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Notes -
Another case of culture war cancellation dropped, this time somewhat more important than the usual cases.
The case of Nicolas Guillou, French judge at the ICC, cancelled by Marco Rubio personally.
If your French is not sufficient, here is Xitter summary.
Can it happen to you?
Not in this way, not even the most IRL important mottizen is worthy of Marco's personal attention.
If it happens, it will happen because AI analyzed your online activity and decided it crossed a threshold of dangerous nihilist extremism (and you could do about it just as much as Nicolas Guillou, this means nothing at all.)
Regardless of your feelings about Netanyahu's actions as PM of Israel, he is a democratically elected head of state who took office in a free and fair election. This is the first time the ICC has ever been so bold as to issue a warrant for a leader who meets that definition (prior recipients such as Putin and Gadhafi mostly dont even bother to wave the fig leaf of democracy), and IMO sets a terrible, no-good, very bad precedent that should be treated with utter contempt by all peace-loving denizens of the world.
Issuing an actual international arrest warrant because you don't like what the leader of a democracy is doing is dangerous and destabilizing to the norms of international behavior. The only people who can get away with it are those who have enough actual international muscle to shake up the playing field, and the ICC definitely fails that test. Our robed man of excessively signaled virtue fucked around and is now finding out. This is a good thing.
Obviously the ICC and the rest of the internationalist crowd continues to believe (just as they did in 2003 when W invaded Iraq) that national sovereignty must give way to international law. Waving around the democratic mandate of the Israeli government is totally irrelevant to the question, given they don't believe that the nation itself has such authority. Quibbling about how it's constituted is besides the point.
They're pretty obviously wrong, but it is important to actually understand the core of their position (even if we all disagree with it). It would be impossible for them to concede that a national leader has impunity if he can demonstrate sufficient democratic mandate -- indeed it makes a mockery of the entire conception of international law as vindicating universal and inalienable human rights. They can't just say "well they're inalienable unless the guy alienating them won an election" -- that's an untenable position.
I'd take the case against international law more seriously here if there were any politically significant actors who abstained on principle from invoking it to condemn their geopolitical enemies as well. I find the rank hypocrisy morally more revolting than any object-level "violation of international law".
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