vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
Ok, with that in mind, and assuming that there were a brutal 10/7 style terrorist attack planned for Canada, what percentage of Americans would lift a finger to stop it?
Elsewhere in this thread, I already conceded I may be wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadians question, depending on the level of inconvenience involved.
But we shouldn't just judge ourselves or others purely on on how we treat our friends or allies.
I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that Iranians wouldn't make a phone call to prevent American deaths in a terrorist attack. But I would again ask how many Americans would make such a call for terrorist attacks against Russian or Chinese citizens? I don't believe that the general sentiment here in the US is "Death to China" or "Death to Russia", and yet I think even our more tempered animosity towards these geopolitical rivals is enough that I have serious doubts about how many Americans would make a phone call to try and save Russian and Chinese lives.
Don't get me wrong. I actually think the bigger the consequences, the more do-gooder Americans would try to stick their necks out for Russian and Chinese civilian lives. That is, if it were 30 lives at stake, I think there's a reasonable chance a majority of Americans wouldn't make the call. But if it were 3000 lives or 30,000 lives of innocent Russian or Chinese civilians, I think Americans would be more likely to make the call despite our animosity.
But I actually would guess that that is also the case for Iranians to some degree. Don't get me wrong, I am far from believing I have a good read on their general mindset, but I suspect that as the potential death toll in a terrorist attack rises, so too would the odds of an Iranian citizen making the call to try and save American civilian lives rise. Though I have no idea if it would be anywhere close to the rate of American do-gooders in similar circumstances. We could be talking moving from a lizardman's constant of 7% of Iranians for 30 American civilian deaths, to 8% of Iranians for 3000 American deaths.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I think by changing it to a 911 call you warp the question being asked.
I doubt that most Iranians are ever in a position that a 1 hour phone call could guarantee the safety of Americans from a would-be terrorist attack. My personal guess is that if an Iranian became aware of a terrorist attack against Americans, and wanted to prevent it, it would take a lot more personal effort and research than a mere hour-long phone call, and they might not even succeed at preventing it.
Just turning the question around. If the information about a terrorist attack in Russia next week fell into your lap, how much time would you estimate it would take you to ensure that the right people got that that information, and how sure are you that your effort would actually prevent the terrorist attack? Do you think the vast majority of Americans would be willing to expend that effort for the citizenry of our geopolitical rivals?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I guess some of the question is: is 10% of your savings enough to materially impact your standard of living much? If you scaled your income to "average American" levels, is that a candy bar or a car for you?
Do you think the 30% of Americans who have their health care costs paid for by Medicaid would be willing to give 10% of their savings to prevent a 30+ person terrorist attack in Canada?
If I'm wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadian point specifically, then fair enough. But I still maintain that regardless of the Canada angle, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't even slightly inconvenience themselves to save Russians or Chinese people from terrorist attacks. Am I supposed to think worse of Iranians when they have the same hang up about saving Americans?
Agreed, and I would also ask the following: Of the people who say "death to America," but really only mean "down with America," what percentage would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Americans?
That actually seems like a surprisingly high standard. What percentage of Americans do you think would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians? We mostly don't even hate Canada, and I don't think you'd get more than, say, 30% of Americans actually willing to materially inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians.
I guess it matters how much of an inconvenience we're talking about here, though. If it was something like, "would you be willing to spend $1 more in taxes to prevent terrorist attacks on Canadians", I suppose I could believe that possibly a majority of Americans would be willing to make that sacrifice. But if you turn it around and ask about a rival nation like Russia and China, I'm not sure how many Americans you could get to voluntarily pay $1 more in taxes to prevent a terrorist attack against Russian or Chinese citizens, and I don't think the prevailing sentiment is exactly "Death to Russia" or "Death to China."
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.
I think more generally it's that you remember and internalize what offended and outraged you, and not what didn't. I'm sure there's a certain kind of trans skeptical person that can cite chapter and verse of every bad thing a trans person has done in the United States over the last 10 years, while your average trans-friendly progressive either didn't hear about such incidents or even if they did hear about them, they weren't horribly offended by them or were happy to say something like, "Yeah, trans people are human, they do bad things just like everyone else," and moved on with their lives.
In a way, it is a form of political myopia that basically everyone who sees themselves as part of a larger political coalition ends up experiencing. The only way to avoid it is to feel in your bones that neither the Right nor the Left are "us", and to instead center your "us" in some completely orthogonal grouping. Otherwise, it will take constant effort to correct for this "myopia" due to then nature of human psychology. And most people don't want to correct the myopia because righteous fury feels good.
I mean, the whole point of our mixed constitution is to get all of the benefits of the good aspects of rule by the one, few and many, with as few of their downsides (tyranny, corrupt oligarchy, and mobocracy) as possible. Whether the United States actually accomplished that goal is a separate question, but a major idea of our system is that for a small handful of protected rights we don't just let the mob do whatever they want, but force them to achieve a broader societal consensus before we change anything major.
For less important issues, we allow a simple majority (or really, their elected representatives) to determine government policy. Maybe that could be called tyranny, since we'll always be forcing 49% of the population to listen to whatever 50%+1 of the population has decided, but I'm not sure I buy that argument.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
But I also only see push-back on this one from the conservative side of aisle: the Roberts court has a continuing theme in its jurisprudence of telling Congress that it actually has to govern (overturning Chevron, the Major Questions Doctrine), and some of its most prominent members were nominated by Trump himself and confirmed by a right-leaning Senate.
I think there's a real sense in which conservatism in the United States is just right liberalism dressed up as conservatism. Classical liberalism was once (and arguably still is) one of the most radical ideologies in the history of politics, and it is the Foundation of the United States and how we think about ourselves.
While we do have a mythical past conservatives can pine for, I think one of the basic issues is that the freedom afforded by liberalism is what got us here to the present moment step by step. Unless you are some form of reactionary who thinks we need to forcefully return to some past social arrangement, it will be very hard to "hold on" to any particular era of US politics. (I once knew an older gentleman who pined for the left liberalism of the 1960's and JFK, and I had to point out to him that all of the contradictions and craziness of that era are what eventually led to to the "bridge too far" of today that he considered absurd from trans kids to social media.)
Even in glorious past eras, a lot of the problems were caused by groups people today want to idolize. Like, when people bring up something like the 13/50 statistic around black people, I feel like they forget that if that is a real concern, it can be laid entirely at the feet of the ruling elites at the Founding (and reaffirmed on down through time by the post-Civil War amendments, and the reactions of "heritage American" elites and their successors at every step of the process.) I suppose an actually fascist president could just "deport" all of the black people in the United States to Liberia or something at this point, but Trump certainly has no appetite for that sort of thing.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
I feel like the butch and femme dynamic among lesbians is similar. While I get the feeling it is a lot less prevalent as a dynamic in modern lesbian spaces in the West, I have seen plenty of Tumblr posts where lesbian women fawn over tall, muscular women presenting in a mannish style, so there must be something to it.
My best guess is that the human brain generally tries to detect two things in mates: man/woman and masculine/feminine (or perhaps dominant/submissive.) In most people they are attracted to a congruent set (man+masculine/dominant or woman+feminine/submissive), but a minority of the population end up attracted to an incongruent set (man+feminine or woman+masculine.) This is why a small percentage of men love the idea of Amazon warrior women, or orcish women. And why you get some gay men attracted to femboys, and some lesbian women attracted to butch lumberjack women.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
To be fair, I don't think most people's AI-dar is well-calibrated in either direction.
I recently had the frustrating experience of being accused of using AI to write some posts on Reddit, even though I did not use AI. The OP blocked me, and I learned first-hand how annoying Reddit's implementation of block is, because I kept getting notifications when people replied to my posts in the OP's thread, but when I clicked the notifications Reddit pretended the thread didn't exist. I had to log out to see that the thread wasn't, in fact, broken.
I didn't even get the chance to defend myself regarding the supposed AI usage. The OP just decided I was using AI after a few posts (their evidence was that I supposedly wrote in "ridiculously long paragraphs" and had posted in AI subs in the past), and then blocked me, effectively ceding the whole discussion to the other side of the argument in that thread.
Obviously, a false positive like this isn't the end of the world, but it will be annoying going forward if everyone's good faith efforts to argue an unpopular opinion on Reddit somewhere gets them accused of AI usage and blocked.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I wasn't nerd sniped by the Renee Good case the way those here on the Motte were - it just didn't interest me that much, which is why I only had a few marginal comments in that thread despite reading much of it. I will say that it seemed like partisans on both sides saw what they wanted to see in the Good video, which is why I have enough intellectual humility to admit that I could literally not be seeing what I think I am seeing.
I'm even trying to come up with ways DHS might not be lying. Maybe the 200 people were a few blocks away, also protesting/observing/disrupting ICE activities, and they heard the gunshots or where contacted by observers and descended on the scene shortly afterwards? I don't know. I would very much like to hear more details about this supposed riot, especially if there is any video evidence of it to be had.
And there's a little weirdness in the phrasing of this tweet, like "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted." (emphasis mine) It seemed to me like the suspect was successfully disarmed, moments before they shot him. But maybe there's a second weapon they haven't told us about yet, and didn't think was worth including in their tweet?
I'll be honest, if the "sig misfire" or "reaching for the gun" thing don't pan out, this shoot seems a lot less justified to me. But maybe my brain has just been poisoned by partisanship, despite my best efforts.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Admittedly, I could have phrased it better, but "the gun" in my sentence is meant to be "[the suspect's own, possibly concealed, second] gun [that the officer couldn't rule out that the suspect had until it was too late]", not the officer's gun. I don't think anyone is claiming the suspect reached for the officer's gun.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Here is what the Department of Homeland Security had to say on X/Twitter. (Alternative link for those without accounts.) Copying the text here:
At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.
The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.
Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement.
This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming.
I'm, uh, not sure I believe them. Like, I saw the videos and maybe he was technically resisting arrest, but I didn't really see "an individual [who] wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." And I suppose it is possible 200 rioters arrived after the videos we have, but it doesn't really look like 200 people are even in the vicinity in the shots we have.
Should I believe my lying eyes here, or is this another case of Point Deer, Make Horse in action?
I'm even open to the "Sig misfire" and "reached for the gun" narratives (though on the latter point, it really doesn't look to me like he is reaching for the gun, but I'm open to the idea that the officer saw a hand twitch that was less obvious to me in the video I've seen and thought he might be reaching for a second concealed firearm), but when their initial attempt to control the narrative is so absurd, I honestly have to question why I'm bending over backwards to be reasonable and give them the benefit of the doubt?
At some point am I just saying, "Well, I don't know. The animal doesn't really look like a horse to me, but I can't definitively rule out that it's a horse I guess..." Feels like a good way to fail the loyalty test in both directions. Maybe I should just say it's a horse, and keep my head down.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
He wouldn't have gotten immigration enforcement nationwide; he would have only gotten immigration enforcement in red areas.
I disagree.
If all Trump wanted to do was enforce immigration nationwide, having hundreds of small operations in the interior that were not announced ahead of time would be a better way to do it. Surely, the element of surprise is important, and is not something you obtain by making a big announcement that you're about to send 2000 guys into a city. That, to me, seems like a way to guarantee two results: 1) some illegal immigrants are going to flee to other places and lie low while the enforcement is in place, and 2) locals are going to try and find and confront ICE agents.
Maybe Trump just is so much of a showman that he can't help but step on his own feet when it comes to immigration enforcement, but I find it more plausible that the current outcome was expected and part of the point.
What you are asking is for the right to only govern their own when they are in charge, while the left gets to govern everyone.
I'm not asking for anything. I basically agree with the idea that Trump ran on immigration and so should have some latitude to enforce the laws, regardless of how much of an immigration hawk I am. I am saying that a Trump that wanted to actually enforce immigration laws would not be doing what he is doing now.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Didn't both sides kind of want this?
Trump could have gone full throttle enforcement of immigration laws within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders, and then done a bunch of small, targeted operations within the country's interior, publicizing the expelling of big criminals from the interior every time he did it, and he would have gotten most of the benefits of his current immigration policy, with fewer opportunities for leftists to get in his way.
While the current operation sending 2000 ICE agents to a Blue city 250 miles from the Canadian border is completely legitimate as a matter of law, I think it is a tactical mistake unless we assume this fanfare is exactly what Trump wanted.
And the Blue tribe are eager to make martyrs of their own. It fires up their base, and lets them cathartically live out their fantasies of being rebels and revolutionaries while changing very little.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?
Setting aside the object level question of the incident here, the state having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force does not mean that all use of force by the state is legitimate.
Part of what legitimizes the state monopoly on violence is the assurance that if agents of the state step out of line, they will theoretically be punished. For example, police enforcing drug laws is a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, regardless of how any given individual feels about drug laws. But police planting drugs on someone to justify an arrest, is not a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, and should be punished by a state that is interested in maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.
Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate. Until we have a literally omnipotent government with infinite state capacity, the vast majority of a law's power comes from voluntary compliance. People see that the posted speed limit is 50, use some heuristics to see how likely enforcement is, and compromise by driving 55 miles an hour. Speed cameras and automated enforcement could change things, but there is some level of enforcement short of the most severe draconian enforcement that gets the most voluntary and happily willing compliance from the vast majority of the population.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
But ICE is going to different neighborhoods. While I would expect repeat harassers/protestors for a given geographic region, I would also expect a lot of churn from people only sticking their necks our for their own neighborhood and local community. I find it extremely plausible that you will get multiple true positives here as a result.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Do you believe "warning a felon of police presence" is the best analogy for the average case of people warning illegal immigrants about ICE? Isn't unlawful presence a civil offense, and a first offense illegal entry into the US a federal misdemeanor, so nowhere near as bad as a felony from a legal standpoint?
If you compared it to another non-felony, like having the fines from an overdue library book going to collections, do you believe that warning your buddy that a debt collector is going to their house should not be allowed under the First Amendment? Even if you think such a warning is anti-social and breaks the social contract of paying fines or debts that you accrue, surely you can see that the choice of analogy biases the analysis here?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Are you accounting for repeated encounters? A person is presumably removed by ICE only once, while protesters repeatedly interact with ICE agents, allowing for multiple accusations of being a part of ICE.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I've also implicitly compared them to Lovecraftian horrors and hive-minded vampires in this same thread. I'm not sure why you're hammering this point. It isn't a gotcha, it is built into what I am saying.
And I wouldn't say "blame" is the correct word here. I said it is noble to be Socrates or Helvidius Priscus and die for your beliefs. That isn't blame. I just personally think that there is more wisdom in being Plato or Maimonides. People are allowed to disagree with me, and turn themselves into Socrates or Helvidius Priscus.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.
I think there's a good chance that Classical Liberalism is dead in America. I had a little hope that the right might try to revive it, but Trump 2 has clearly not brought anything like a bedrock of Classical Liberalism back to our politics. If we're going to have to suffer under the rule of identity politics from the Right or the Left anyways, might as well start quietly building the foundations for a better society like Kolmogorov, and not worry about what we can't control.
Of course, this is all acting with some assumption that something like a normal human society exists in a few decades, and I don't rule out the possibility that AI may prove to be a total game changer in numerous hard to predict directions.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle.
I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.
I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.
Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture
I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.
The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.
It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.
Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".
I don't believe that right-wingers are just mentally deficient.
My belief is closer to "agonistic pluralism" or the idea that within society there's a tendency for the struggle between various personality phenotypes to result in better outcomes overall. You need a certain amount of openness in society, but too much can lead to bad outcomes. You need a certain amount of fear of the Other, but too much can lead to bad outcomes.
I think there are plenty of historical examples to learn from. Look at Rome conquering Greece militarily, and then being "conquered" by Greek philosophical thought. Would Cato the Elder, who famously spoke out against Greek philosophy as un-Roman, have been happy to learn that his grandson, Cato the Younger, was the poster boy for Stoic martyrdom two generations later? I think for us non-Romans looking back, we can see that it was a mixed bag. The Greeks had a lot of good ideas, and Rome importing them probably helped them transition from a Republic to an Empire, and maintain their new system for hundreds of years, but it did come at the cost of being "less Roman" than the generation of Cato the Elder in some sense.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that we'll always get the perfect balance of struggle at all times. In fact, I'm worried that various trends of modernity might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs for us.
For example, I suspect that men and women in heterosexual relationships had a tendency to "balance each other out" personality-wise in the past, and the increasing number of single men and women and the nightmare of the modern dating scene is leading to this balancing not happening. So we get women flying off into extremes of Progressivism and Leftism, and men flying off into extremes of Rightism. And honestly, I don't like either tendency. I was against Wokeism, and I'm against Trumpist identity politics as well.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along. See also Leo Strauss, and his idea that great thinkers of the past were often esoteric and hid their actual ideas for only the smartest to find and deal with.
I think our relatively free and open era has spoiled a lot of us. We chafe against any limits on our abilities to say whatever we want and not have the people around us react with social opprobrium. And yet, Plato, writing one generation after Socrates was executed for his open practice of philosophy, is supposed to have said in his seventh letter, 'I have never written down my true beliefs.'
I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.
Don't get me wrong, there's value in being a Socrates or a Helvidius Priscus, and being willing to die for your beliefs, while speaking truth to power. But there is also value in being a Plato or (as Strauss sees them) a Maimonides or a Machiavelli, and hiding your true views from all except a vanishingly small number of highly discerning readers. Luckily, the internet is still anonymous enough that I think we get a great compromise: able to be open about our beliefs in places like the Motte, and able to be Straussians/take the Kolmogorov option everywhere else in our lives.
In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.
I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.
My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience. I think this also explains a lot of the increasing urban-rural divide in American politics, with people often self-sorting based on their genetic predisposition to cosmopolitanism and tribalism.
Unfortunately for the tribalists, there are a lot of benefits to city living due to networking effects, and so, generally speaking, city folk enjoy a higher standard of living than rural folk in the modern day. Since rural folk will have a higher genetic predisposition towards tribalism, this leads to growing resentment at their "unfair" status compared to urban elites, in a cycle that just gets worse and worse as the genetic ability to be cosmopolitan leaves rural breeding stock with each generation, leaving those who are left behind less and less able to cut it in the city.
It's not that rural people are genetically inferior. They're well suited to a small, close-knit tribal environment that was the human norm for 2 million years, but in the last 10,000 years the equation has flipped and cosmopolitanism generally outcompetes tribalism over the long term, and so humans keep building cities, and rural folk keep losing out and being xenophobic about the cosmopolitan urban areas.
I actually think H.P. Lovecraft is a great example of this phenotype. He was undoubtedly a genius, but with many of his aliens I find myself wondering if there isn't some way we could team up with them in a vast, galactic civilization? For example, the starfish-headed elder things and the mi-go seem like species we could eventually reach some sort of understanding with. Similarly, the underground K'n-yan seem like people we could get along with, under the right circumstances. And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)
But Lovecraft's horror was so effective because he understood the danger the Other posed. One of his most racist stories, "The Horror at Red Hook", which is partially inspired by his time living in New York city, is all about the effect that immigrant populations have on a native-born population. And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
But even when the US didn't formally declare war, Congress has generally implicitly consented to military actions by the president by agreeing to fund them.
Congress didn't do that here.
More options
Context Copy link