Otherwise regardless, they should be labeled by the ICC, without any US legal repercussions, so we can learn.
Learn what? We already have processes for handling this. What additional value does an extrajudicial kangaroo court in Europe have in enforcing our laws. Perhaps we should start trying European politicians and soldiers in our own made up courts. Would that help them learn?
The ICC is not powerless. You are correct that they are de-facto powerless against the United States because we fight back against them. The answer is not to stop fighting back. It's to remove the threat entirely. You kill a tumor before it grows large enough to be a problem.
The Trump administration realizes quite correctly that the next Democrat regime could use the ICC to harass its domestic enemies while sidestepping Constitutional concerns. If there is a higher court that is above the Constitution and answers to no one, it's quite convenient. That's why they need to be defunded, disbanded, and sanctioned now.
porkpiehat
8hr ago
On the plus side, Trump might well win his second FIFA Peace Prize this year,
Okay, that would be hilarious.
porkpiehat
8hr ago
I do not understand what leads the left to defend Maduro and the right to attack the ICC.
You really don't understand why the right would attack a court that believes it supersedes the sovereignty of the United States and would try members of the US military as war criminals? The Trump administration is correct to sanction and dismantle that court.
The ICC's clear violation of international law aside, it also makes sense politically.
The left would love to have a leftist body such as the ICC which can overrule the actions of a right wing President like Trump. Then they can say "we didn't violate the Constitution, it was out of our hands".
Are you also surprised that the left would attack the NRA?
porkpiehat
8hr ago
The U.S. has a lot more options. We can print money. Or we can simply raise taxes.
Also, our GDP growth is much faster. And our demographic trends are better.
But, yeah, both countries are gerontocracies and are on similar trajectories. France is just way worse off.
porkpiehat
12hr ago
Compare the situations in France and the US and you realize France is completely screwed. There will almost certainly be another Euro monetary crisis in the next couple years.
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US debt to GDP 122%. France 116%.
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US 10 year real GDP growth: 2.45%. France: 1.22%
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US average age: 39.1. France: 41.6
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US controls own currency. France: No
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US total taxes to GDP: 25.6%. France: 43.5%
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US gov. spending to GDP: 39.7%. France: 57.2%.
France can't raise taxes to get out of the problem since doing so will cause capital flight and negative GDP growth. They already tax Nicolas, 30 ans, as much as he can bear. Incredibly, pensioners in France now earn more than people who are working. And yet French people are on the streets protesting against "austerity" and "neoliberalism".
Le Pen won't save France either. She wants to lower the retirement age.
I'll also just mention that, in 2021, it was estimated that about 15% of people under 18 are Muslim. Imagine what this number is now.
Absolutely screwed. Complete economic, demographic, and aura collapse.
Maybe AGI will save them somehow.
porkpiehat
1d ago
Dang, I forget all about that one. Buenos Aires is a nice touch.
porkpiehat
1d ago
I don't like it aesthetically, but I disagree with posters who say this will be bad for Trump or for the death penalty.
Consider what has brought us to the current moment. It takes like 20 years and 5 million dollars to execute someone and then we try to do it in a medical way but can't even do that correctly.
We have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no way to perform executions that will satisfy the critics, just like we can't build nuclear power or high speed rail in California.
So Trump flips the table and does things in a way calculated to maximally piss off his haters. I doubt Trump is making an explicit political calculation, but when the usual suspects shed tears over an evil terrorist who killed people (and they will), it will polarize people to Trump's benefit.
It's a good reminder that Trump is a creation of the media. Like Roko's basilisk, he was willed into being by the very people who fear and loathe him the most. Every moment spent hating him makes him grow stronger. Best just to say, "yeah, he's right, evil terrorist is evil", not watch the video, and sleep soundly.
Personally, I'll cheer on the Golem who kills my enemies, even if he also muddies up the town square.
porkpiehat
1d ago
Yes, obviously. Now fast forward 10 years.
porkpiehat
1d ago
My heuristic is that he'll probably turn up soon no worse for wear, because they almost always do. But, hey, in the mean time, you can bet on it.
porkpiehat
1d ago
Slightly complicated by the fact he never appeared in the first place.
Politicians "going missing" is an evergreen story. Early this year we had Mitch McConnell. Right now apparently Talarico has been missing for 12 days. And before that Trump went missing for like 3 days, and Putin was dying of cancer, and Kim Jong-un was already dead.
It's always a nothing burger.
Apparently, in 1967, the prime minister of Australia (Harold Holt) went swimming in the ocean and disappeared and they never found his body. But there were others with him who witnessed him go out to swim and sort of drift away.
I wonder when the last time a world leader actually disappeared or had a Weekend at Bernie's scenario. It must have happened quite a bit in ancient times.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Seattle mentioned!
Another plan would be to attack the source at the root by nuking TSMC or wherever they are making those lithography machines. Problem is, China has parallel technology that would probably catch up within 2-3 years.
This problem would be so much easier to solve if we never let China join the WTO in 2001.
porkpiehat
2d ago
Things have gotten better, I don't disagree. And it's nice, I suppose, that the Dems have retarded candidates as a consequence of DEI. Vance, Miller, and Rubio are far smarter than any Democrat who is close to power.
But, speaking of IQ 120 people, I pretty much never meet any who aren't liberals. I hate to say it, but adjusted for race, people just get more liberal the smarter they are. Chalk it up to smart people being more socially adjusted. They usually think I'm a libtard too, because everyone is. (Of course, like me, some are crypto-conservatives).
This isn't hopeless. Asians may be more conformist than whites, but whites are still plenty conformist. That means a preference cascade can happen and a right wing viewpoint because the default like it is in China.
But as for now, no the right is not winning. You can't even tell people you voted for Trump in polite company. Seriously, you would be EVICTED from social groups for saying you voted for a person who won the popular vote.
At the risk of proposing an obvious solution, why not take psyllium husk every day?
Go to Amazon. Buy this Metamucil. Add two teaspoons to 8 ounces of water every morning and drink it. If not working, do it in the afternoon as well.
Manages blood sugar. Lowers cholesterol. Your poops will be perfect. Really everyone should use it.
porkpiehat
3d ago
I agree that it will be awhile before all human labor is replaced. But that doesn't mean that AI can't subjugate the human race. The lords in Medieval Europe were reliant on the serfs for all their needs, yet there was pretty much never a single peasant rebellion that overthrew the ruling class.
porkpiehat
3d ago
AI risk is nothing like climate change.
Climate change is well understood, it's not going to cause human extinction in the next 500 years, and we have weapons to cheaply mitigate it if we ever wanted to. Climate scientists are calling for a sea level rise of 1 meter by 2100 and a 3% reduction in GDP or something. Its a nothingburger on human timescales.
AI risk is immense. There are many plausible ways in which it could lead to human extinction or irrelevance. We don't know how to align it. And, if something goes wrong, we don't have easy ways to mitigate the damage. (No, we can't just "pull the plug" if it's running our whole economy). Furthermore, the changes are happening over a period of single digit years, not centuries.
porkpiehat
3d ago
Winning the popular vote does not make you the stronger party, in my opinion.
Control over the elites, especially media and the law is what makes you the stronger party. And on those fronts the leftists dominate.
I agree that the tide has come in a bit since 2020. But we're nowhere near parity. What we need is a counter-FDR who wins elections and controls Congress for at least 12 straight years, replacing most Supreme Court justices in the process. It could happen with 8 years of Vance. But as of now, we're one lost election from permanent leftist dominance. Winning means being able to lose elections and not immediately have your country destroyed by mass immigration.
porkpiehat
3d ago
This isn't going to convince anyone in 2026.
"Why do you even care bro. Immigration is no big deal. You don't want to be (gasp) racist, do you?"
Everyone now realizes that mass immigration means permanent electoral dominance for the left, which is why every leftist wants it. Immigration in itself isn't the end goal, but it is such an important instrumental goal that it dominates everything else.
Put it another way, find me a leftist who is against immigration. You can't. Remember when Bernie Sanders got the memo and did a total 180?
porkpiehat
4d ago
If he wants A and B, but B is impossible, then he is no different than any other supporter of A. He clearly doesn't think of himself as a leftist, and he didn't choose to become one. He just stood still while the Overton window moved to where he was standing.
Glad to hear that he thinks HBD is a "possibility", although how you could be anything other than a fervent believer in HBD in 2026 is puzzling.
I don't think he's a bad guy. He's just wrong about the things that matter, and the things he's right about don't matter.
porkpiehat
4d ago
That's conservatism too, there is always some heretic that needs to be burnt
Clearly, rightist moments have had that failure pattern, the Nazis being the most obvious example.
In the current epoch, the right, being the weaker party, calls for tolerance while the left bays for blood. And so it will go until the shoe is on the other foot. When that time comes, I'll probably become a leftist.
The devil ever sits on the shoulders of the self righteous.
Physician, heal thyself.
Immigration and population replacement is what defines leftism in 2026. He is a blank slatist who believes in magic soil. So it makes him a leftist.
The fact that other leftists would happily line him up against the wall for his heretical beliefs? Well, that's leftism for you.
I do agree that unlike Bernie Sanders, who pivoted hard on immigration to stay relevant, Caplan is a principled leftist. Put him in the useful idiot category.
porkpiehat
4d ago
Yes. We're still learning and relearning things that have been known for ages. As Tacitus said in 117 AD:
Benefits are acceptable, while the receiver thinks he may return them; but once exceeding that, hatred is given instead of thanks
Imagine being a Muslim in France. Of course you hate the French who are at once obviously superior, yet also weak and self-loathing.
A weak ruler subverts the natural order of things and is naturally hatred. The Muslim population would like the French a lot more if the French kicked them around once in a while and crucified people for burning churches.
porkpiehat
4d ago
Oil tankers are out of stock.
Everyone (except for Abdul El-Sayed who never got the message apparently) knows that the Hormuz is effectively open with most pre-war flows restored.
That's great.
Except there aren't enough ships to take the oil where it needs to go.
A VLCC (very large crude carrier) can carry about 2 million barrels. It typically costs around $120 million to buy one, and they last for about 20 years. Breakeven all-in cost is about $30,000/day.
It now costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000–$1.2 million per day to hire the services of a VLCC. There just aren't any available. Recently Frontline booked a contract for over $700k per day for 88 days. So they will earn $60 million for a single voyage, about half the cost of a new ship.
Normally, the cost to ship oil is not a significant driver of the cost of the final consumer price. But today it is. It's adding up to $30/barrel for shipping to Asia. Unprecedented times.
porkpiehat
5d ago
Yes, I remember. It doesn't mean it was going to replace the US vaccines which were superior in quality and had better data to support them. As I'm sure you remember, scaling is also an issue. I didn't get my shot until June 2021. Imagine how long it would have taken if only Sputnik was available.
US vaccines saved millions of lives.
It's hard to overstate how little this matters for the midterms. Saudi Arabia? The Houthis? To the extent that Americans know about these things at all, they accurately identify them as alien people with strange and violent customs entirely alien to our own experience.
The Iran War? Also a nothingburger. Unless American GI's start getting sent home in bodybags, and they very much aren't, it just doesn't matter. We can keep this up forever and it doesn't even move the needle. Gas isn't expensive, except for diesel, and that is more related to what's happening in Russia. Not that voters even know or care.
And of course an October surprise would be very much good for Trump just as every other attack from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 has been good for the incumbent.
The midterm election will be decided based on vibes and turnout. Mundane things like rules for mail in ballots and early in person voting matter a lot. The Iran War does not. Who is even being swayed? What are you going to do, vote for the party of gender transitions and open borders because of a foreign conflict that has killed, checks notes, 21 service members? There are much bigger issues at stake, and everyone has already made up there mind. Both parties have a hard floor and a hard ceiling and rely mostly on elderly voters and ethnic voting blocs.
The internet is not the real world.
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