hamas starts another war in a few months or years. There is no losing interest and giving up against an enemy that threatens your homeland.
If the Viet Cong had done 9/11 we would have turned their jungle into a parking lot.
Sunshine
5mo ago
The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up. The Viet Cong never landed a single boot on American soil. There was never any question of the Viet Cong conquering America. In the sense that the Palestinians are too weak to conquer Israel, the Viet Cong were too weak to conquer America.
The difference between Hamas and the Viet Cong is that Hamas has invaded Israeli soil and killed Israeli civilians. The Israelis can't get tired of fighting and give up like the Americans did in Vietnam. If they could, they would have done it already. Hamas and its various sister organizations like Hezbollah will continue to attack Israel until one or the other is annihilated. Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.
I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.
As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.
"Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet"
If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil. The fact that Hamas' power is limited to terrorizing a few unarmed civilians and then scampering away in impotent terror when the real soldiers show up is, itself, the problem. The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory is the reason why their futile war crimes are so heinous. It's one thing to commit a necessary evil in order to liberate your people from oppression. It's another, much worse thing to commit a pointless evil just for the sake of doing it.
As Talleyrand once said of another act of self-destructive violence against civilians: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."
Can you name one? It's interesting that the first "terrorist" you named, Fethullah Gulen, is only classified as a terrorist by two governments: Turkey and Pakistan. If the best example you can come up with is only recognized by two Islamist regimes of dubious legitimacy, then I have to wonder if the point is really so well-supported.
The US has a long history of supplying arms to enemies-of-enemies to attempt to achieve its strategic aims, but that's not really a central example of terrorism. A central example of terrorism is when you murder lots of people for no reason at all except to sow terror among a civilian population. If you can't provide an example of that then I'm not going to give the word "terrorist" much weight.
Hmm...
HMMMMM...
Hamas' fighters do not wear uniforms. That makes them war criminals, it makes any war they participate in an illegal war, and it means they have none of the rights and privileges afforded to legal combatants. Hamas is a non-state terrorist actor and any action taken against them is merely an international police action, not subject to the rules of war.
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