It's Trump who can't thinks strategically. He's the one who started a war which predictably led to Iran closing the straight and then asked the Europeans to bail him out.
Its predictable that Iran would engage in piracy against 3rd parties in response to military actions against it? Sounds like they are pretty bad guys and should be taken out pretty soon. Imagine if Israel mined the Straight of Gibralter every time Hamas launched a terror attack. Would the French be like, "come on Hamas cut it out?" Come on man. That beggars belief.
The original public meaning has two main exceptions that make the ACLU's position nonsense: Indians and Diplomats. In 1866 those two groups couldn't just go around raping and pillaging and avoid being hauled into American courts. To quote that insurance commercial, "Thats not how this works. Thats not how any of this works."
If we arent going to reconsider WKA. And we probably aren't. The principled question to ask about any immigrant group is, "are they more like a permanent resident or more like and Indian/diplomat?" Tourists seem more like a diplomat. Illegals seem more like an Indian.
It isn’t nitpicking to figure out what the words “subject to the jurisdiction” means.
The reality is that neither side has a good answer to this. A plain meaning of the phrase would mean anyone who US law applies to. However, that can't be correct because we know there are two groups that it never applied to until statutes were written: AmerIndians, and Diplomats and their kin.
BUT, AmerIndians and Diplomats and their kin have been consistently prosecuted for crimes, brought into courts on civil actions, etc going back to the founding. If a diplomat commits a serious crime on US soil, they are almost always prosecuted, and the visiting nation basically always waives immunity. Same was true for AmerIndians committing crimes, but states wouldn't even bother to talk to the Tribe in question. If you were a drunk Indian that killed an American you were just tried and hanged quite quickly.
So the so called "plain reading" regarding whether American laws apply to you is just a straight out red herring. Its wrong, very wrong.
So PROBABLY something along the loyalty questions that have been often remarked on in some cases in the 1800s is what it actually means. The real problem with those is that its mostly subjective question of someone's mind, and probably should have gone the other way in Wong Kim Arc if it really is about loyalty. They were still Chinese citizens, not American citizens at the time. What side of the war would an illegal immigrant or tourist pick in a war between America and Mexico/China/Etc. The real answer for most of them is the side they think is going to win. National loyalty is not a quick thing to develop, it takes generations of being in the same place and cultivating ties to the community. If we applied a loyalty test many 5th generation people would not pass. Heck, nowadays many descendants of founding fathers prefer enemy countries to prevail against the US.
Putin also invaded his neighbors under the Obama regime (which Biden is best seen as the 3rd term of). The defining thing about the Obama people long term is their consistent lack of seriousness in foreign policy. Grandiose speeches paired with feckless actual policy. JCPOA is the crowning achievement of this "strategy" if you can call it one.
Biden was a Russia hawk in rhetoric only. It was like Reverse-Teddy-Roosevelt stuff. Its pretty obvious in hindsight why Putin waited for him to be President to invade.
Im always surprised at how many of these I miss in real time. Hat tip to @LazyLongposter I particularly liked that gem.
The USA is not engaged in piracy no.
I did a time limited search to see what Kagan thought about the JCPOA before Trump got into office, and he was seemingly silent on the issue. Prior to the JCPOA he called the Iran nuclear program the biggest question to American security Obama would face. Given that silence we can't know what he thought about the JCPOA in a Trump-free world. However, his lack of commentary while fellow Neocons were very loud about how it was a shit sandwich with no enforcement mechanisms that gave Iran everything up front (oddly correct by the Neocons here), indicates he was already departing from the neocon camp into a more full-Dem partisan camp at that time.
Regardless of Kagan's views at the time, I do always find appeals to the JCPOA facile and stupid. Its not a treaty, and other countries who were party to it didn't care about any part of the agreement besides getting more Iranian petrol and LNG. They were never going to think it was sufficiently violated to think it wasn't salvageable, because they didn't care about any of the alleged burdens on Iran. They only were interested in the US's obligations.
Given all that, there is no path to a "broad coalition" Iran could have been doing all the terrorist funding it has been since 2015, just with extra money because of lifted sanctions, and then put up a big clock in Tehran in Jan 2024 that said, "Countdown to Nuclear ICBM completion" with a 365 day countdown and none of the other countries would have cared. America would be left with this same coalition of Israel + a couple of ME countries pissed about Iran's terrorism.
That doesn't mean Trump didn't fuck this up. He's unarguably failed rhetorically selling the war to the public. He's seemingly underestimated the IRGC's leadership depth. And he's also seemingly committed to no ground troops, which means he can't secure the straight long term. But, about the last point, it is also kind of a stupid criticism of Trump. There's nothing that says Iran needs to attack French and Chinese vessels because they are at war with America. In fact, that is just piracy. The fact that the French and Chinese blame America is a kind of derangement in its own right. In more normal times France would be the one threatening to nuke Tehran right now if they stopped or hit a single additional French flagged vessel.
Given that anytime a non-Commie tankie goes to the country they consistently report crushing poverty, government corruption, and a bunch of street scams, the obvious answer is the real domestic GDP is quite low and the numbers are cooked by the regime.
They still have plenty of trade partners and this particular subrule is generally not enforced!
n 2024, the top exports of Cuba were Rolled Tobacco ($418M), Zinc Ore ($107M), Nickel Mattes ($88.6M), Hard Liquor ($75.2M), and Precious Metal Ore ($55M). The top destinations were China ($270M), Spain ($109M), Germany ($68.2M), Macau ($57.1M), and Switzerland ($49.9M).
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub
their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites
This is not true in any way. They not only have higher objective crime rates via stats like incarceration %, number of homicides per capita, etc, but they also are far less policed and report crime to authorities less often.
While not being able to trade with the US is certainly detrimental to Cuba, it is hardly explanatory as to its utter dysfunction. Access to 1 market, even if it is a huge close market, is simply not capable of producing such negative results. Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc. Its a small island. Even if it was producing goods and services on a per capita basis rivaling a US state, those markets would be more than adequate to absorb all that output and more.
The only thing that the US opening its markets up to Cuba would really do, or would have done, is piss off a bunch of Floridians, who might storm Havanna in boats. Which would be good for Cuba long term of course, because obviously there are enough Cuban-decent former marines to take out the Castro regime if given a green light, but well there it is.
Well they aren't very productive citizens.
Oct-7 showed that Hamas was pure evil. If Israel had decided to occupy Gaza and deny them the right to self-determination for a generation or two, I would have been fine with it. Instead, the IDF used bombs to go after Hamas with complete indifference to civilian casualties. Obviously they did not go for an Endloesung.
But apathy to civilian casualties is its own kind of evil, and they certainly had plenty of that. Killing 50 bystanders to get one commander might be acceptable if that immediately ends the conflict (e.g. the commander is Genghis Khan), but the IDF did accept that collateral damage ratios for minor victories which did not change the strategic landscape.
Likewise, we can debate if the IDF used hunger as a weapon in Gaza. I doubt that many Hamas members went hungry, and as you point out if their intent was genocide they did a terrible job of it.
However, I do believe that feeding hungry kids in Gaza -- whose government can not be trusted to do so because they very much prefer them killed by Israel to score propaganda points -- is a collective responsibility of the civilized world. I am sure that some food trucks were smuggling in weapons for Hamas. If the IDF wanted to sift through every pack of flour, I would understand that. But by simply stopping the trucks from entering Gaza altogether, Nethanyahu defected from civilization.
I just don't see how you can hold these positions at the same time. Heck, later on you say:
The path to Hamas victory is paved with the corpses of dead Gazan kids killed by the IDF, resulting in the loss of international support and isolation. Nethanyahu's government strode proudly along that path.
You are letting yourself be tricked! Just like dont be tricked? The kind of occupation you are talking about would involve more violence and more casualties than the post 10/7 campaign Israel conducted. It would require brutal authoritarian suppression operations to have a chance of working. We are talking decades of Tienaman square for the whole Gaza strip, monitoring of all internet and phone traffic. Checkpoints every 6 blocks with stop and frisk for bombs & guns. Again for decades, and even then it would have a low chance of working? Why? Because while you and I agree Hamas is an evil organization, you know who disagrees? Supermajorities of Gazans. Hamas won the only election they ever had by a big margin, and all reliable polling indicates they would win again if fair elections were held. Gazans want total war with Israel, the only reason they dont get it is because of Israeli self-restraint.
It solves the issue if you want it to solve the issue, but that sidesteps the very important Indian exception. The Indian exception is really the tricky part for those who want a broad reading of birthright citizenship because it creates absurd results when applied. By way of example:
2 Indian Parents of the Cherokee Tribe, one set lives in northern North Dakota, one lives in Southern Manitoba. The manitobans they both have children in ND on 1/1/1900, both in North Dakota. The Canadian one gets US citizenship while the one whos parents live in ND does not? Why? No one knows, but it is what is insisted on being the truth under the expansive reading.
I remember going back to work during Covid (courts, particularly criminal can't wait forever regardless of what is happening outside). And a female colleague broke down crying about "why we the one's who have to die" (or something similar Its been years at this point). Our boss (a lady, or this would probably not be the funny story it is) poured some whiskey into a disposable coffee cup and offered it to her saying something like "alcohol is a sanitizer" (or again something like that). I started laughing and said I was also sick. Got my own cup. There were only like 5 of us left at the office at the time. It was certainly a time.
It cant work! The Master's tools and whatnot!
But more seriously, I don't think it can work. Real communism is too boring and stale at this point for $250 million to be enough to get the movement sparked. Netflix's annual revenue is $45 billion, youtube's is $50 billion. You are talking a drop in the bucket next to a lake when it comes to media influence and the like. That could work if it was something new and compelling that could meme itself into mainstream, like Looksmaxxing or Fursexuality (a hypothetical new thing), but with boring Marxism? Meh.
In any case, all the smart commies already moved on. They realized Facism is better anyways, you get 99% of the control over things that you would have had under socialism/communism, but still get to blame the capitalists when things go wrong.
This wasn't a civil asset forfeiture thing. It was a poorly issued criminal search warrant thing. Every jurisdiction has their own regulations, but disabling cameras might be standard. Seizing all cash in drug/prostitution operations certainly is standard for most jurisdictions.
The officers carrying out the search warrant weren't like NAZIs "just carrying out orders" they were literally executing a search warrant, not only approved by their superiors, but signed by a judge, and in a way that was indistinguishable from the dozens or hundreds of search warrants they had conducted in the past that looked (to them) the exact same. The petty cash tallying problem is a problem. But also they are not the smartest folks.
The real problem is this alleged source and the detective (and his Sergeant/Lieutenant) that believed it. They are the ones that created the situation and then lied to or misrepresented the facts to the judge. And not to let the judge who signed the warrant off the hook. Obviously, they are supposed to swear detectives to their search warrants. If you see something like this, its your judicial duty to bring down your weight on the department and detective. Perhaps through a contempt action, or simply refusing to sign all future warrants.
As far as I could ever tell, the Mueller report was, basically the actual coverup of the crimes. Mueller himself was a doddering figurehead who knew little about what was happening (selected because he was ostensibly a Republican, but his team was staffed with partisan Democrats), and clearly was at Joe Biden 2024 levels at the end. The report meticulously avoided investigating FBI wrongdoing, such as the dozens of leaks to partisan news organizations of half-truths, and the fabrication of evidence put into FISA applications, and instead focused on process crimes, often ones the investigation itself generated by doing things like not videotaping interviews, so agent memorializations could put interviewee's "statements" in the least favorable light when seeking indictments under $1001.
While some of the Trump conduct did seem at the time, obstructionist, with hindsight, we see it was perfectly justified. Trump's campaign advisors were illegally wiretapped. Comey himself attempted to blackmail Trump during the transition with the fake Steele Dossier (then leaked the fact that Trump was briefed on it so people could treat it like it was a serious FBI piece of work product). The Michael Flynn prosecution was an ongoing demonstration of the venality of the prosecutors, essentially bankrupting a man, and then the judge frustrating efforts to undue the ridiculous results.
All in all it was a big production to distract from what really happened which was a lot of illegal things at the FBI, wherein the Mueller report succeeded in its goals of hindering the Trump adminstration's agenda and running out the clock on those criminal and civil claims (and also fouling evidence by way of time).
I get your point and entirely reject it.
Thats kinda silly. The people executing the search warrant dont know what the PC was. Thats on the detective and the judge.
If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.
Only if you subscribe to modern liberalism. Its perfectly fine to accept race differences without being compelled to subjugate people under classical liberalism. Lincoln, an abolitionist, fiercely believed in black inferiority. He had some creative solutions, such as deportation of many back to Africa, which probably would have worked decently for mainland America.
But there need not be drastic measures. American blacks could merely be treated equally, with the same expectations as everyone else, and it would dramatically improve things here. Of course, the backlash would be immense, as blacks treat equal treatment as oppression.
The set of people who had control of the situation are the ones who have the burden of proof to demonstrate they were on the up and up. If someone comes to your house to set up a roach fumigating tent and then a meth lab explodes in your house...
I think the adoption rate of real ID is a decent stand in for approximating how many people have their birth certificate, original SSN card, and a tax return available at the ready.
Nah. Its people who have those things + 5 hours to waste at the DMV.
They would have IDs, even if they don’t always carry them. I would think the only people who really don’t have a government ID today are going to be dysfunctional hobos/junkies, and extremely “off the grid” types
One of my more favorite stories from being a new lawyer is how many female states attorneys (who always start in misdemeanors and traffic) admitted they had expired DLs or out of state DLs (despite living in and working in the state, which is against the law). Its like, your job is to prosecute yourself. Get with it!
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What Iran is doing is what they are doing. My ire is for the countries helping them by blaming America
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