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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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If macron got caught sexting a minor on American soil, do you think he’d be boing to jail? Sirskiy? Mark Rutte? British royals?

I think the kid gloves are just ‘cabinet official in a major U.S. ally’. Whether that alliance serves US interests is another matter.

Macron is a head of state which means he has diplomatic immunity. Royals enjoy similar and very long lived privileges.

Random ministers and secretaries, even members of parliaments, unless specifically acting as diplomats do not and should not enjoy immunity from prosecution for crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of a foreign state.

You're either so important putting you in jail could start a war or you are not.

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.

As an example, deployed US soldiers and others stationed in allied nations often get processed by the American (UCMJ, as appropriate) justice system. It's obviously unfortunate when it happens, and sometimes leads to local protests and upset local officials, but at the high level neither side sees it as worth ending the arrangement (historically, "better US troops than Soviet ones", I'm sure). See the death of Harry Dunn in the UK and various incidents in Okinawa and Germany.

I'm not here to defend the process, merely to note that it happens.

There's a lot of space between "Ending the relationship" and "Don't even mention it."

Lodging formal complaints, and making public that they are doing so to assuage public concern, can lead to Israel telling its government officials do not diddle kids.

If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail. Obviously on a diplomatic mission is a different story be he was not on a diplomatic visa.

The "major U.S. ally" schtick is really starting to run its course. It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally. Israeli-born Sigal Chattah is just super passionate about US alliances right...

If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail.

What if the head of the French DGSE was on a recreational / personal visit to the US on a non-diplomatic visa? I have no doubt he would quickly be allowed to return to France under significant diplomatic pressure. Why? Because the leverage of going to US jail as a foreign sex predator is enough to get almost anyone to say anything, and he would know a lot of things, and everybody knows it.

It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally.

How is this different (in fact it’s far smaller scale) than senior Saudi royals and those affiliated with the bin Ladens being allowed to leave the US immediately after 9/11 while US airspace was closed to all commercial air traffic and almost all private traffic? You will say they weren’t charged with a crime, but given the circumstances involved that is a largely circular argument.

Do you expect the USA to press charges against prince Andrew?

Can you point to any other diplomatic personnel or senior political staffers of first world countries who have been arrested in the U.S. for sex-related crimes? Don't we sort of take it for granted that people in power are fucking deviant horndogs - isn't it a totally normal headline that prostitutes/escorts "descend" upon Davos and similar major-power conference locations?

The correct comparison here would be a non-diplomatic foreign government official from a friendly country. A good comparison here is actually the Harry Dunn case in the UK. An American government official without diplomatic immunity killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road. She was released with the expectation that she would show up to court. It turned into a big diplomatic mess because the US government smuggled her out of the country on a military plane and tried to retroactively claim diplomatic immunity under a highly questionable legal interpretation.

The expectation especially among friendly countries is that foreign government officials who are charged with a crime will respect the laws of their host country and show up for court. This is especially true among first-world democracies with trustworthy legal systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn

I would think you should be the one pointing to other foreigners who were here not on a diplomatic visa who were arrested and charged with trying to have sex with a minor and then were just inexplicably allowed to leave the country with pending felony charges.

Roman Polanski; Chinese billionaire Richard Liu; the Saudis have a habit of having their government bail out their nationals after their arrests, including for rape and child porn...

Neither Polanski or Liu are examples of that. Liu was released due to lack of evidence. Polanski got a sweetheart deal like the Epstein case. The Saudi cases are far closer to this example, but still seem to be different:

That student, Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, was freed from a Portland jail after the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles gave him $100,000 to cover his $1 million bail. He surrendered his passport and driver’s license to Homeland Security officials. But on a Saturday afternoon in June 2017, two weeks before Noorah was to go on trial for manslaughter, a large, black SUV picked him up at the home where he was staying and spirited him away. His ankle monitoring bracelet was later found by the roadside; a week later, he was back in Saudi Arabia — a fact that the authorities in Oregon did not learn until more than a year later.

Federal officials would not discuss their evidence in the case, but they said they believe it shows that the Saudi government helped Noorah flee the country. Investigators suspect that Saudi operatives provided the student with a replacement passport and may also have arranged for him to escape on a private jet, officials of the U.S. Marshals Service said.

... It is generally not possible to leave the United States by plane without a passport. National security officials said it was implausible that young Saudis on the run could obtain replacement passports or travel into Mexico by land without help. They suspect that Saudi operatives accompany or guide the fugitives.

The Saudi Embassy, unlike many others, routinely posts bail and hires criminal defense lawyers for its citizens when they are accused of crimes in the United States. But Nazer, the embassy spokesman, said it does not “issue travel documents to citizens engaged in legal proceedings.”

Danik, one of the former FBI officials who served in Riyadh, recalled dealing with cases of Saudis who fled despite the fact that U.S. courts had seized their passports. “I remember in some cases local police and U.S.-based FBI agents were angry,” he said. They would call the legal attache’s office in Riyadh afterward asking: ‘How did he get out of the U.S.?’ I told them if they’d have notified us beforehand, I could've possibly filed an affidavit opposing bail because Saudis arrested in the U.S. were often a flight risk.

So his passport was revoked and he was given an ankle bracelet. The escape involved a replaced passport and more coordination. This is not an escape where the US government is arguably looking the other way, this is the US Government letting him keep his passport and leave the country. And still the Saudi cases invite scrutiny with many demanding accountability. It's a different story here to say the least.

Steve Bannon's passport was seized when he was charged with Contempt of Congress... This is not SOP and is not even the case with these Saudi fugitives.

So you've got lots of examples, but obviously no one case will be exactly the same, so you can nitpick endlessly to claim somehow this one was unique and special because Jews. You have failed so far to meet the challenge of offering anything other than "Jews" as evidence.

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