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
10mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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."
Sunshine
11mo ago
It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.
Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.
A left-wing commune dweller saying that after the revolution they'll lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. A right-wing authoritarian saying they'd be a warlord an authoritarian society. I think you're making a conversion error when you say these are equivalent.
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system. If we had the money and desire for that kind of frivolous luxury then someone would already be paying you to do it.
Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites. A more reasonable comparison would be to a warlord's street-level enforcers, who actually tend to do quite well for themselves under an authoritarian system. "Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.
If you work hard and kiss all the right asses you can climb the ladder of authoritarian goons until you become the warlord, like how Putin climbed through the KGB. That doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't make it all the way to the top is just wasting their time. Being a regular goon can still be a good job.
In order for Big Tech to rejoin the Democrats, the Democrats would need to make some kind of credible commitment to not backstab Big Tech the second they get back into power. I don't think it's very likely. I wouldn't even trust the Democrats to hold off on the backstab until after they regain power. They're a very stabby people.
Say what you will about Trump but he's capable of playing ball, at least in the short term. If you help him get what he wants then he'll hold off on betraying you for at least a few months. That's not great, but it inspires more loyalty than the Democrats, who will betray any ally at any time if enough activist groups demand it.
Sunshine
11mo ago
I'm putting my money on Nothing Ever Happens. If there was bombshell proof that Trump is a pedophile it would have been leaked years ago. In the absence of that, this will just be yet another lawsuit Trump gets embroiled in for years. People will forget about this in a week.
enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
I regret to inform you that you share a planet with people who believe in penis-stealing witches, and many of them don't even have Internet access.
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The original default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time. Recently, in large part thanks to the Internet, some people are occasionally less than 100% wrong. You might even say that the Internet made people less wrong (bah-dum tiss).
People being wrong is not a new problem and the Internet didn't make it worse.
During the life of Marie Antoinette, there was a scandal involving a diamond necklace that severely damaged her reputation. Except she had literally nothing to do with it, and she could prove that she had nothing to do with it. The French press vilified her anyway.
And who could forget about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans? You know, the guy who was proven innocent and then dragged through the mud by the French press because the army was too embarrassed to admit they made it all up? The guy who was vilified because of a bunch of lying journalists and government officials? That guy?
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Hey, I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph. Maybe instead of giving journalists and government officials unlimited power to censor anyone who disagrees with them, we should consider that maybe the call is coming from inside the house.
Sunshine
11mo ago
OK, fair enough, I guess a lot of people die before losing their teeth. Although I would argue that death means losing your whole body, including your teeth.
Sunshine
11mo ago
Being exempt from taxes is small beans compared to having the right to divert tax revenue to yourself, which is the real prize.
Sunshine
11mo ago
If you observe a person's number of teeth over time, you will find that they start with 0, rise to a certain peak, wobble a bit as baby teeth are lost and replaced, and then stay mostly stable at a certain number for a long time (possibly losing a few to accidents). Then, at the end of their life, they gradually lose teeth their one at a time until they have none.
If you were to look at a snapshot of a community, you would find that some children are gaining teeth quite quickly, the adults have a stable number of teeth, and the elders are gradually losing teeth. In a community that is 50% children (not rare historically) you might take an average and find that the number of teeth in the community is rising rapidly. However, if you were to extrapolate that to assume that the community's children are mutating into shark-like creatures who constantly grow more teeth, you would be making a mistake. In the long run, everyone ends up with exactly 0 teeth.
The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly. It is better to assume they will follow the same course of evolution the more-developed civilizations took. The more-developed civilizations are becoming less religious over time, and unlike with children there are no new undeveloped civilizations rising up. It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.
Sunshine
11mo ago
Even if the overall population of Christians is going up due to population growth, there's a clear trend towards secularism in the countries at the end of their development cycles (high education, wealthy, etc). If current trends continue then all the currently-developing countries will eventually become developed countries and go through the same secularization process. If current trends don't continue then all bets are off anyway.
Also, it's pretty clear that political power has largely gone out of religion in the world's great powers. The Church of England used to spend its time trying to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, now it's a nearly-atheistic social club. The medieval Vatican waged wars against kings and emperors, now the Pope is just a celebrity ruling over a country the size of a park. If you're at all familiar with the power religion used to have, it should be self-evident that it doesn't have that anymore.
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions. For example, you can't teach it in schools. Indoctrinating other people's children is one of the main reasons to have a religion in the first place, so it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Nowadays, if you have a metaphysical theory about the intangible nature of human essence with strong dictates about how humans should behave, you call it a new field of science and loudly insist that your priests are scientists. Since your "field of science" does not interact with any previously-existing field of science and all scientists within that field will be your priests, no one can prove your "science" wrong.
See: gender science.
I expect to see religions gradually replaced by a variety of woo-woo superstitions and mystery cults that loudly insist that they aren't religious in nature.
Sunshine
11mo ago
I'm equally baffled by Trump's 180, and for the same reason. The best answer I can come up with is that Trump isn't on the list, but someone who is on the list has something on him.
Sunshine
11mo ago
that the Democrats support illegal immigrant child slavery on drug farms?
Is this controversial? The Democrats support having lots of illegal immigrants working at below market rates by violating labor laws. I don't think many mainstream Democrats would deny it, although they would probably phrase it differently. That naturally includes underaged workers.
It's the logical conclusion of having a large population of undocumented people. I think pretty much every Democratic politician who has any interest in illegal immigrants is at least aware that it's happening. Presented with a choice between allowing them to operate without the protection of labor laws or getting law enforcement involved and likely getting them deported, they are choosing the former in full knowledge of the consequences of that choice because they think it's the option that causes less harm.
Have any Democrats spoken up about the dozen antifa who organized that pathetic mass murder attempt on ICE agents?
This is a poor comparison. AOC is an elected official, the perpetrators of the "pathetic mass murder attempt" are a handful of deranged crooks.
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.
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