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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23384 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/

Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

  1. Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?

  2. The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."

Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?

I continue to believe that Trump is the real anti-war president, as I did when he bombed an Iranian general, and indeed as I did when he bombed Iran. I will freely agree that he is not as anti-war as I would prefer, but he has in fact been more anti-war than any other president in my lifetime.

I "square the circle" by noting the fact that he has, to date, not initiated any large-scale wars, even in circumstances that it seems likely other presidents would have. A good example would be his bombing of Iran, followed promptly by him announcing that there was no need for further engagement, and actually declining to engage further, following which the ongoing and escalating war actually petered out.

By that logic, Biden should be the real anti-war president. He didn't bomb anyone we weren't already bombing, got us out of a war, and wasn't making threats against Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada.

Biden presided and bears responsibility for the meatgrinder kicking off in Ukraine. He was the one person who may have stopped it and had the authority to do so, but he didn't bc he is a vegetable and bought into the consensus that America is the only sovereign country that has legitimate security interests.

Probably at least 750,000 soldiers and 30-40,000 civilians are dead. Ultimately it's could go up to a million - all in a war whose outcome was, after the chaotic initial months, utterly predictable. Russians weren't bluffing and nobody lucid with half a clue would have expected them to bluff, same as nobody lucid would expect Americans to 'only bluff' in reaction to a Chinese color revolution succeeding in Canada, promptly followed by a defensive pact announcement.

Oh please. Russia has a long history of invading their neighbors under flimsy pretenses and taking effective control over the area for decades. They started on Ukraine in 2014 with Crimea, spent the entirety of 2014-2022 destabilizing the eastern region using plainclothed soldiers and separatist puppets, played "mediator" to try to force Ukraine to stop interfering with the separatists, and finally amped up to war when Ukraine didn't sit by and let the separatists break the agreements while they abide by them.

Trump had 4 years to take a shot at it as well. He sent some weapons, but otherwise was more interested in getting Ukraine to investigate Hunter.

Russia bears responsibility as the aggressor Not Americans for bolstering the defenders. Apparently the Ukrainians weren't bluffing about their willingness to grind Russians.

Two additional wars did in fact kick off during his tenure.

And he did in fact escalate our involvement in those conflicts. And of course the ongoing joke that U.S. tax dollars funded both sides of Israel-Palestine.

No problem granting credit where credit is due, but let us not pretend that defense contractors were starved for business due to an unprecedented outbreak of peace and harmony from 2020-2024.

If we wanted to really push the point, the Biden admin can be attributed with a lapse in military recruiting. I'm interested in perspectives on whether this is good or bad for the antiwar position, but one possible explanation for it is people expected that we might get into a shooting war which makes military recruitment less appealing when the homeland isn't at stake.

Anyhow, don't want to get dragged into the weeds on this just yet. Ample time for Trump to get us embroiled in, e.g., Venezuela or Taiwan or some heretofore unexpected conflict.

The most antiwar president imaginable has no control over whether other countries decide to start wars.

...you say that, but Trump has clearly had some influence on when they decide to end them.

At least, THEY give him credit.

Is it just possible that those other countries take the existence and nature of the U.S. President into account in determining their military activities?

I consider this a serious argument, and have praised and defended Biden regarding the Afghanistan pullout debacle for precisely this reason. The weightiest counter-argument, in my opinion, would be his administration's handling of the Ukraine conflict, and his administration's continuity with the Obama administration. I would not consider these counter-arguments decisive by any means. I am very frustrated with the first Trump administration's inability to end the war in Afghanistan, and appalled by the degree to which the senior brass lied to and disobeyed his orders to keep their pocket wars going.

There's "Anti-War" in the sense they studiously avoid military activities of all stripes... then there's "Anti-War" in the sense that they will happily perform a handful of sharp, limited engagements calculated to avoid a protracted conflict.

I still prefer the Ron Paulist 'non-interventionism' approach, but yeah, he's been avoiding any boots on the ground actions and he seems to love few things more than brokering a stand-down between rivals that minimizes further violence.

If he manages to get the Ukraine war stopped, in a way that doesn't effectively cede Ukraine to direct Russian control, he's objectively the most deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace prize since Gorbachev (i.e. since 1990).

And you damn well know he's gunning for that prize since Obama has one.

Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal, striking the boat and killing a bunch and letting the rest drown or be eaten by sharks is fine and legal. But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?

I could see being upset about the initial strike, if there was another available option to intercept the boat, try the drug dealers, and hang them under law. It is better to go the extra mile to show you aren't making mistakes and accidentally striking innocent boaters.

But making the second strike the point of outrage? Yawn, don't care.

Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal

No, that relies on novel legal theory that dealing drugs is a form of terrorism, which seems highly dubious to me.

I think there is some irony here in that most of the (left, I assume) folks up in arms about the Trump administration taking kinetic actions against drug smugglers probably also take a very dim view of Western actions during/leading into the Opium Wars [1]. I certainly think China is at least viewing this all through a lens that sees that history more prominently.

  1. "Why did the Qing have concerns about undocumented European pharmacists? Because they went woke."

The steelman for the "Drug dealers = Terrorists" position is that it isn't the drug dealing that makes them terrorists.

Its all the other violent activities they do that are incidental to dealing drugs which are pretty isomorphic to terrorist activities, even if motivated more by profit than ideology.

I think that in fact has been the argument since Tom Clancy wrote a fictional take on it in 1989.

The Justice Department, for instance, charges cartels with "Drug Trafficking" as a separate offense from "Narco-Terrorism" and "Material Support of Terrorism."

According to court documents, since its inception the Beltran Leyva faction has been considered one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations to operate in Mexico, engaging in shootouts, murders, kidnappings, torture and violent collection of drug debts to sustain its operations.

So its not so much a 'novel legal theory' as one that hasn't been rigorously tested before a Judge.

Yeap, should have pulled a Batman and just say “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you”

Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.

Simply firing two missiles at the boat would not be a war crime (well, there’s an argument to be made that these operations in general constitute extrajudicial executions more than warfare, I personally have mixed thoughts about it, but obviously for this discussion we’re assuming the combat itself is legitimate). The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off. This is unambiguously a war crime today and has always been considered egregious misconduct. Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.

The concept is the same as how you don’t shoot at a pilot who has ejected from a shot-down plane, and is therefore no longer part of the battle. If you kill him in the process of shooting him down, c’est la vie, but if he bails out and you circle back to blow him away on his parachute, that’s beyond the pale.

Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime,

I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, I'm pretty sure that if the ship still has significant ability to fight despite it's disability, a belligerent would be permitted, under the rules of war, to continue attacking the ship until it no longer poses a threat. Even if the continued attacks will inevitably result in crew deaths.

In my experience, the rules of war contain very few bright line safe harbor rules. Because such rules inevitably would invite abuse.

That being said, I am happy to consider your claim with an open mind. Can you please provide a specific cite to the provision of international law which you believe applies here?

The crime is from firing once, confirming the boat is disabled and sinking, noticing survivors in the water, then firing again to finish them off.

If this is your claim, that it's a war crime to specifically attack the survivors of a ship that is disabled and sinking, then this is a more defensible position. But note that you changed two facts: (1) you changed the ship from merely "disabled" to "disabled and sinking"; and (2) you changed the attack from one which knowingly killed the crew (but perhaps was done for other reasons) to one where the point of the follow-up attack was to kill the surviving crew.

So I guess I would ask you to set forth what exactly you believe to be a war crime. Because I suspect you are setting up a motte and bailey argument. An attack directed at surviving crew of a disabled and sinking ship can be argued to be a war crime, but it's pretty unlikely that's what happened here. A follow-up attack on a partially disabled ship (which happened to kill the remaining crew) is more likely what actually happened, but that's much harder to argue to be a war crime.

So again: What is the exact war crime you are alleging here and do you have a cite?

Appreciate the thoughtful response -- I don't think we actually disagree very much here.

I'm pretty sure that if the ship still has significant ability to fight despite it's disability, a belligerent would be permitted, under the rules of war, to continue attacking the ship until it no longer poses a threat. Even if the continued attacks will inevitably result in crew deaths.

Agreed. I was using "disabled" to mean "firmly out of action", i.e. removed from combat and neutralized as a threat. So:

If this is your claim, that it's a war crime to specifically attack the survivors of a ship that is disabled and sinking, then this is a more defensible position.

The ship literally sinking is not necessarily part of my claim, it could be dead in the water, but I agree that if the enemy ship is still moving or shooting it is plainly a legitimate target. I would phrase my claim as "it is a war crime to intentionally attack the surviving crew of a ship which has been neutralized or sunk."

Can you please provide a specific cite to the provision of international law which you believe applies here?

I am not a lawyer and at best an armchair historian, but yes, I was able to find this portion of the Geneva Conventions, which should at least be illustrative: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gcii-1949/article-12/commentary/2017. This comes from the 1949 version of the Conventions; I believe that there is some similar provision in older versions or in some other older treaty, I think from the Hague in 1899, but I couldn't immediately find a source for that. It is considered applicable today, in any case. I also believe there are similar provisions in some other treaties (e.g. UNCLOS) but again I think the Geneva Conventions are illustrative enough on their own (also, if memory serves, the USA is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions but not of UNCLOS anyway). I am fairly confident that what is formalized in the Geneva Conventions was considered the proper way of doing things by custom for a long time, but I admittedly don't have a source at hand for that, it's just from my vaguely recollected history knowledge. Regardless, the historical aspect is only tangential to what is being discussed here.

Anyway. The relevant portion is the discussion of "wounded, sick, and shipwrecked" combatants, under Article 12. The set of [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] is used throughout the convention as a coherent category, and in short the point of the convention is that [wounded, sick, and shipwrecked] enemy personnel should be rescued as POWs and given medical attention, to the best of the ability of the prisoner-taking side, and generally treated as required by all other protections for POWs. This is all pretty clear and straightforward, so what is at issue here is who counts as "shipwrecked". This is defined as follows:

“shipwrecked” means persons, … who are in peril at sea or in other waters as a result of misfortune affecting them or the vessel or aircraft carrying them and who refrain from any act of hostility

Further:

A person does not need to be in an acutely life- or health-threatening situation to be ‘shipwrecked’ for the purposes of Article 12. Persons who find themselves involuntarily in the water or on board a burning ship are covered.

And:

Persons on a fully disabled ship, or a ship that has run aground, whose situation is dangerous but not necessarily imminently life-threatening, are also covered, as long as they also refrain from any act of hostility

So, this quite directly supports my claim. If a US Navy officer ordered a follow-up strike on a neutralized ship in order to kill its crew, that would indeed be a war crime. Crucially, for the act to be criminal, the victorious party must knowingly fire on a disabled ship, and that's what's really at issue in the present case. The Geneva Convention discusses repeatedly that it is important for the defeated crew to be "refraining from hostilities", which generally seems to be interpreted as not firing (not remotely at issue here) and not maneuvering or otherwise attempting to complete a mission. This is what I was trying to get at in my first post. If the Navy simply fired two missiles at the boat, one after the other, that clearly would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, believed it to still be operational, then fired again to sink it, this would not be a war crime. If the Navy fired on the boat, confirmed through surveillance that it was disabled but had survivors, then fired again to finish off the crew, this would be a war crime.

You dismiss the second case as "pretty unlikely", but that is exactly what the Navy/DoD is being accused of doing, which is why it is being treated as a Big Deal. In previous strikes on drug boats the Navy has released very clear targeting footage from drones and other aircraft showing the weapon impacts and aftermath, so it's unrealistic to think that they outright could not see the boat. In the absence of any released targeting footage it is impossible for the public to determine conclusively whether a war crime was committed. All we know for a fact is that two missiles were fired at the boat. If targeting footage shows two swift impacts that would plainly disprove a war crime. If targeting footage shows an impact, then a clear view of a burning boat with crew either on the deck or in the water, then another impact, that would prove a war crime, or at least would be very strong evidence. They would have to somehow prove that the second shot was fired without knowing that the boat was disabled and/or without knowing there were surviving crew members.

If targeting footage shows two swift impacts that would plainly disprove a war crime. If targeting footage shows an impact, then a clear view of a burning boat with crew either on the deck or in the water, then another impact, that would prove a war crime, or at least would be very strong evidence. They would have to somehow prove that the second shot was fired without knowing that the boat was disabled and/or without knowing there were surviving crew members.

I've heard talk the the survivors reboarded the not-disabled boat and tried to recover the drugs cargo. If that is true, does it moot everything you've said thus far?

You can see the pictures now, they've released some of them. It was obviously a drug running boat, and the only reason it would be something else is if they were running guns instead.

The relevant portion is the discussion of "wounded, sick, and shipwrecked" combatants, under Article 12.

Apparently Article 13 sets forth the list of persons that would be protected under Article 12. I am skeptical that drug smugglers would be considered protected persons, but anyway . . .

So, this quite directly supports my claim. If a US Navy officer ordered a follow-up strike on a neutralized ship in order to kill its crew, that would indeed be a war crime. Crucially, for the act to be criminal, the victorious party must knowingly fire on a disabled ship, and that's what's really at issue in the present case.

Here's a question for you: Suppose the US were in a bona fide war with another signatory to the applicable Geneva convention. Suppose further that the enemy's merchant marine were transporting vital war materials on the high seas and it was important to us to stop these war materials from moving. Suppose further that our first strike against the transporting vessel rendered it inoperable but the war materials were still salvageable and there was a genuine concern that the enemy would salvage the war materials. In that case, can we agree that it would be permitted to launch further strikes against the disabled ship even if doing so would necessarily kill surviving members of the enemy's merchant marine?

This is, in substance, the unrestricted submarine warfare debate.

If a surface warship has found an unescorted enemy merchantman, or driven the escorts off a convoy, it is in sufficient control of the situation that it can reasonably be expected to hail the target, board it, seize the ship, the cargo, or both, and take crew prisoner if necessary. (Warships carry much larger crews than merchant ships). If the merchantman doesn't respond to a hail and gets fired on, the warship is able to rescue survivors and either seize the cargo or allow it to go down with the crippled ship - including if necessary by using a deck gun to pound the crippled ship into flotsam after the crew have successfully evacuated.

If a submarine finds an unescorted enemy merchantman, it could in principle offer the same courtesy (and occasionally in WW1 this actually happened - WW1-era torpedoes were unreliable and you didn't have many of them, so allowing the crew to evacuate and then sinking the ship with the deck gun was the way to go). But obviously the sub doesn't have the ability to seize cargo or take survivors on board in the way a surface ship would so the crew are left drifting in a lifeboat.

But more realistically, the submarine normally has a sound military reason for hitting and running - either the aim is to torpedo a merchant ship in a convoy without being spotted by the escorting destroyer, or to attack an unescorted merchant ship in an area where enemy destroyers are operating so you want to get away fast before one shows up. So in practice, when you use submarines to interdict enemy merchant shipping (which was the main use case for submarines in both world wars) you are sending merchant ships to the bottom with all hands on board. Given the customs of the sea that would later be institutionalised in the 2nd GC, the vast majority of sailors (including plenty of uncucked naval officers) saw unrestricted submarine warfare as per se perfidious and/or piratical. British Admiral Arthur Wilson favoured hanging submariners as pirates, leading to a backlash and ultimately to British submarines proudly flying the Jolly Rodger - the most recent example being HMS Conqueror when it returned to port after sinking the Belgrano in the Falklands War. Ultimately, the world's navies decided that USW was too militarily useful to be illegal, and Donitz was acquitted on that charge at Nuremberg.

Using small drones operated from a safe distance is more like submarine warfare than surface warfare - you don't have the resources to do things the old-school way so if you want to effectively interdict the commerce in illegal narcotics, you have to be willing to send boats to the bottom with all hands. A surface navy or coast guard officer who sank a boat with all hands "to send a message" when he was on the scene and able to board would be considered a moral monster by everyone who has ever set sail - and doubly so if he took a second shot on a crippled boat to make sure it sank without rescuing the crew. This is quite apart from any criminal liability under the UCMJ or 2nd GC - naval law implements sailors' understanding of morality.

Here we have a case where the US has admitted that they could have interdicted the drug boats the old school way with a surface warship, but chose to use drones. Hegseth said that the point was to use lethal force which wasn't strictly necessary "to send a message", which, regardless of legal technicalities, is evilmaxxing for the evulz from the perspective of maritime custom and tradition. If Hegseth is bullshitting and the real motivation is to interdict more boats with less resources, then this is in the territory of "is USW militarily necessary in a way which overrides sailors' gut feeling that it is piratical?"

This is, in substance, the unrestricted submarine warfare debate.

Umm, does that mean "yes"?

Here we have a case where the US has admitted that they could have interdicted the drug boats the old school way with a surface warship, but chose to use drones. Hegseth said that the point was to use lethal force which wasn't strictly necessary "to send a message",

Would you mind linking me to the source of your quote? I am skeptical.

I made a mistake - it was Rubio and not Hegseth. I found it on Lawfare Media. Googling gives many examples of MSM coverage such as this in Politico, although I note that most of the MSM articles don't use quotes, so it is possibly a paraphrase.

More comments

Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.

War crime conventions apply to uniformed soldiers and civilians. A core portion of the legal argument for these attacks is that these boats are not uniformed military (obviously) nor civilians (obviously) and are instead nonuniform guerrilla terrorists who fail to abide by any conduct contemplated in any war crimes regime the US has adopted.

Under modern customs, irregular combatants are not considered total outlaws and are still expected to be treated properly as POWs. I'm not sure if this is explicitly codified in international law or in US military policy, but it is certainly the general case. For example, even when fighting Al Qaeda or the Taliban, coalition forces were not allowed to summarily execute surrendering enemies (which is essentially what the Navy is being accused of in this case). The clearest example of this is the case from a few years back where an Australian special operations unit was found to have executed a group of Taliban prisoners because they could not fit them into their helicopter. The fact that the Taliban troops were neither regular military nor civilians did not protect the Australian soldiers from prosecution.

This doesn't even get into the question of whether the drug runners should really be classed as "combatants" in the first place as opposed to merely "criminals". If they are properly classified as criminals then these strikes are summary executions (or arguably just murder), not legitimate combat, and would be illegal anyway... but that's not really what's at issue here.

No one seems to know what is really at issue. You have a bunch of folks pointing out military codes and treaties. You have other people just handwaving. You have other people citing laws about piracy. Given that the "this is illegal" side has deployed so many different niche legal theories that seem to routinely fall apart upon full interrogation, I think we've gotten to the point of clarity that this is an "arguments as soldiers" situation, and some people just want more Coke and Venezuelans in the US.

If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:

  • What is the appropriate level of force to be used when interdicting drug smuggling outside US waters? Or to be pithy, is the War on Drugs a real war like World War 2, or is it a metaphorical war like the War on Poverty?
  • Who decides? Is this an inherent Article 2 power of the President, or is it subject to Congress' power to declare war and to regulate land and naval forces?
  • Does all this form part of a cunning plan on the part of the Trump administration to start a war against Venezuela?

For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:

  • It is a real war.
  • Congress decided by passing the AUMF
  • It was part of a cunning plan to start a war with Iraq. The Deep State and pro-establishment Democrats were in on the plan alongside the Bush administration. It turned out to be a pretty poor plan.

After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".

But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.

You and others (u/UwU , /u/haversoe) are ignoring both the letter of the law and spirit of the law. The letter of the law (such as Geneva article 3 -- https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/article-3 ) does not apply to pirates or criminals at sea. They are not a member of armed forces, they never signed the conventions, they are not on the territory of a signing state, they do not get protected.

The spirit of the law is that international law is basically a gentleman's agreement (often observed in the breach), the cooperate quadrant of a prisoner's dilemma to make war slightly more awful. If an enemy unit has been completely defanged, and I capture them instead of killing them, that costs me little, and if my opponent does the same to my troops, we are both much better off because fewer men die unnecessarily. Therefore, it is in my interest to make an agreement with my opponent and order by officers to obey the agreement so that our men are given similar treatment. The spirit of the law is furthermore that members of official armed forces are usually decent, good, productive men, often with families, who are doing the right thing in serving their country, and even if they are on the wrong side of the war, will be productive citizens in the future and it will be tragedy for any more to die than necessary. They are not criminals. The parachuter who we rescue and imprison instead of shooting, may go on to have a great life.

Whereas with drug runners and pirates, we are not in a gentlemen's agreement with them, and we do not want to preserve their life. I could really care less if they are just excuted on the spot, left to be eaten by the sharks, or brought home to be hung. Either way, they are dead. So there is a big difference between executing the drug dealer who deserved to be killed anyways, versus executing the parachuter who we want to live.

Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.

They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.

They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.

That’s true, but I don’t think it would’ve been considered “proper” conduct. They might sink a pirate ship and leave without making a rescue attempt but I don’t think they’d finish off survivors. And it would be more a case of “nobody is going to miss them anyway” rather than active policy. Certainly many pirates were captured from sunk/defeated ships, then tried and jailed/whipped/executed according to the law. Admittedly I got a bit carried away with the historical analogies, I have some knowledge but I’m far from an expert and it’s not a perfect parallel to the issue at hand anyway.

Part of the (legal) problem is that the anti-drug operation is being justified in no small part by declaring the smugglers to be irregular combatants (narco-terrorists) affiliated with the Venezuelan government. If they are merely ordinary drug smugglers then the Navy should not be sinking their boats at all, per US law, and doing so would be criminal. But if they are combatants then the strike would be a war crime. There’s no version of modern law where killing the survivors after destroying the boat is legal/acceptable conduct.

Edit: @KMC as well

Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water.

Yes, you literally would. There's no war crimes for pirates. It requires state actors, which these are not. They are beyond the law, and have put themselves there. Narco cartels are not signatories to the geneva conventions, and would not be allowed if they wanted to.

Pirates do not deserve due process, and never have, and never will.

Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.

  • -10

Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare.

No, they're not; this is just sophistry.

Yeah, at that point, you'll have a hard time waging a war that's chemical-free (SMBC).

Personally, I think these guys ARE state actors, but Venezuela has obvious incentives to never ever claim them, so they're acting under the flag of no nation, and thus its hard to see why we shouldn't call their bluff and just treat them like pirates until Venezuela actually complains.

We're also at the point where the U.S. response to sending these boats has been made clear. I'm sure there are also backchannels where its communicated "if the boats keep coming, we're going to keep blowing them up."

They keep putting the boats in the water. What precisely are they EXPECTING. "Don't worry brother, they will surely detain you for a fair trial if you're caught in the act. Pay no attention to the reaper drone circling overhead."

Personally, I think these guys ARE state actors

It would explain the extra personnel on the boats. Illegal smuggling as a patronage jobs program.

My priors on a struggling petrostate trying to make up lost funding by becoming a narcostate are pretty high.

The only other viable explanation would be that Maduro has lost significant control over his territory to gangs, but for obvious reasons wouldn't want to admit that, so this is in fact just cartels acting with impunity and they consider the occasional drug mule being obliterated as the cost of doing business.

Its just possible that the boats getting ganked are intentional diversions from, I dunno, actual submarines or some more surreptitious shipping methods.

I mean isn’t Venezuela’s crime problem and failed-statery pretty well known?

Uncharitably, most lefties I talk to seem to be studiously ignorant of it.

I used to use Norway vs. Venezuela vs. Saudia Arabia as a case study in why Socialism doesn't cause prosperity, but sitting on billions of barrels of oil (or similar natural resources) does, and even then socialism can ruin it.

I'm unsure, myself, as to whether Maduro intentionally permits gangs to thrive or just partnered with them out of convenience/desperation, but I do believe it is all tied up in a giant Kleptocracy.

There was a rather more pointed example of this, IIRC, where deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military. The story I heard is that US forces contacted the Russians demanding that their forces cease fire and withdraw, were told that no Russian forces were involved, tee hee, and responded by annihilating the Russian troops with a sustained, overwhelming bombardment.

deniable Russian troops in Syria got in a dustup with the US military

The Battle of Khasham, for those interested in reading more.

That's as clear an example of Defect/Defect as you can ask for. Sucks for the Russians... but doesn't it always?

>mfw I'm a member of a deniable military squad working for a sovereign nation, and I am denied by my nation when the opposing force has arty.

Or if you like:

"Andrei, you've lost ANOTHER Mercenary Battallion?"

Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal, striking the boat and killing a bunch and letting the rest drown or be eaten by sharks is fine and legal. But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?

Yes it would be a war crime. Why do you think there's so much ink spilled down thread about whether the second strike was to sink the disabled boat and the deaths were incidental or that it was done specifically to kill the survivors? You are not allowed to kill shipwrecked crew who are out of combat.

What say you to this: "Am I understanding this correctly that shooting the fighter plane down and killing the pilot would be fine and legal, allowing the pilot to bail to be eaten by bears in the woods is fine and legal. But strafing the parachuting pilot to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime?"

Killing combatants who are hors de combat (i.e. providing "no quarter") is illegal for signatories of the Hague convention of 1899. It's a war crime. In any case, it's not clear that's what happened and I assume that's why Congress is investigating. If they find evidence the civilian leadership committed a war crime, I have no idea where it goes from there. When it's a uniformed guy, the military branch convenes a court martial and hopefully justice is served one way or the other. But when is the last time a department head has been found guilty of anything?

But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?

Yes, because that's apparently what happened and so that is the rope by which his enemies will attempt to hang him. If he had let them drown, that would be the rope instead. If he had killed them all in the first strike, then that.

The notorious Far Right rag, the NYT, has issued an article that pretty much backs what I've been saying: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-strike-order-venezuela.html

According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.

But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.

Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.

The two officials questioned whether the surviving people were Admiral Bradley's intended target in the second strike, as opposed to the purported drugs and the disabled vessel. They argued that the purported cargo remained a threat and a lawful military target because another cartel-associated boat might have come to retrieve it.

The boat was the target of the second strike, not the people. Common sense prevails.

Seems kind of obvious, in retrospect.

I don't know where precisely the boat was intercepted, but if it was far enough from any land mass that a survivor probably couldn't swim to 'safety'... they were most likely going to die anyway?

Why waste a missile to double tap doomed men?

Unless the actual objection is now that the navy should have sent a rescue crew out to pick up anyone in the water which, hey, I'm willing to entertain, but that's a different question.

And on that topic, if there are survivors of a strike like this, is it more humane to leave them floating in the water to most likely die of exposure, drowning, or shark attack, or to do the double tap? Like, in a complete vacuum, which is more ethical?

I also note that the claims that these could be innocent fishermen or something have apparently evaporated.

the navy should have sent a rescue crew out to pick up anyone in the water

The US military takes prisoners of war because the US is a civilized nation. I believe the Navy absolutely would have rescued the survivors if the situation was straight-forward. But it's not and what exactly happened and what the point of the second strike was remains to be seen.

It seems just a tad goofy to go through that rigamarole of formally capturing these guys, bringing them to the U.S., trying them, then sentencing them to imprisonment (at our expense) or deporting them back home where... they might do the same thing over again?

Which gets into the whole "what is 'due process' when removing an illegal immigrant" debate we've been having sporadically.

This is due in part to Venezuela doing the thing where it apparently sends gang members and drugs at the U.S. with official approval from Maduro, AND doesn't want to claim its boys so it says nothing when they get wasted. So its not a 'war' but its definitely an active campaign of sorts.

Suffice it to say, I don't think they should count as 'civilians' under any fair definition, and if Venezuela doesn't want to make this a formal war, then its... "silly" to think the rules of war need to be strictly observed. If they're going to keep them in that weird grey area, then treating them like pirates until proven otherwise seems fair.

Shipwreck survivals in tropical water are a thing that happens; theoretically they could make an improvised raft out of wreckage and float to shore. Of course realistically dehydration or drowning would get them and their body would be eaten by sharks, but eh.

Oh absolutely.

But I'm definitely questioning the need to double-tap the dudes. Okay sure if the specific order was "kill all of them" then the admiral in question might feel the job incomplete.

Or just... wait a bit and see if they even try to swim to shore.

Hence I give a bit more credence to the argument that the second shot was to sink the boat to deny the opponent the ability to retrieve it later.

I am quite skeptical that its maritime law that is going to successfully bring down Trump where every other approach has failed.

Like, in a complete vacuum, which is more ethical?

Missiles are expensive. It's more ethical to not waste the tax dollars.

Send over a dude in a rubber dinghy armed with a rifle instead.

FA-18’s have autocannon and can just shoot them on-site.

My bad, I somehow assumed it had been a cruise missile rather than an air-to-ground one.

Well that's why I'm asking 'in vacuum.'

Its like a trolley problem where the only options are "hit this button to kill them more or less instantly, therefore minimizing suffering, or don't hit the button and they die anyway, but hours or days later, maybe in agonizing pain."

One could argue that the latter might add some deterrent effect, which is arguably the TRUE point of doing this at all.

Anyway, my argument is that its up to VENEZUELA to stand up for their citizens if they think some international law was violated. But then they'd have to own that they're aware of these drug shimpments.

The fact that U.S. citizens and Politicians are the ones pushing for sanctions on U.S. troops... while Venezuela just goes through the motions of prepping for invasion is such odd optics.

Its like a trolley problem where the only options are "hit this button to kill them more or less instantly, therefore minimizing suffering, or don't hit the button and they die anyway, but hours or days later, maybe in agonizing pain."

I'm inclined to argue for the second on ethical grounds, honestly! If they ask for a mercy-kill it's a different matter, but I'm skeptical of the humaneness of "putting people out of their misery" when they haven't asked for it. Maybe they'd rather spend their remaining hours praying, thinking back over their life, or whatever else suits their conscience. Certainly I'd want to be given the option if I was in their place.

That's my moral intuition, as well as the fact that it allows the possibility of a 'miracle' to intercede to save their life. If they're not immediate threats, I go with Batman Begins logic.

I feel similar but not identically about end-of-life Euthanasia, too.

1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.

2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?

My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.

Trump had said US should have taken (meaning stolen) Iraqi oil on multiple occasions.

Trump has said a lot of wild shit. You got any reason for thinking that statement was any more revealing of his inner soul than any other?

If you look at what he's actually done in military actions over the five years of his presidency or so, he draws down forces if he can, doesn't commit to anything new, and if something happens he bombs something. Houthis? Iran's nuclear reactors? Drug boats?

Anti-war doesn't mean anti-military-action. Up until now, Trump has been quite careful and diplomatic with military action, waffling and A-B testing until everyone's arguing. Sometimes he uses the pressure to do a deal (North Korea) and it never comes to strikes. Sometimes the deal is done after strikes (Iran). In my estimation, the drug boat thing is no different, he's pressuring Maduro and by extension the various South and Central American rulers to get control of the flows of people and drugs to the US.

If he puts line ground troops into Venezuela, I'm wrong. If he bombs a few things, ratchets up tensions, threatens regime change and then does a deal where he's shaking Maduro's hand on TV, I'm right.

Edit: The imaginary deal I'm teasing will probably not change much materially, but that isn't the point.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/venezuela-resumes-accepting-us-deportation-flights-after-trump-closes-airspace-country

Trump threatened to declare the airspace "above and surrounding" Venezuela to be "closed in its entirety," causing Venezuela to cancel the twice-weekly flights of migrants from the U.S. on Saturday. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on Tuesday that, at the request of the Trump administration, those flights have now resumed.

Seems likely to me you're right. This is not the deal itself, but if Maduro wanted to be defiant he'd say "fuck you and your deportation flights" and hold this as a bargaining chip against Trump, especially since it's short of escalation by any measure, but affects something important to Trump and his base. That he capitulated on this makes me think he's already decided to go, he's just working on the details of his exit.

He's trying to finagle mineral rights from Ukraine right now, and thinks that America's problems come from being "too nice" to the rest of the world so thinking US should be going around stealing oil would fit with that general pattern.

Exactly how many countries has Trump invaded and stolen their oil?

Once again, you're arguing from your imagination of someone else's psychology.

"We've just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever, actually, and other things are happening," said Trump, who has been pressuring Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to step down.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

Time to move from "it's not happening" to "and it's good" phase?

ratchets up tensions

It's in the Diplomacy manual under "Yemen Gambit".

Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal

Syria, US took oil producing region from Assad and gave it to the rebels.

TRUMP: They say, ‘He left troops in Syria’. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil. I took over the oil.

INGRAHAM: We’re taking, we’re not taking–

TRUMP: Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.

INGRAHAM: They’re protecting their facility.

TRUMP: I don’t know, maybe we should take it. But we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil. So, they say, ‘He left troops in Syria’. No, I got rid of all of them, other than we’re protecting the oil. We have the oil.

There's rumors that Maduro is negotiating an exit plan with immunity for family and elections to follow. If Trump takes it, he's a genius compared to who we've had lately.

But if he's really smart, he'll keep Maduro on hand. Just in case.

Instead the oil rights got bought largely by China IIRC. The US military has essentially been securing China's energy imports.

(And the '''grand strategists''' in the Pentagon/State Department blob never got purged or anything, they're still around)

At the time (pre tar sands and fracking), the US was securing an orderly global oil market with plentiful supply, something that as a matter of domestic politics benefitted you more than anyone else, even if as a matter of economic logic the EU benefitted more than the US as a larger net oil importer. Retail gasoline prices are ultra-sensitive politically in the US, and vary directly with world oil prices in a way which European prices don't because most of the cost is a per-litre tax.

Now the US is a net oil exporter, the US benefits economically from high world crude prices, but the US government probably still loses politically because voters care more about pump prices than they do about oil company profits or oil industry jobs. (Various people have said that the Biden administration was trying to mitigate any upward pressure on oil prices from the Ukraine war because of the US domestic political consequences, despite this working against his climate policy, his foreign policy, and objective US economic interests). In addition, the US benefits geopolitically from the world being a place where the easiest way to get oil is to trade US dollars for it in a liquid market.

I mean, maybe we should have. It's hard to imagine a counterfactual world where Iraq had a thriving US-financed and operated oil infustry employing locals and generating economic activity/tax revenue is worse for the Iraqi people than what they currently have.

A western-backed petrol state is vastly preferable to a failed state, for essentially everyone except the jihadis. Just ask the Kuwaitis.

Except then you're basically committing to a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced, which is throughout the country. You may be okay with that, but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable. We would have had to commit to nation building as a side effect.

a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced

It's called a territory, we have many.

but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable

It would still have been better than what we got.

In 2006 there were 140,000 US troops in Iraq. By contrast, when the Afghanistan drawdown began there were 5,000 troops stationed there, and there were never many more than 100,000 throughout the war. I picked 2006 because it was a typical mid-war year that wasn't part of a surge or a drawdown. That year we spent $70 billion on the war and suffered 821 killed and over 6400 wounded. You can also add on the 32 billion in Iraqi government spending that they paid for themselves out of oil revenue. Which revenue, by the way, wasn't anywhere near what they needed it to be, since the war was disrupting the supply. With that kind of production, the price of oil would have to be about $140/bbl just for them to pay for security and government funding i.e. it has to be that much just to get to what would be a price of $0 in any other context. Then add all the normal expenses on top of that and you're looking at prices that have never existed just to hit breakeven and not make any money.

And even if it were profitable, profitable for whom? Do you think the US government was going to operate these fields at taxpayer expense and give everyone free gas? No, it was going to give concessions to private companies and charge a royalty, the same as it does on public lands in the US. This was traditionally 12.5%, even as rates crept upward during the fracking boom, and have only gotten up to 16.67% with the Inflation Reduction Act. I spent a decade in the industry and the largest royalty I ever saw on a lease was 20% in the Utica. At any rate, the Iraqi government made about 90 billion in oil revenue last year, but there's no war going on, and the 2006 numbers suggest we can comfortably halve that. So about 45 billion in additional government revenue, against about 100 billion in expenditures. I don't see how this is better than what we got.

I mean Iraq is, currently, a petrostate. That is the main sector of their economy. Making it US owned is… very possibly not an improvement.

The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.

I'm not sure if it's an assumption about what Iraqis wanted in 2003, so much as a claim that after a generation of two of being ruled by a secular US-propped government they'd learn to like it and the islamic death-cult would die out. Which other experiments eg Afghanistan have of course shown to be… optimistic at best. But it's something, and it's probably the best we've got if you don't want to despair of human nature.

That’s the point of the Erdogan biography though. Turkey had secular democratic government for generations (under the oversight of the army who were mostly strict but not despotic).

That is, they had a democratic government in which it was against the constitution to advocate for explicitly Muslim policy.

Erdogan rose to power in large part as an expression of deep fury by the Muslim majority whose desires and way of life were being discounted.

Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me, which is why I am a firm advocate of very low immigration.

I think the belief that everyone, given time, will approach something that liberalish Europeans are comfortable with is load-bearing for immigration advocacy and also that it is mistaken.

Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me,

I do not think this set of preferences is compatible with tolerating a religious movement which aspires to world domination and glorifies achieving that end through holy war. You may not be interested in what fundamentalists do in their own countries, but the fundamentalists in far-off countries are interested in you. Or, at any rate, will grow interested in you once they've secured their power-base at home.

Now, of course, in practical terms I'm no kind of Middle-East hawk. In the aggregate, interventionism in the Middle-East has proven counterproductive when it comes to curbing the threat of muslim extremism - infamously so. But in the truly long term, "let them sort themselves out" can only be a temporary solution - it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West. Barring that assumption, if we're letting them be for now, it can only be for one of two broad reasons:

  1. we hope that they'll organically become more liberal over time and the existential threat will peter out, à la USSR collapse;
  2. in the long term, we intend to get our ducks in a row and figure out an effective interventionist approach at some point before the jihadis get their ducks in a row and overwhelm the free world.

with #2 further subdividing into a comparatively peaceful "we'll figure out how to do secularization in a way that sticks" option and a maximally pessimistic "we'll crush them and salt the earth if it comes down to it" option. Plus an AGI-truther "we'll hit the Singularity before we need to worry about any of this" addendum, I guess.

But it cannot be because we should just reconcile ourselves to the existence of fundamentalist islamic theocracies for the truly long term, as an acceptable state of affairs for the planet Earth. That's just shaking hands with that nice Mr Hitler in 1938.

(Setting all this aside, I do have a basic moral objection to the existence of muslim theocracies qua muslim theocracies. But I think that's really neither here nor there. "Just close the borders to immigrants from muslim theocracies" remains a bad plan even if you value the welfare of Middle-Eastern women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, etc. at exactly 0.)

it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West

They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.

But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.

The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.

Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.

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Point taken. I must admit I cannot imagine fundamentalist Islam advancing to technological and economic parity with the West without becoming something quite different, so that doesn’t concern me hugely right now.

(Caveats: yes, there was a very advanced Muslim society pre-Renaissance, but they were cosmopolitan and borrowed heavily from Greek and Roman writings, as opposed to being insular and traditionalist.)

In general I think that advocating (even slow, non-violent) regime change for anyone who might one day be a threat is both deeply impractical and exactly the kind of behaviour that makes people perceive America and the West as relentlessly hostile! I’m no dove, but ‘we’ll figure out how to exterminate you some day’ does not strike me as a good basis for foreign policy.

I am also increasingly dubious about the use of Munich as an intuition pump for foreign policy. Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily, and the other party didn’t hold to it. There must surely have been loads of other times when a peace treaty was signed and the other party stuck to it, or got distracted making war elsewhere, or busied himself with internal affairs. Likewise, there were lots of times when two countries didn’t sign a peace treaty because they each thought they could win, and one found to their horror that they were mistaken. The lesson from Munich cannot be ‘even if a warlike nation offers peace, you must set your sights on destroying them. Only once everyone who dislikes you is dead can there be peace’. Humanity is a warlike race and we will never be short of potential Hitlers; some distrust and hoarding of one’s own strength is appropriate but meeting each with a campaign of elimination will cause far more bloodshed than it solves.

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It not like Iraq isn't producing oil now (it's top 7th producer in the world).

The “laws of war” aren’t real and don’t apply to terrorists. This kind of bloviating about moral principle might work on the DC politicians who read the Washington Post, but we here simply don’t have to participate in this. We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. The purpose of a military is to kill people. We’re not playing these nice legal lawyer games where we can’t kill our enemies or else they win. We don’t have to care about the latest high-level inflammatory anonymous “sources familiar with say” nonsense story about how Trump is doing this evil evil thing that was normal until five minutes ago.

My position is that it didn’t happen and it’s a good thing if it did.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.

The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest. Sometimes that means accepting limitations—when you actually get something in return. That’s civilization for you.

I don't have reason to believe that these strikes were actually illegal. But if they somehow were, Hegseth would be undermining an equilibrium that really does benefit the U.S.. And for what? A little extra assurance that those narcos wouldn’t get rescued? There’s no reward.

The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest.

Our current Secretary of War has written a whole book (The War on Warriors) about how treating the US military as an instrument of policy and social change, rather than an instrument of violence, is the root cause of much dysfunction from the Vietnam-era to the present day.

And Clausewitz wrote a book saying that "War is the continuation of policy by other means". I think Clausewitz is right and Hegseth is wrong.

You are free to feel that way. Clausewitz's On War is widely viewed as a seminal work but then so to is Marx's Das Kapital.

In the meantime Secretary Hegseth is echoing a view that has been shared by military thinkers as diverse as Musashi Miyamoto and Tecumseh Sherman. The ultimate purpose of any soldier (or army) is to kill the enemy.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

When we signed the CWC, we were binding our hands with respect to chemical weapons. We’d decided that was a fair price for binding all the other signatories. Cooperate-cooperate.

We don’t bomb lifeboats so that other states don’t bomb ours. Even though narcos will never be in that position, bombing their lifeboats would set a bad precedent for our relations with other states. They might reasonably assume that we will, in fact, ignore the rules we’ve supposedly endorsed.

Social change has nothing to do with it.

Secretary Hegseth would disagree. As @gog and @YE_GUILTY observe above, there has been a societal shift towards the idea that discipline should be done away with. Hegseth argues that this attitude is fundamentally incompatible with the "warrior ethos" and by extension winning wars, and I feel like he makes a reasonable case for this position.

Which of those things applies to bombing lifeboats, though?

Who's bombing lifeboats?

This is no longer a moral argument but a political argument. At that point, it’s more parsimonious to admit this is just another anti-Trump hoax. That is, none of this press coverage exists as an organic natural concern about what’s best for America’s interests in the world. Those are just arguments made up to get the sexy “war crimes” headline into the news right as Mark Kelly is calling for soldiers to be prosecuted.

That would be selective outrage at worst. Hoax would mean that they made up the details of the story.

If the latest NYT reporting on this is to be believed: they did.

And how do they assert the national interest? Essays? Vibes?

No, with the threat of deadly force, and the application of that deadly force.

Diplomats are also there to assert the national interest, but diplomats aren't for killing people. Armies are.

A method isn’t a purpose.

Violence is the most important skill for armies, but it’s not the only one, and there’s no reason they can’t agree to hold back in some way.

We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well. Obama wisely got the Nobel before he started his campaign of drone strikes against weddings. (The main difference being that the logistics of capturing someone in rural Afghanistan might be slightly more difficult than capturing a small boat in the middle of the ocean. But international humanitarian law should be followed even if it is not convenient.)

The purpose of a military is to kill people.

Respectfully, I disagree. The purpose of a hitman or an SS-Totenkopfverband is to kill people.

The purpose of a military is to achieve military objectives. Frequently, this involves blowing stuff up, which incidentally also tends to kill bystanders. Sometimes, it involves incapacitating enemy soldiers, and the best ways to do so often involves killing them.

Now, I am personally sympathetic to Tucholsky's claim ("soldiers are murderers"), but I reject your framing that this is all there is to the military. I see them more like Walter White, someone willing to murder when their goals demand it, and less like cultists of Bhaal or Khorne, who murder for the pure joy of it.

I am skeptical that honor has ever been a dominant force on the battlefield, but I believe that it is something which can slightly lessen the horrors of war. If you have your soldiers kill helpless combatants, that will affect the self-understanding of your troop.

If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.

This is a fully general argument against due process. After all, with the data the NSA has on US citizens, we could just trust them to designate bad people and have the cops shoot them.

I think that in response to Trump blowing up boats, other countries have decided not to share their intel on drug smuggling any more. I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.

Now, it could be that the US has ground assets to reliably identify all drug-smuggling boats, but it could also not be the case. My mental model of Trump says that he is unlikely to accept "Sir, we have no positive ID on any drug smugglers at the moment". In such a situation, it would be in the self-interest of the commander to identify the most suspicious boat and destroy it. After all, nobody will go through the wreckage and find out what amount of drugs they were carrying. If you say you had ironclad evidence that they were carrying drugs, who could prove you wrong? Probably some Latinos (and the left) will cry about how you murdered innocents, but realistically that would happen in either case.

This is, of course, why we need due process: not because the government will never have ironclad evidence for its violence, but because we can not trust them to tell the truth about their evidence.

But then again we should not worry, because you estimate the probability that a commander acting on less-than-perfect evidence would target an innocent boat as similar to that of losing the Moon (which is p<1e-10, conservatively).

I do not believe that the US has the tech to identify drugs on boats from satellites.

Military technology does not lend itself to a sources-cited I-make-my-claims you-make-yours open debate. So I’m not sure I have much to add here in the good nature of this forum. But I can tell you that you are completely wrong. I can’t really convince you of that when again we’re talking about military secrets. So it would be easier if you said you don’t trust Trump, or the government in general if you prefer, because then we’ve reduced the argument to its real essence. Otherwise I can’t say very much productively, because our priors about US military capabilities are wildly far apart.

If it is any consolation, I was against these invasions/interventions as well.

Well, that’s not really what I’m concerned about, because this isn’t really about whether you as an individual are arguing in good faith. (And I assume you are.)

This story doesn’t just fall out of the sky and then journalists put on their truth suits and we sit around debating what it all means. Every phase of these stories are political and carry political connotations. “War crime?” Nobody in the public knows what that means or how important that is, so someone has to pick a few pieces of context to give that meaning. “Anonymous sources?” Someone has to stake some credibility asserting that these people are telling the truth, not those other people making denials. “Fishermen” Now we need part of this story to deny Trump’s / Hegseth’s determination that these are narcoterrorists, because the story is a non-story if it’s accepted on Trump’s terms.

Every part of this story involves relying on assumptions made by people acting out of political motives. Moreover, many of these political actors don’t care when we do it in Ukraine, supported the Iraq War, allowed millions of illegal immigrants at the border, etc. Many of these same journalists and senators pushed hoaxes about Trump and Russia, Kavanaugh, January 6 and 2020, Corona, etc. Why should I take them at their word?

So no this isn’t about your good faith as an individual. I’m calling bad faith on the entire media complex that reifies this as a story I have to care about, as though I’m somehow a hypocrite if I don’t jump through exactly the right rhetorical proofs while denying that Hegseth did anything wrong. Especially today, a day later, as the New York Times reports that WaPo got the story wrong, I feel increasingly good about my priors and attitude toward the latest anti-Trump hoax.

Candace Owen’s is reporting today that the French government is trying to have her killed. Should we kick France out of NATO? Is Israel behind it? Actually it’s ok to just call that one bullshit

This is a fully general argument against due process.

Pretty much nobody thinks that due process should be applied or not applied depending on what you think the chances are of guilt. But the argument was about the chance of guilt--the OP was trying to insinuate that because the boats have large crews, they are unlikely to be criminals. So disputing that can't be an argument against due process.

In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for

Political power, in many cases; protection rackets, economic domination of various industries and ability to exclude personal enemies or rivals in many others. In still others, there are out-and-out ideological motivations, often some derivation of Marxist (e.g. Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and FARC in Colombia).

what are the violent acts [the narco-smugglers engage in]

Murder both of competitors, politicians, and law enforcement, as well as of alleged collaborators, opponents, and personal rivals/enemies. Human smuggling, sex slavery/prostitution, kidnapping for ransom, and other major crimes, up to and including active armed insurrection against local governments.

what civilian population do they instill fear in?

Anyone who isn't actively on-board with them.

I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money.

This is incorrect. Business always involves some form of politics, especially when crossing international borders and on the scale of narco-cartels. Also, there's whole subcultures that have developed around the cartels. These aren't homo economicus any more than the Sicilian Mafia is.

If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.

We did use to hang horse thieves, and shooting a fleeing felon was entirely legal in the US under longstanding anglo-american common law principles until iirc SCOTUS decided to prune it back in the 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner. You're right nowadays, but it's a comparatively recent development.

Murder both of competitors, politicians, and law enforcement, as well as of alleged collaborators, opponents, and personal rivals/enemies. Human smuggling, sex slavery/prostitution, kidnapping for ransom, and other major crimes, up to and including active armed insurrection against local governments.

So basically, they're just a government-in-waiting that the US doesn't like, and has thrown in with the existing government to remove them in return for owing the US a favor later.

Except that they lack any form of legitimacy other than raw force...

Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

Emphasis mine.

Was this a typo? In what sense is it justifiable to take reprisal on the citizens of a belligerent power that aren't involved in hostilities?

The United States government is not friendly with the government of Iran. Both sides have killed individuals on the other side. Yet somehow I would not find it justified if someone on my street snatched up an Iranian tourist for torture / murder. I would not find it justified if the US government did it. And I would not find it justified if Iranians did it to random Americans.

If it's not a typo, can you please explain the line of government behavior beyond which the citizens of a country should expect to justifiably have their brains blown out if they wander down the wrong street on a foreign taco tour?

What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for

"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."

what are the violent acts

See here.

and what civilian population do they instill fear in?

See here.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights;

I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.

If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.

To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.

I mean, what makes terrorists special?

The origin of a ‘special category’ of criminals was pirates as hostis humani generis, followed by slavers in the 19th century, and terrorists after 9/11. Adding narcotraffickers doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

Historically, though, while using military force against pirates, slavers, etc. was commonplace, you executed hostis humani generis after a trial if they surrendered or were in a position to be captured. You weren't supposed to just summarily execute guys you thought maybe were pirates or slavers if they weren't actively committing piracy, manstealing, or resisting arrest. This actually mattered historically - for instance, several people who were tried for piracy because they were part of Blackbeard's crew were acquitted, so the trials weren't just pro forma. But the ones who weren't acquitted were generally hung pretty promptly.

There's no real logistical obstacle to taking these guys in and trying them for smuggling drugs, the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them. But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.

hostis humani generis

Drug smugglers are not hostis humani generis. Perhaps they should be, and unless the international legal position is changed by treaty, making it US policy that they are falls within the Article 1 power of Congress to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations" - it isn't something the President can do by proclamation.

The Trump administration has accused Tren de Aragua of various violent crimes committed on land, and argues that their encouraging illegal crossings of the Mexico/US land border is legally an invasion, but as far as I am aware they have not accused them of anything that would be piracy as a matter of US or international law.

Sure, agree with all of this. But even if they were clearly hostis humani generis, summary execution would not have been the usual means of dealing with them if they were not offering resistance or threatening violence.

In my understanding, judges during the age of piracy were rather the opposite of bleeding-heart liberals. If a hostile judiciary were fighting like hell to let pirates off without serious response because they're poor kids who are nice to black people sometimes, I suspect that summary executions would have made a triumphant comeback.

Weren't drumhead trials for pirates pretty common (if officially disallowed) also?

More comments

the US military/Coast Guard has a long arm and could easily arrest these smugglers instead of airstriking them

I don't think this is accurate. It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

But the political situation in the United States has evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) to the point where it's significantly easier and cheaper to use the military to blow up hostis humani generis by basically executive fiat than it is to pass a bill saying "we will execute you if you smuggle lots of drugs into the United States" and then...execute people who smuggle lots of drugs into the United States.

The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death. Decarlos Brown, for example, is still living and breathing. and won't even get a trial for months. That's unacceptable. I'd rather he were shot in cold blood at the scene than linger on for months, years, or, god forbid, decades.

Justice delayed is justice denied, after all, and the one thing the justice system does well is delay. Fix this, and you'll find me coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.

It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

Civ2 notwithstanding, I think a Super Stallion might be able to pick up one of those boats.

It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.

Sure, but two Hellfires (in a double-tap situation like the one at hand) is going to run around $300,000, so you are probably losing money just to save time, if you contrast it with the cost of putting four guys that you're already paying in a speedboat out there or what have you. Granted, some of that depends on the specifics of the situation, and granted also that the .gov will allocate a certain number of Hellfires for firing as practice every year, but until the cartels start shooting back it's mostly just a question of if you want to give the Chair Force guys or the Coast Guard/high speed low drag types a live-fire exercise. It is true that sending the Navy SEALS or whoever out to arrest them is more dangerous than simply bombing them, but they do a lot of dangerous training anyway.

The reason for this is because of how long it takes to put people to death.

Yes. Dronestriking people is more theatrical, but it would be better (assuming for the sake of the discussion that it's good to execute drug smugglers) to do it via arresting and trying them, if only because we aren't going to drone strike the guys we apprehend at a border checkpoint. (Well, probably not, but see below).

coming around to due process and rule of law, but right now those are empty words that mean, in effect, no punishment for criminals.

Caveat that this is under-researched and I would be glad for pushback:

See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).

Which, frankly, wouldn't be surprising given the incentives. But I oppose it because I don't actually think it's a good idea to drone strike Americans in Kansas or wherever for drug-running, and also because I do not think the US government is nearly as good at determining if someone is actually "a bad guy" as TV would have you think, and finally because if the government can drone strike American citizens without having to show proof that they are actually doing bad stuff (which is the point of a trial!) then it's pretty tempting to just...blow people you don't like up and say "they were bad guys trust me bro."

See, what seems to be under-discussed is the "can we drone strike US citizens with the military without due process by accusing them of being terrorists" ship sailed under Obama a decade ago. What's interesting about what Trump is doing is that now we've expanded what constitutes a terrorist to "member of a cartel." I have not done a deep-dive on the legal backing here (and IIRC the Trump admin hasn't released their exact legal reasoning!) but it seems to me that there's precious little reason not to drone strike US citizens assessed by US military intelligence as being drug dealers, under these legal theories, and then I'm not really sure what would stop you from doing it domestically except "bad optics." (Posse Comitatus prevents the US military from being used domestically for law enforcement purposes but my understanding is that this is not law enforcement but rather counter-terrorism under the auspices of an AUMF).

As you hint at in your last sentence, the AUMF is the critical distinction. When the Obama administration dronekilled people it was (at least nominally) attacking allies of the guys who did 9-11, as was explicitly authorised by Congress. Both the GW Bush and Obama administrations claimed (correctly) that citizenship is irrelevant to the US's ability to kill wartime enemies on the battleground, and (probably correctly) that the President had broad discretion under Article 2 and the AUMF to decide who was an enemy and where (except US territory) was a battleground. When the Trump administration dronekills Tren de Aragua drug traffickers, he only has his inherent article 2 authority. In non-lawyer's terms, it is the difference between ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in wartime, and ordering the military to kill alleged enemies in peacetime.

(correctly) that citizenship is irrelevant to the US's ability to kill wartime enemies on the battleground

I agree with this, but at least in al-Awlaki's case, there wasn't any allegation that he was on the battlefield, except I suppose in the very broad GWOT context in which the entire world was the battlefield.

the AUMF is the critical distinction

It's not clear to me that the AUMF isn't in play, since the Trump administration hasn't released their legal reasoning yet, have they?

Nor is it clear to me that the AUMF is actually a very clear bar on to strikes on narcos. Didn't the AUMF give the President leeway to go after anyone that aided those who assisted in the 9/11 plot (all broadly defined)? It doesn't seem crazy that TdA and the Taliban, for instance, might have done e.g. a drug or arms deal. At which point you could probably invoke the AUMF.

Returning to the Obama administration again, we see that they used the AUMF as their justification for strikes against ISIS. That seems less ridiculous because ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban all sort of look the same if you squint but is that really the case legally? I'd need to do more digging into the question to have a very strong opinion, but from my admittedly pretty superficial understanding of this all it looks like the AUMF has already been stretched all out of proportion to provide a legal fig leaf for doing whatever the President wants, so I would not be surprised if this is being done again.

Iirc the Supreme Court has ruled that narcotrafficking could be tried as treason. It just takes 20+ years to execute someone.

In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"?

Drug cartels are designated as terrorists at least according to us.gov. This link contains reasoning behind adding them earlier this year.

Isn't this a case where the US should be granting letters of Marque to hunt stateless vessels in international waters? Offer a bounty for each kilo of drugs returned and let them keep any oil they capture.

US should be granting letters of Marque

If letters of Marque start getting issued anyone want to go in on a boat? As the classic goes:

A letter of marque came from the king congress

To the scummiest vessel I've ever seen ...

The Yankee Bolivarian lay low down with gold drugs

How I wish I was in Sherbrooke Destin now

She was broad and fat and loose in the stays

But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days

But seriously, I wonder what flag these boats are flying and if they respond to hails on guard. It seems unlikely that vessel designed for discreetly carrying drugs would be confused with a fishing boat to a trained navel eye. If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?

If they are flying a Venezuelan flag is the argument that Venezuela (also not a signatory) is not complying with Article 108:

All States shall cooperate in the suppression of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances engaged in by ships on the high seas contrary to international conventions.

Where exactly are these events occurring, are they being initiated in the exclusive economic zone where and Article 111: Right of hot pursuit would exist? If they are or not, are the boats running when contacted or are they not contacted? If they are running what rational actor would choose that course of action, how do they expect to out run a F/A-18 Super Hornet?

The legal analysis seems fraught given how much information has been released.

Being sure of your prize seems like huge headache if you only had a letter of Marque to protect you. Never mind on going in on the boat.

If you're being hailed by the US navy and ordered to submit to a Article 110: Right of visit (using UNCLOS as a customary standard though the US is not a signatory) to verify your flag, under any circumstance, wouldn't you yield and submit to inspection?

The administration has said it could have done this, but chose to dronekill from a safe distance without haling the boats in order to make a point.

If that's really the doctrine it seems... suspect?

I can imagine some construction where you hail them, they surrender, you find drugs and determine they are not properly flagged. You then scuttle their vessel to deny the organization the materiel. They could then claim the operators are unlawful combatants and send them to GTMO or claim they are stateless criminals and send them to CECOT El Salvador. Or even hang them as pirates.

The practical effect might be the same, but even literal pirates flying the Jolly Roger in the golden age of piracy would offer quarter if thier target surrendered and offered no resistance. Legal or not, offering no quarter at all seems highly undignified for a civilized navy and not at all in line with the traditions of the sea time immemorial.

but even literal pirates flying the Jolly Roger in the golden age of piracy would offer quarter if thier target surrendered and offered no resistance.

They did that because taking the ship was still risky and some of them could die. Do you think the average pirate would have still been so merciful if they had the option to push a button and simply delete the defending crew?

Average pirate, maybe given the choice of a button that maroons the defending crew vs a button that just deletes them. Most came from backgrounds as lawful seafarers and understood the plight of the average sailor of the age. Benjamin Hornigold probably yes, he mostly tried to maintain at least a thin veneer that he was acting lawfully as a privateer. Just straight deleting the operators of merchant vessels would not have been in line with the veneer of lawful privateering.

Regardless, if the legal target is the drugs and vessels that are carrying them why waste a missile on them when the operators likely would surrender and you could just scuttle them by opening a seacock? I mean if they run or start shooting at you, sure they left you no choice. If the targets are the actual vessel operators, then definitionally this is an extrajudicial killing; in the sense that it is a intentional killing by a state actor without any judicial process. I'll let the lawyers argue about whether it's also an unlawful killing, but I do consider conducting extrajudicial killings to be an odious, ungentlemanly, and undignified task if I were the one that had to push the button. Maybe the age of expecting our officers to also be gentlemen is long gone or never existed, or our modern environment makes that ideal impossible. I still think it's lamentable if that's the case.

It's one of the few things they can do that can't be undone by a judge.

I support this purely because of the vibes.

I suspect the real flaw in this plan has to do with ensuring that the privateers simply don't keep the drugs and sell it on the street. Unless the US government is offering a price above street value, the temptation to do this would be powerful (and even if the US did offer those sorts of bounties, I suspect that you'd still see problems with guys trying to take home narcotics and whatnot).

I think if the government bought at discounted bulk street value most mercs would accept it. Assembling a drug distribution network is time consuming and expensive, and probably requires you interfacing with people who want to kill you for killing their old reliable supplier.

I also wonder about that, but I have to imagine Dyncorp and whatever Blackwater identifes as these days has enough to lose to not decide street level distribution of contraband is a good idea if it puts all their other government business at risk.

Now, I wonder how much pure product gets liberated for personal use between those bust dog and pony show press events and the eventual incineration.

To your point, I suspect there are already problems with that. I agree that The Company Formerly Known As Blackwater is unlikely to have a corporate policy saying "steal cocaine illegally" and their guys probably aren't particularly less trustworthy than cops/soldiers, so if you screened organizations carefully you could probably weed out people going into it specifically to exploit their access to drugs.

I think that originally, narco-terrorist referred to people who made a fortune dealing narcotics and then started using violence for political ends, e.g. in Columbia.

This is basically not a thing in the US. Any drug lord with two brain cells knows better than to pursue political goals by blowing up people on US soil. None of them want the Bin Laden treatment, after all.

I can see how the terrorist label would apply to some in the narcotics trade (e.g. the Mexican cartels), but here it really doesn't seem applicable -especially if, as the Trump administration seems to insinuate, the drug trade is indeed backed by the Venezuelan government. What political ends do they need to achieve by fear if they are already in power? (Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist.)

Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist

When the government does it (above a certain threshold, which is likely very low for anarchists), we call it terror (or crimes against humanity, sometimes), not terrorism.

Of course, there are a lot of special cases, such as government A sponsoring terrorists or freedom fighters in country B, as has happened with bin Laden in multiple stages of careers.

What if the goal was to destabilize the US? Andrew Yang used to argue pretty convincingly that Trump's 2016 election was only made possible by the Opioid crisis destroying communities.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid), and fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico? Now, you could argue that cocaine played a role when the US elected a TV personality president, given its use as an "act confidently in front of a crowd" drug, but...

(...and well, "destabilizing" does not meet the standard definition of terrorism either. Do you think Russia would be right to outlaw everyone involved in VoA/RFERL in the medieval sense too? Every kinetic war is "destabilizing" in the most straightforward sense; would "destabilizing=>terrorism=>give no quarter" then be a fully general argument against any ius in bello?)

That’s the real ploy. Everyone is missing the forest for the trees, quibbling over the legality of the drone strikes, when they are being prepped for Iraq 2.0. Venezuela is like in the D minus list for drug smuggling, if it was really about drugs they would be talking about Mexico.

Everyone is missing the forest for the trees

Are they? CNN is quoting Trump saying land strikes will begin soon. That’s Iraq 2.0 right there in the major news outlets.

fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico

It comes from Canada, too.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid)

Allegedly, the vast majority of US cocaine comes from Colombia, not from Venezuela.

Venezuela has weaker rule of law, transshipment wouldn’t surprise me.

It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans

There isn't a Latin American ummah. Brazilians aren't going to care very much if you blow up Venezuelan drug dealers.

the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

US foreign policy has caused bad blood in South America for at least half a century, but as far as I'm aware this hasn't led to revenge killings of American tourists being common. I'd be much more worried about the local criminal population than righteous pan-Latinx avengers.

There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.

I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Yeah it’s not like the Reagan administration had a school in Georgia where they taught Latin American right wing death squads how to torture and murder people. Oh wait they did. Latin America is already well aware that America has no baseline rules of conduct. This boat stuff is absolutely tame by the standards of the 1980s.

taught Latin American right wing death squads

That's the crux, though? I didn't write "directly" for no reason. In terms of indirect support and training, American fingers have involved on most sides of most conflicts.

Yes, during the Cold War extrajudicial executions in Latin America were largely outsourced from the USFG to local governments.

I don't think that [...] there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Is it better to get tortured and killed by an American proxy than by Americans directly?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly? Should they consider themselves lucky if they weren't killed lawlessly?

How is killing suspected drug traffickers on the high seas supposed to be an escalation here?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly?

Presumably not, because Panama is not part of "South America" by most definitions I'm aware of. But that's a geography argument, and not a moral one.

The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."

Now that the dust has settled, were the two Gulf Wars actually about oil all along? All the bullshit we learned in school about Kuwait and the Kurds feels like focusing on the logisical intricacies of the Danzig corridor. "Did people actually believe that?" future schoolchildren will ask.

It was about taking out Israel's regional rival.

Second Gulf War was perhaps largely about Saddam taking a shot at Bush Sr. First Gulf War was the US supporting an ally, as I recall. Oil never was anything but the standard leftist talking point.

So this is the rough sequence of events for the first Iraq war...

  • Iraq had an oil reservoir that was almost all in Iraq, but extended like a mile into Kuwait. Fact check the exact distance before quoting, but it wasn't far.

  • Kuwait was doing slant drilling operations along the border.

  • Iraq was upset and started massing troops.

  • The US assumed that Iraq was just planning to take the small strip along the border and didn't think it was worth getting involved. They sent a State Department official to deliver the message "The USA takes no position on inter-Arab border disputes"

  • Saddam hears this and launches a full invasion of all of Kuwait.

So the first Iraq war was essentially about trying to fix a State Department screw up. They tried to give an inch and Saddam tried to take a mile.

As flattering as it is for all things to be a consequence of American decisions, this kind of neglects the context of Saddam's invasion of Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, the economic straights that left the military dictatorship in, the profit motive of not just protecting 'their' oil but getting the rest of the Kuwaiti oil fields, Saddam's geopolitical calculations of how his control of so much of the oil market would lead to it being a fait accompli, and the implications of how that 'how I could get more' and 'why I would get to keep more' could combine with moving further.

Sounds like both Russian invasions of Ukraine.

First Gulf War was the US supporting

the post-1945 taboo against wars of territorial expansion.

I take it that Kosovo and the repeated wars involving Israel were the US opposing that taboo, then?

As neither the United States nor its allies ever sought to annex Kosovo, combined with the atrocities committed against the population by the Serbian government, the intervention in Kosovo was less analogous to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia/Poland/&c. and more analogous to the independence of the various colonies of European nations.

The matter of Israel is more complicated; Israel had, to the best of my knowledge, been minding their own business for the past decade when their Arab neighbours decided to attack them; however, some of their conduct in the territory which they captured in the ensuing conflict has been less than honourable.

I am going to do the, “states rights to do what?”, thing and ask why Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are such close US allies?

I've heard it's because of the balance of power in the Middle East. Also because the US burned bridges with Iran after meddling in their politics during the Cold War, and KSA is the only countering power that the US plausibly could work with. Also oil, probably.

Saudi is a great ally in terms of projecting power and influence in the region. They mostly don’t have internal insurgents we need to help them with and they project power externally against our enemies in the region. Ok top of that, they don’t make everyone else around them incandescent with rage at us for supporting their right to continue drawing breath, which is rather nice.

To what extent do the Saudis project power? I imagine they have an on-paper good military but I haven't heard of any conflicts in which they've performed particularly impressively.

Checkbook diplomacy is the primary, with all the proxy influence dynamics that can imply.

To what extent do the Saudis project power?

They seem to have a lot of pull with other Arab and Muslim nations, which is probably at least partly due to their control of Mecca. Allies with soft power are also useful at times.

Well they are the leaders of the “not Iran or Israel” diplomatic block, so they seem to have influence among the Arabs that want to build functioning societies and not be psycho. They waged a bombing campaign against the houthies about as effective as ours (not at all), which is something. It’s true that they don’t seem nearly as military competent and muscular as the Israelis or Iranians, but they are at least enough of a regional military power that Iran factors them in to their hegemony plans.

Their purchases of US military equipment at sticker price is probably some subsidy to the military industrial complex. They also briefly stabilized Somalia, until the USA made them stop, and Yemen, before the USA made them stop.

Someone online pointed out that 18.3.2.1 of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual reads:

The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal. Similarly, orders to kill defenseless persons who have submitted to and are under effective physical control would also be clearly illegal. On the other hand, the duty not to comply with orders that are clearly illegal would be limited in its application when the subordinate is not competent to evaluate whether the rule has been violated.

That second strike, if it happened, is literally in the manual as an example of an illegal order that would be a violation of the laws of war. I am as-yet unclear on how involved Trump or Hegseth were in this operation but it sounds like, minimally, everyone in the chain of command between Admiral Frank Bradley and whomever actually executed the strike is, at least, a war criminal.

is literally in the manual as an example of an illegal order that would be a violation of the laws of war.

Well, if that's true, screw that manual and screw your laws of war. You don't let the enemy survive after you've drone striked them once. You finish the job. Nothing in the calculus changes that led you to issuing that strike just because you didn't do a perfect job the first strike.

I agree, this seems to me a perplexing point to focus on. For instance the US used delay-action bombs specifically to target rescuers and firefighters trying to put out fire in burning cities during WW2 and beyond - some of those bombs are active to this day in Germany. As of now you can go and watch similar tactics being used in Ukraine war, where you have literal videos of drones bombing wounded, kneeling and praying soldiers, you have videos of double-tapping tanks and APCs including soldiers seeking refuge under such vehicles and more.

Double-tap operations were famous under Obama, where drone strikes targeted either rescue operations or even funerals of terrorists. But maybe this is the critique? Arguably Hegsegh is stupid and he should have done Obama style duble-tap operation, where the military waits for rescue vessel picking up the drowning terrorists only to bomb them again or maybe bomb attendees at their funeral or hospital visitors? The famous sniper tactics of purposefully only wounding the target and letting him alive as bait to kill medics and other valuable targets of opportunity.

Arguably Hegsegh is stupid and he should have done Obama style duble-tap operation, where the military waits for rescue vessel picking up the drowning terrorists only to bomb them again

I'm pretty sure no one was coming to pick up the drowning drug dealers.

...other than the fact that they are no longer a threat to you.

Are they more or less of a threat to me than a terror suspect attending a wedding in some Afghan village?

Less, given that they are hors de combat, while the terrorist in the Afghan village is still capable of perpetrating armed acts against you.

Which "combat"? There's no "combat" between a narco-boat in the middle of the sea and a drone flying a mile overhead. If anything, the "combat" began is when the drone operator identified the target, and it ends when the target is destroyed. Saying it in a fancy way doesn't change anything.

Less, given that they are hors de combat

The terrorist in the Afghan village is not engaged in combat at all. He is not engaged in terrorist activities by attending a wedding, there is no reasonable standard by which his immediate actions constitute combat. Yet we bomb him and those around him anyway. If this is acceptable, which it evidently has been for decades now, then it must be because his allegiance is sufficient to justify striking him, regardless of his present actions. And if that be the case, how does similar logic not apply to narcos in boats?

By what moral logic is it acceptable to bomb a crowded wedding to kill one of the guests, but bombing narcos engaged in smuggling becomes a serious crime only when the second bomb drops? What do you suppose the first one was for?

My understanding is that it's actually more complicated, even if there was a strike purposefully for the purpose of killing two shipwrecked hostile non-state actors.

The quote you reference has a citation referring to a specific event where a military stopped and questioned lifeboats fleeing a sunk hospital ship.

After having sank the ship, the commander decided to ascertain whether the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants and approached the surviving lifeboats. After having interrogated them and having found no indication that the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants or munitions, the U-Boat fired at the lifeboats, sinking two out of three.

The citation should not taken to indicate that shooting everyone who's ever been shipwrecked is always illegal. For example, in the specific case referenced in the Manual, if the lifeboats had combatants or munitions it would have been acceptable to kill them. The Manual is giving a specific example of a time when soldiers were found to have committed an illegal act.

That said, I think it is more likely given the facts known now that no such order was given, and instead the order was to destroy the boat after the first strike did not do sufficient damage for mission parameters. The deaths of the narcoterrorists was incidental.

In addition I think there is currently a strong attempt by the Democrats to force meme 'don't obey unlawful orders (read: any orders given by the administration)' into the zeitgeist. Apparently, the FBI have opened an investigation into the video made by military and intelligence officials, presumably to see if it reaches the benchmark of 'sedition'.

Apparently, the FBI have opened an investigation into the video made by military and intelligence officials, presumably to see if it reaches the benchmark of 'sedition'.

What update am I to make from that? If Trump tweeted that Harris was BBQing babies, I am sure his lapdogs at the FBI would dutifully waste taxpayer money to investigate her for child murder and cannibalism, not release a press statement "this is absurd, we are not looking into that."

It depends very specifically on the exact orders, to far greater detail than available from current reporting even if you trust it. From 7.3.3.1 of the same document:

Incidental Harm Not Prohibited. The respect and protection due to the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked do not prohibit incidental damage or casualties due to their proximity to military objectives or to a justifiable mistake. Combatants who are wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield are deemed to have accepted the risk of death or further injury due to their proximity to military operations. Although the presence of the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked on the battlefield does not serve to exempt military objectives from attack due to the risk that such personnel would be incidentally harmed, feasible precautions must be taken to reduce the risk of harm to the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked.

I mean, the Post's reporting is that the order was to kill everybody. That doesn't sound like the killing of the two initial survivors was incidental. That may turn out to be wrong, of course, but if it's accurate I am pretty confident saying it's a war crime.

the Post's reporting is that the order was to kill everybody

The Post's reporting is that an unnamed source claims the order was to kill everybody. If we're going to nitpick, do it right.

On one hand, Hegseth was picked because he looks like a made for TV movie secdef, not for competence. On the other I trust the average journalist less far than I could throw them. I find it believable that he said something that stupid but I'm not going out of my way to trust unnamed sources in a biased context, either.

On one hand, Hegseth was picked because he looks like a made for TV movie secdef, not for competence.

You're misreading the situation on that one. Hegseth is still too young and pretty to have the look Trump would prefer for SecDef.

Hegseth was picked because he had publicly beefed with the Generals about how the military should be run. Some of their behaviour in Trump's first term was frankly illegal, eg lying to Trump about troop counts in Syria. Trump needed someone who knew enough about the military and was willing to be adversarial.

Was the order to kill everyone issued after the first strike, or before it? Was the order to initiate the second strike to kill survivors, to destroy remaining parts of the boat, or to prevent recovery of drugs? Were the survivors showing clear signs of surrender such that they could be easily captured without any risk or serious cost to other military goals, or were they trying to coordinate over radio for a pickup by their compatriots? These things all matter, and as far as I can tell, none of them are even considered in the original Post reporting so far.

I don't know what the situation is. I don't trust The New York Times any further than I trust WashPo, and I don't trust any politicians further than I could throw their house, and somehow admin members speaking anonymously managed to be even less trustworthy.

And I'm very far from an expert on the laws of combat. But I notice the certainty of others, and how little they argue for how they know what they 'know'.

Interesting that the citation for that section is not to an actual law, but to a post-WWI German War Crimes trial of two U-boat gunners.

Is the DOD Law of War Manual itself a law? Does it get to issue binding commentary? Is something illegal just because the manual says it is?

Legally binding documents:

International Criminal Court Elements of Crimes art. 8 (2) (a) (i):

War crime of wilful killing

Elements

1. The perpetrator killed one or more persons.

2. Such person or persons were protected under one or more of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

3. The perpetrator was aware of the factual circumstances that established that protected status.

4. The conduct took place in the context of and was associated with an international armed conflict.

5. The perpetrator was aware of factual circumstances that established the existence of an armed conflict.

Second Geneva Convention of 1949 art. 12:

Protection and care

Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article, who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances, it being understood that the term “shipwreck” means shipwreck from any cause and includes forced landings at sea by or from aircraft.

Second Geneva Convention of 1949

To apply, wouldn't the crews need to belong to "Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices of the merchant marine ... of the Parties to the conflict..." (literally "the following Article")? Are these boats Venezuelan-flagged vessels? I strongly suspect they're not because that would have raised a whole bunch of other arguments (literally acts of war) that haven't been brought up.

They're not flagged. Since the treaties comprising the laws of the sea were written by people representing nations, who had very little regard for stateless entities and none of it good (considering them brigands, pirates, or worse, libertarians), there's really no or almost no protection for them in those treaties.

Nobody likes non-flagged libertarians.

There are a couple of relevant conventions about stateless persons, but those seem to mostly boil down to "don't make people stateless" and even those aren't universally accepted. But Western nations are more prone to letting them live indefinitely in airports than issuing death warrants for private persons. Boats, on the other hand, don't even get that protection.

The us is not a party to the ICC and the ICC is a joke.

Terrorists are not covered by Geneva conventions.

And even if people want to argue over the definition of terrorist, "non-uniformed combatants" in general are not covered by the Geneva Conventions (or most of the laws of war in general). Non-uniformed combatants are generally punished when found via... summary execution. Whether or not alleged drug dealers allegedly bringing drugs to the US (allegedly on behalf of the Venezuelan government) count as non-uniformed combatants is a whole different question though.

is a whole different question though.

And one with a well-known answer. Merchant seamen are civilians, even if they are transporting contraband. Hence the theory that the drugs and not the people were the legally relevant target - if the drug war was a real war, the drugs would be a legitimate military target and the sailors would be acceptable collateral damage but not a military target in their own right.

Which is probably part of why the US is claiming they are military irregulars operating under the command of the Venezuelan government: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8j4ye5x0mo

Whether or not that claim is true is, again, an entirely different matter. But if they are then they are both non-uniformed and operating flagless vessels in international waters, which means the amount of protection they have against pretty much any action another state chooses to take is effectively zero.

But if they are then they are both non-uniformed and operating flagless vessels in international waters,

There is no requirement for merchant seamen to wear uniforms, or for merchant ships to fly their flags in international waters (unless asked to by a warship of any nationality). For the crews of the drug boats to be unlawful combatants, they have to be fighting out of uniform. Otherwise "they are members of TdA and therefore Venezuelan irregulars" (which I agree is probably the Trump admin's position) would make them combatants currently not fighting - which means the people (but not the boat) would be valid military targets, but subject to GC protections (including against continued attack after being shipwrecked)*

The legal position that makes the boat a military target is that the drug war is a real war which triggers Article 2 war powers and the international law of armed conflict, and that shipping drugs is a belligerent act. And indeed that shipping drugs from Venezuela to Trinidad is a belligerent act against the United States based on the ultimate destination of the drugs. The only people who have historically taken that position as regards shipments of weapons were supporters of unrestricted submarine warfare in WW1 and WW2.

* The distinction the Geneva Conventions make between combatants not currently fighting and combatants rendered hors-de-combat (sick, wounded, surrendered, shipwrecked), while clear as a matter of the current international law in force, doesn't quite make sense in the context of off-battlefield drone strikes. The fact that you can legally (subject to normal considerations about proportionality of collateral damage) drone-kill an off-duty enemy soldier in his bed at home, but not in his hospital bed, doesn't really serve a logical purpose. The fact that you can legally drone-sink a civilian boat (again subject to proportionality) in order to kill the off-duty enemy combatant passengers, but not finish them off once they are in the water, is producing mildly absurd results in the instant case.

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Second Geneva Convention of 1949 art. 3:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed 'hors de combat' by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Commentary ¶ 489 (applying to the first-quoted paragraph):

The object and purpose of common Article 3 supports its applicability in non-international armed conflict reaching beyond the territory of one State. Given that its aim is to provide persons not or no longer actively participating in hostilities with certain minimum protections during intense armed confrontations between States and non-State armed groups or between such groups, it is logical that those same protections would apply when such violence spans the territory of more than one State.

Commentary ¶¶ 893–896 (applying to the last-quoted paragraph):

This provision confirms that, while humanitarian law provides for equal rights and obligations of the Parties to the conflict in the treatment of people in their power, it does not confer legitimacy on non-State armed groups that are Parties to a conflict.

Furthermore, it serves to underline that, as international humanitarian law applies based on the facts, regardless of whether a State qualifies the members of a non-State armed group as ‘terrorists’ or its actions as ‘terrorism’, humanitarian law applies if and when the conditions for its applicability are met.

The denial that groups that a State has labelled as ‘terrorist’ may be a Party to a non-international armed conflict within the meaning of humanitarian law carries the risk that the non-State armed group loses an incentive to abide by that body of law. This in turn reduces the ability of humanitarian law to serve its protective purpose. Humanitarian law seeks to protect civilians and all those who are not directly participating in hostilities; it does this in part by obliging Parties to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and military objectives.

Nothing since the introduction of common Article 3 in 1949 has altered the fact that the applicability of humanitarian law to situations of non-international armed conflicts does not affect the legal status or enhance the legitimacy of non-State armed groups. This remains as essential today as it was at that time, as any other interpretation will almost inevitably lead States to deny the applicability of common Article 3 and thereby undermine its humanitarian objective.

I don't think the ICC rules apply to the United States. (Isn't there an literal statute repudiating them?)

The Geneva Convention is your best bet, but it's pretty vague. I don't think anyone actually wants our armed forces interpreting it literally (okay, some people want that, but I'd wager most people don't, especially not if we were in a real war with enemies who shoot back.)

I never put much stock in the, "we would never follow illegal orders," shtick in the first place. If the military wants to do something in wartime, they'll do it.

I will caveat that the Second Geneva Convention only applies between contracting parties by its own terms, so unless Venezuela wanted to do the funniest thing, it's not clear how binding it would be here. But the United States tends to flip back and forth about whether it wants to apply the same rules regardless, and it'd probably be a good idea.

The story I heard is thag Trump asked for the boat to be destroyed, and someone down the chain of command decided to shoot a second missile, which technically did not voilate his orders. There's a lot of leeway in ways to destroy the boat, and legally I can't see the difference between shooting the boat while it was undamaged, versus shooting it after it was damaged by a missile but still floating.

Anyways clearly the intention is to kill the people on those boats, so any screeching that the survivors were finished off will fall on deaf ears. Anyone who wants those people dead is still happy, and anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

There is zero credible argument that these aren't smuggling boats. Even the most biased anti-Trump news isn't making that claim.

and anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

I'm generally sympathetic about drugs. Drugs are sick. I prescribe them sometimes. But when the drugs in question are almost certainly large amounts of fent, I'm not too fussed if the dealer is blown up by a missile.

If Trump is telling the truth about what is going on, the drugs in question are cocaine being smuggled overland from Colombia through Venezuela, and then by boat island-hopping across the Caribbean - most of the boats sunk were travelling from Venezuela to Trinidad, and they don't have the range to reach the US directly. The fentanyl comes in from Mexico across the land border. (It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).

(It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).

As far as I know, the consensus view is that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl on US streets takes the following route:

  1. Precursor/component chemicals are produced in China by pharmaceutical companies.
  2. These components are shipped from China to Mexico. Some of this is smuggled in (e.g. triad-to-cartel B2B relationships), some is legally shipped and acquired by cartels later. The Chinese government may or may not be facilitating this process.
  3. The actual fentanyl is produced by the Mexican cartels, in drug labs throughout Mexico.
  4. Fentanyl is smuggled into the US over the land border. The potency of fentanyl means tiny volumes comprise many doses so this is not very hard to get away with on a useful scale, much easier than basically any other drug.
  5. Once in the US, the fentanyl is distributed around the country through traditional criminal channels until it eventually reaches the street-level dealers.

This consensus ignores the vast amounts of fentanyl being produced in Canada and coming across the wild Northern border.

It's drug money being laundered through real estate propping up Vancouver and Toronto housing prices.

Closer and closer to the Day of the Rake.

Fifty-four Forty, all the way to Hudson Bay.

I know that Trump's been saying this, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly wrong -- mainly because it's approximately as hard to get precursors into Canada as it is to get them directly into the US; also while we do have our own homegrown gangs their capacity is pretty limited compared to the cartel scene in Mexico.

You are certainly wrong about the real estate <-> drug money pipeline; this is rare enough to be negligible (mom & pop stuff) -- the main laundering going on (in the western part of the country anyways) is people trying to hide money from the Chinese government. Maybe you have real estate confused with casinos?

You are very right, thanks for adding that. It’s a similar path of Chinese pharmaceuticals -> drug gangs with labs -> smuggled across the land border. The “essentially all through Mexico” theory is a few years out of date; I don’t know how much of that is actual change on the ground and how much is just increased awareness of northern-border drug running. I do think the majority is still assumed to be coming from Mexico but the Canadian side is very much not negligible.

Weren't most of these boats carrying cocaine rather than fent?

Ah. In that case, I think a missile is overkill. They should have been given an expedited visa instead.

anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

Or, you know, we could take them prisoner?

To what end? Is one of these boat guys going to give us GPS coordinates on the Venezuelan El Chapo and then we are going to send in a SEAL team into Venezuela? Otherwise, a Hellfire is $150k, transporting these folks from a shipwreck to the US already probably costs about that. Housing, prosecuting, imprisoning, then deporting them 10 years later would cost several million per head.

Not only shouldn't they be taken prisoner, the strikes should be also on the plantation, the reprocessing "factories" (dudes with a bunch of diesel and metal drums). The strikes should extend to the cartel leaders, their homes and their families.

What did their families do?

Not worth the wasted fuel and detention costs.

Or, you know, we could take them prisoner?

There are significant logistical difficulties in doing this before the boat has been hit by a missile. Afterwards, they apparently have been, when reasonably possible.

If you're referring to the purported double-tap specifically, well, is there any good reason to think such a thing happened? You're not seriously taking an anonymous anti-Trump report from the Washington Post at face value in 2025, are you? One so perfectly timed with a Democrat Party psyop that it was almost certainly coordinated? Pity that CIA-Afghani dude went and shot a couple of National Guardsmen who were following "illegal according to Democrat Senator winking and nudging" orders. Really messed up the flow of the news cycle.

You're not seriously taking an anonymous anti-Trump report from the Washington Post at face value in 2025, are you?

The WH confirmed it:

WASHINGTON, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The White House on Monday defended a U.S. admiral's decision to conduct multiple strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling vessel in September, saying he had Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's authorization, even as critics questioned the legality of a strike on survivors. The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to kill two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed.

President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he would not have wanted a second strike on the boat and said Hegseth denied giving such an order.

But White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that Hegseth had authorized Admiral Frank Bradley to conduct the strikes on September 2.

"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.

...

My dude, that whole quote is pure "The media rarely lies, just carefully weaves un- and half-truths like a wicked fey. Meet them with fire and cold iron."

And there's actually still plenty of room for straight up lies in what you posted. That first sentence is a masterclass in smuggled assumptions and sleight-of-hand implication. But no, there is nothing remotely resembling "confirmation" in that quote. What you are seeing is your own motivated reasoning, in a mirror.

Do you read the things you post?

60% of the time, every time. Is this a complaint that the WH confirmed the second strike occurred, but disputed Hegseth's orders?

That's the most obvious problem:

The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to kill two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed.

and

"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.

Are not completely incompatible, but they're very far from confirmation, and in some ways very specifically in contradiction ("ensure the boat was destroyed"). And Hegseth's specific denial isn't much reason to be generous -- he's a politician! -- but it by definition can not be confirmation.

More subtly, "double-tap" has a specific meaning. While no one's using the strict 'hitting a bomb site to hit first responders' bit, here, it matters very heavily whether the second shot was solely targeting survivors or targeting material; this distinction would be a major difference in between a war crime and a legitimate (if not necessarily ethical) strike. This, likewise, wasn't confirmed by the White House.

Can it even be a war crime when it's not an official war?

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anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

You know that's not the actual argument being made right? There's a lot of room between "just blow up boats because we said they had drugs" and "do nothing"

Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.

But ok, let's say that they are drug boats. Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people. Drug deaths are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but blaming the person who sold them the drugs is like when leftists blame gun stores for shootings.

That doesn't mean we should or have to be legalizing them, there is no constitutional right to either use or sell drugs but the argument being used currently by the Trump admin is one of poor victims who aren't responsible for their own drug additions, and they need to be protected from the "terrorists" who provide the druggies the goods they want. An easier way to think about it is with a lesser harm, like if someone were to proclaim we should start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. It's the same logic, they provide an addictive product that Americans use to hurt themselves with so are they not corn syrup terrorists?

We could ban high glycemic index products and we could punish people who kept selling them anyway because likewise there is no constitutional right to them. But calling the sellers terrorists for something the "victims" choose to do to themselves is nonsense. We ban those products so people can't hurt themselves from their own stupid decisions.

Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway?

Yes please. I think that due process should only be reserved for citizens and people in US legally.

But ok, let's say that they are drug boats. Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people. Drug deaths are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but blaming the person who sold them the drugs is like when leftists blame gun stores for shootings.

I don't find this convincing, for the same reason that a gun dealer smuggling weapons into Somalia is, as far as I'm concerned, killing people. Sure, they didn't shoot anyone. "Guns don't kill people, people do, unless it's a Sig" etc etc.

More importantly, drugs aren't made alike. A group of college kids or business people doing lines of coke in a bathroom stall aren't trying to kill themselves, any more than someone ordering a shot of vodka is. Unfortunately, due to the sheer ridiculous potency of fentanyl, even microscopic contamination, say the dealer being less than scrupulous about washing hands, can leave those poor bastards ODing on the floor.

Drugs are not made alike. Someone smoking weed, doing coke or dropping molly before a concert is in a very different reference class to people shooting up heroin/fent or smoking crack pipes.

Accidental ODing from taking an entirely different drug is closer to dying of a peanut allergy after ordering gummy bears. It's not suicide.

I particularly dislike fent because it's like the Worst Drug Imaginable, and because it screws over even people who want to stay away from it. Thankfully it's not common in the UK, and the Albanians keep the coke clean.

Drugs are not made alike. Someone smoking weed, doing coke or dropping molly before a concert is in a very different reference class to people shooting up heroin/fent or smoking crack pipes.

Accidental ODing from taking an entirely different drug is closer to dying of a peanut allergy after ordering gummy bears. It's not suicide.

I particularly dislike fent because it's like the Worst Drug Imaginable, and because it screws over even people who want to stay away from it. Thankfully it's not common in the UK, and the Albanians keep the coke clean.

Agreed with you on all of this. As far as I know, almost no one intentionally takes Fentanyl, because it's not fun and it's pretty much straight poison. They take it accidentally because it gets mixed in with other drugs.

This situation is dicey. As I understand it, most of US cocaine comes from South America and especially Venezuela these days. They don't need to bother with Fentanyl, cocaine is plenty cheap enough there already, the only hard part is getting it into the US. So these drug boats are probably just carrying cocaine. However, after it's into the US, it gets mixed in with fentanyl by dealers here who want to make extra profit. The Fentanyl comes from Mexico or China, and it's a lot harder to stop because it comes in such small quantities and we have less power to use military force against those countries.

Using lethal force against a fentanyl dealer seems justified. Using lethal force against a coke dealer seems like massive overkill. In this case... maybe that's the only way to stop the fentanyl from being used? I don't know, seems like a trolley problem.

As far as I know, almost no one intentionally takes Fentanyl, because it's not fun and it's pretty much straight poison.

You are incorrect. I have many clients who smoke 10-100 fentanyl pills (in the form of fake oxy pills) per day.

why do they do that? why not oxy or heroin? how are they even still alive?

America's tent cities are full of such fent users. It is very, very cheap and easy to obtain. Far cheaper and easier than oxy or heroin. Like all narcotics, one can build up a tolerance.

I don't find this convincing, for the same reason that a gun dealer smuggling weapons into Somalia is, as far as I'm concerned, killing people. Sure, they didn't shoot anyone. "Guns don't kill people, people do, unless it's a Sig" etc etc.

There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.

But how about the other examples then? Are sugar companies terrorists? Are the tobacco and alcohol companies terrorists? They're all dangerous unhealthy products that get misused and abused, causing health damage and even death.

They're not as dangerous as most drugs sure, but they are pretty dangerous. Alcohol just off a quick Google search is estimated at "approximately 178,000 deaths per year are linked to excessive alcohol use.". That's 178k lives annually, some of them course not even the drinkers own life like people hit by drunk driving. Were the teens in my high school hit and killed by drunk drivers years ago victims of Alcohol-terrorism by the store who sold the drunk a dangerous product? Kids died because of it, so using the same logic it seems like a yes. I'm sure the alcohol manufacturers were well aware that some of their drunk customers go on to drunk drive and hit other people at times.

There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.

But how about the other examples then? Are sugar companies terrorists? Are the tobacco and alcohol companies terrorists? They're all dangerous unhealthy products that get misused and abused, causing health damage and even death.

Well, there's a reason why I went with the example of arms dealers circumventing international law to smuggle drugs into a war zone with an ongoing genocide. I think Colt or H&K are entirely above board. Cars kill people too, and I don't blame Honda as long as they met government safety standards.

With alcohol and cigarettes, everyone knows what they're getting into. Society beats into your head the fact that you're almost certainly strictly better off not touching them, but hey, you're a free man, and if you're an adult that's your choice. I like that. I also believe that most currently illegal drugs should be held to the same standard.

The arguments you bring up are emotive and sway the innumerate. I am okay with greater than zero people dying because of their choices, and that point it becomes a question of quantity, not quality. Swimming pools kill kids too.

By those standards, a fent dealer is closer to someone aiding and abetting a genocide. Someone selling weed and coke at Burning Man is not. That's my two cents.

By those standards, a fent dealer is closer to someone aiding and abetting a genocide. Someone selling weed and coke at Burning Man is not. That's my two cents.

By raw numbers, junk food companies kill and injure way more citizens a year than fentanyl does. They have massive lobbying arms to get themselves into schools (where they clog our childrens arteries and make them unable to exercise well and ugly), remain on programs like SNAP, and get funneled government money.

And Google says

Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,

In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.

Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.

I think you're conflating "harm" with "violence" and ignoring the role of consent and information asymmetry.

If I sell you a car that I know has a 100% chance of breaking down in ten years, I'm a crappy salesman selling a mediocre product. If I sell you a car that has a 1% chance of exploding the moment you turn the key, I am a murderer. The total number of people inconvenienced or harmed by the first scenario might be higher in aggregate, but we treat the second scenario differently because of the variance and the violation of expectation.

Tobacco is the first car. It is a slow-motion suicide pact. The transaction costs are transparent. The package literally says it will kill you! Nobody smoking cigarettes in the West in 2025 AD is under the illusion that it's good for your health.

The user makes a trade of "feeling good now" against "dying of lung cancer in 2050" and society generally allows people to make bad intertemporal trades. We might tax it to recoup the externalities, but we acknowledge the agency of the user.

Fentanyl is the exploding car.

First, there is the lemon market problem. A huge percentage of fentanyl deaths are people who thought they were buying Xanax, Percocet, or cocaine. In those cases, the dealer is effectively poisoning the customer through fraud. If McDonald's started slipping cyanide into 1 in every 10,000 Big Macs to save on meat costs, we would not fine them. We would arrest the board of directors and likely see the company dismantled by the state. That is not "selling an unhealthy product" but rather "killing people" or at least criminal negligence.

Second, even for the willing user, the margin of error is nonexistent. A cigarette smoker cannot accidentally smoke a single cigarette that kills them instantly. A heroin user in the pre-fentanyl era had a reasonable grasp of their dosage. Fentanyl requires pharmacy-grade blending equipment to be safe. Mixing it in a bathtub in Sinaloa guarantees hot spots where a specific dose is instantly fatal. Selling this product is akin to selling a game of Russian Roulette disguised as a sedative.

Finally, there's the state capacity argument regarding your drone strike comment. We don't drone strike Philip Morris because Philip Morris submits to the jurisdiction of US courts. If they break the law, we sue them. If they hide evidence, we fine them. They exist within the Leviathan. The cartels exist outside of it. They enforce their business model with beheadings and bribery, effectively declaring themselves a rival sovereign. You can't sue a cartel in small claims court for wrongful death. When an entity places itself outside the law and uses violence to enforce its will, the state responds with military force rather than police action.

The tobacco executive is selling a legal vice, and everyone knows it's a vice. The fentanyl smuggler is selling a variance-heavy poison often disguised as something else, while actively warring against the state.

In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.

About 10% of the deaths are attributable to second-hand smoking. I think that's terrible, but that's an equilibrium reached by society on the basis of decades of litigation and regulation. We've cracked down heavily on most cases of second hand smoking. You can't harm everyone else in the restaurant without being asked to stop or getting into legal trouble. I wouldn't be averse to even stronger resistrictions.

I care not just about the raw numbers, but harm per capita, preservation of individual liberty, and also whether the industry is doing harm after submitting to regulation, or despite it.

Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.

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About 10% of the deaths are attributable to second-hand smoking.

This also feels like a solved problem. I can't think of the last time I was truly exposed to second hand smoke. There's still older waitresses with a time bomb in their lungs, but will there still be by 2040?

The coke is illegal, though, so the buyer can't quite claim consumer rights. If you're using it, you have to know that it might be smuggled from dubious places and laced with dubious chemicals, some of which can send you into OD.

There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.

If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.

Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime. Drug Cartels are a very close aproximate to classical examples of Hostis Humani Generis. But more damningly, even if these facts were not the case, even if the equivalency you are drawing were not entirely spurious, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.

If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.

Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well. Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!

Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime.

Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves. The same thing happens with guns and bullets.

Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold. But is the gun shop responsible for that? Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!

, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.

There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex. If you're so emotional about it as to actively admit you're making up your strawman ideas about me, then it's not gonna be productive. You don't change emotions with rational arguments, "no, I support due process with you as well and believe in personal responsibility for everyone" would not change a single thing that comes out of feelings.

Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well.

WE implemented laws perfectly well to preclude such lawsuits. Blues found those laws inconvenient and chose to ignore them, and have successfully done so. Perhaps you might have argued that doing so was a bad idea, and would undermine necessary norms, but if so it appears your arguments did not carry the day. Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.

Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!

I reiterate that all evidence indicates that such detente does not exist and never will. Blues will do and have done what they want to do. Neither law nor custom nor social norms restrain them. Trading off my tribe's values in pursuit of some mythical compromise is evidently unworkable; such compromises last until Blues find them inconvenient, and then they are swept aside.

The way my tribe will keep our guns is by systematically undermining and removing the legal and social mechanisms that might be used to take them, which we are currently well on our way to doing, and by making it abundantly clear that we will burn the country to ashes before we allow Blues to disarm us, which we are also well on our way to doing. At no point is any degree of cooperation with Blues required for this process. At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.

Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves.

"Bad way" and "hurt others" are terms of no fixed meaning, and I have no reason to believe that you and I share a common understanding of them sufficient to draw comparisons in this way. More generally, there does not appear to be an objective measure of social harm, and Blues have already demonstrated that they are willing to abruptly and drastically redefine what is and is not actionable social harm overnight.

Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold.

I do not agree that this is a valid chain of causality, and I do not believe that you would accept chains of causality much, much less ambiguous if they cut against your tribal interests. For example, Judges frequently release prisoners convicted of multiple violent felonies who then commit additional violent felonies. Would you agree that the judge more directly causes such violent felonies than the employees of the gun shop in your example? Do you support the recent push to hold judges accountable for the crimes of convicts they release? If not, why not? Such releases are absolutely not victimless, and the judge has far better evidence of the nature of the convict they release than the gun store owner does of a random customer.

Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!

It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."

There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex.

Assessing the values and motives of others based on what they say and do is not a victim complex. Your rhetorical strategies do not appear to me to be particularly complex. You pick an issue and frame it in whatever way is maximally-convenient to the argument you wish to make at this particular moment, with no apparent regard to arguments you've made before or will make in the future. You do not appear to have principles deeper than "Who, Whom". And I disagree, there is much discussion to be had: see above. I appreciate that this may not be the discussion you particularly wish to have, but that is your business, not mine.

In any case, it does not seem to me that pointing to clear examples that contradict your statements constitutes "emotional argument" or a "victim complex". You are arguing that my side should stop doing bad things. I am disagreeing with you that what we are doing is bad, and further that your side does worse than what you accuse us of, much less what we have actually done.

Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.

Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe". Political parties may coalesce around it as compromises, but political philosophies don't. Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"

This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.

At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.

This is actually a great example of how political philosophies aren't so tribal. Try saying "the constitution is a sham" to your average Republican and they'll firmly disagree with you. There are lots of proud and patriotic conservatives who believe in the constitution and traditional American classical liberal values.

Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.

It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."

Ok here's a big example then

Google says

Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,

In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl in terms of how many people die a year! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.

Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.

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There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society.

It was absolutely not laughed out. It was part of a serious lawfare push from the left to bankrupt and destroy the entire domestic gun manufacturing industry. The right ended up passing legislation to specifically ban that kind of "process is the punishment and maybe we win the lottery" fishing lawsuit.

Didn’t the lawful commerce in arms act predate gun control as a political fault line? It basically codified that guns are inherently hazardous and so manufacturers aren’t liable for misuse, the same standards exist for cars.

LCIAA was passed in 2005. Gun control has been a political fault line at least since the Clinton administration and its attempted gun control policies, notably the Assault Weapons Ban and the Waco raid a decade and a half prior. The 90s also saw numerous attempts to use spurious lawsuits to bankrupt the firearms industry. LCIAA was supposed to forestall those efforts once and for all. That it did not is seriously damaging to the standard narrative of how our system of laws operates.

You left off the part where that legislation has been pointedly ignored and that the lawsuits it banned have continued.

It was one of those situations where I was pretty sure that was the case, but couldn't recall any specific details, so I couldn't be sure I wasn't just making assumptions.

Let me guess; Hawaii and NY?

Connecticut for one of the more prominent examples, Massachusetts for another. The lawsuit against Remington was eventually settled for $73 million, the lawsuit by Mexico was eventually struck down by the supreme court after being upheld by some lower courts.

I think the right wing can be too cavalier about this, but there's definitely a spectrum no matter where you personally place the line.

On guns: from selling to a man who tells you outright 'I want this gun to shoot my wife' to selling to an army known for indiscriminate mass murders, to selling to an allied military, to selling to society in general knowing that some may misuse it, to selling only to men of good background with good references.

On alcohol: from selling spirits to the man whose family came into your corner shop to beg you not to sell to him, to the off-license on the motorway, to society in general, to society parties only.

And so on. "Either you hold people responsible for what's done with their products or you don't," seems like a false binary.

Guns also aren't addictive in and of themselves, FWIW.

I know many people who would disagree.

This response does not surpise me, but can we agree that the mechanisms between these types of addictions differ significantly?

Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.

Is it? I mean I've seen that expressed from time to time, but isn't it generally indistinguishable from generalized anti-Trump complaints like opposition to law enforcement and immigration enforcement, being pro-nonwhite persons, etc? The Mark Kelly statement which some on the right are referring to as the "seditious six" seems to me to be something he's probably said before and seems to fit perfectly into statements made about basically every Trump action of all time.

If South American cartels were running guns into the US that were used in the deaths of over 100k Americans per years, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun runners?

If South American cartels were running guns into the US that were used in the deaths of over 100k Americans per years, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun runners?

If US manufacturers and gun shops were selling guns in the US, and the guns they made and sold were involved in the deaths of ~48,000 a year and used in untold numbers of robberies and other crime, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun shop and manufacturers?

It seems like the difference here is

American: Perfectly good, not responsible for anything. Foreigner: Evil, full responsibility

Even if they're doing the exact same thing and selling the exact same products.

If US manufacturers and gun shops were selling guns in the US, and the guns they made and sold were involved in the deaths of ~48,000 a year and used in untold numbers of robberies and other crime, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun shop and manufacturers?

Let's specify "illegal ghost guns" just to highlight the faultlines. In which case, no, because I am not opposed to unregistered ghost guns. But I would bet that approximately 0% of the people upset about the narcoboats would bat an eye if the US government slaughtered a warehouse full of guys 3D printing guns with no warning or warrant or evidence.

Even if they're doing the exact same thing and selling the exact same products.

Cocaine is not legal for sale from US producers. The point of that hypothetical was to change the object-value-valence (guns:good/bad, drugs:good/bad) and see what people's moral intuition came up with.

Let's specify "illegal ghost guns" just to highlight the faultlines.

So is harm only harm if it's been designated illegal? Seems like we could solve all the drug problems just by legalizing them then.

Wait no, that would be stupid and the distinction drawn here would be equally stupid.

So is harm only harm if it's been designated illegal? Seems like we could solve all the drug problems just by legalizing them then.

Did you see how I answered the question? I made it more extreme and then yeschaded it.

The strategy needs to make sense. More neocon war mongering and destroying countries leads to more chaos, drugs and migrants.

The sensible solution is to enforce borders and limit drugs/guns/migrants there. Turning Venezuela into another Afghanistan will just achieve what the Afghanistan war did, aka 10x their drug production. The US doesn't have to fight cartels, they just need to keep a secure border.

Trump is going for regime change in Venezuela, that means more chaos, more drugs and more refugees. The strategy should be a stable Venezuela and largely not caring about Venezuela while enforcing the border.

This is similar to when people living in a cave in Afghanistan were allowed to go to flight school in the US. The solution to 9/11 wasn't banning Afghans from the west, it was the patriot act, a surveillance state and failed wars.

If South American cartels were running guns into the US that were used in the deaths of over 100k Americans per years, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun runners?

Only in direct response to normal contraband-interception-operations being attacked with lethal force. Declaring war launching a Special Military Operation against smugglers "Narco-Terrorists" Foreign Terror Organizations is fucked up.

Only in direct response to normal contraband-interception-operations being attacked with lethal force.

Including in this scenario, where "normal contraband interception operations" are completely impractical?

Are you familiar with the heat map meme?

The heat map meme confuses me. According to this, the instructions are that each circle includes the ones inside it, i.e. liberals are at most guilty of caring about too many things, as opposed to too far things. But then this implies that the circles are exclusive of each other.

Apparently, the description of the task in the Methods section and the supplementary notes is in fact different. I'd assume most participants would follow the actual handout text rather than what the researchers claim they explained.

Apparently apparently, there were two tasks related to the moral circle and the heat map meme is about the simplified "extent" task, where the participants were simply asked to click on the rung that includes everything they care about.

P.P.S. Why is there no circle numbered 0 and labeled "myself only"? I'd like to see what the distribution between that and "immediate family" would be.

The study is at best extremely poorly designed, but generated a convenient image that feels true regarding the actual nature of liberal emotivism rather than what liberals claim about their cares.

where the participants were simply asked to click on the rung that includes everything they care about.

Not just rung! Despite being, in theory, cohesive layers, people only clicked near the numbers.

Why is there no circle numbered 0 and labeled "myself only"?

The people that designed the study were idiots.

Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for...

There's not a ton of quad-outboard motorboats using that style of travel and large numbers of garbage-bagged wrapped cubic containers, as shown in the videos the administration has provided, and other countries have claimed to recover cocaine from the aftermath, but even if you don't trust either administration's assessments, from that Right-Wing Rag:

In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.

I'd be a little interest to understand what, exactly, that would work like.

Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people.

The United States government ventilates the skulls of American citizens in predawn raids, while wearing masks and without clear 'police' markings and without any of the 'blaring messages saying to turn back' bullshit. I can't promise that absolutely every single person who suddenly cares about drug traffickers seems to have found their conscience, here. But if you've got an example, I'd like to see it.

Until then, that argument holds no water. That ship has sailed, exploded, and sunk to the seabed.

((That's doubly true given the common mix and mislabeling of various drugs by illegal sellers. Someone who decided to do cocaine only 'decided' to do fentanyl in the revealed preferences sense of not finding a better drug dealer.))

An easier way to think about it is with a lesser harm, like if someone were to proclaim we should start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. It's the same logic, they provide an addictive product that Americans use to hurt themselves with so are they not corn syrup terrorists?

You're not presenting an argument, here.

the argument being used currently by the Trump admin is one of poor victims who aren't responsible for their own drug additions, and they need to be protected from the "terrorists" who provide the druggies the goods they want.

Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

There's an interesting strain of Latin American thought that goes something like: America blames us for the drug gangs, when we're stuck with the drug gangs because of American demand for cocaine.

(Hegseth is joking about it)

Direct link. I don't think this supports claims that he's joking about the second strike.

((Also, new Turing Test: how do RPGs work.))

Man. I’ve been defending Hegseth’s position upthread, but he’s a real ghoul, isn’t he?

How exactly did he end up in this position?

That's a black sense of humor congruent with most people in a profession where people die. Doctors, soldiers, EMTs, cops, etc. What that actually intends to signal is solidarity with the people who might have to carry out actual violence, over desk-and-degrees leadership a thousand miles away (and their fellow social class members like journalists and general upper class laptop people who take WaPo seriously).

Hegseth's entire pitch for the position was "the purpose of the military is killing people, get back to basics". Getting verklempt over a dark meme is the new R government equivalent of misgendering someone.

In part, as a corrective to the perceived over-sensitivity of the prior military bureaucracy.

Probably because Trump was tired of the lack of loyalty from his hires in Trump I.

As he should be. There's no reason to tolerate people working for you who don't want to be working for you.

How exactly did he end up in this position?

Trump liked to watch him on Fox News.

Your own source says, "President Donald Trump, who is holding a meeting about Venezuela with his national security team later in the day, said on Sunday that he would not have wanted a second strike on the boat." So I'm not sure why your follow up questions are on Trump.

The Washington Post story is, "The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to take out two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed."

Sean Parnell (Assistant to the SECWAR, Chief Pentagon Spokesman & Senior Advisor ) said, "We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday."

You seem to be implying that Leavitt's comment contradicts this:

"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.

However, Leavitt's statement is not the Washington Post story. It actually contradicts it by placing the emphasis on the destruction of the boat, not the killing of the two survivors of the first attack.

So I'm not sure why your follow up questions are on Trump.

He's the President and started this conflict without a declaration of war from Congress, so... (Or do you think the whole thing is being run by staffers pulling a "Weekend At Biden's?")

Was the wreckage of a boat a threat to the United States of America?

Your first comment seemed to be about the new scandal - the double strike. Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."

No, Trump is clearly doing something with Venezuela. But if you want to argue about the whole situation in general, it would require putting forward more of an argument on your part.

Let me try to make my point and my concern more clear: The longer the conflict continues and the greater the escalation of force, the less sense the stated justification makes and the more suspicious I am of the Trump administration.

Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."

Assuming that this occurred, until he fires the people involved, the buck stops with Trump. I'm fairly willing to believe that Trump might literally either not understand or not go into enough detail to care about the laws of war, but he employs several people whose job it is to keep him from tripping over his own dick. If all those people did not prevent him from doing this, or did this without his knowledge, he can fire them, or he can own their actions as his own.

Yeah, sure. But I haven't seen evidence of Trump being particularly bloodthirsty, which seems to be the implications being driven at.

I don't really see the difference between "Trump is personally bloodthirsty" and "Trump hires and empowers bloodthirsty people and does nothing to stop them." Those are functionally equivalent states.

We can play a bit of "If Only The Czar Knew..." but that only works until the Czar ought to know. If Hegseth and his makeup studio are out of the Pentagon by March, then we can go back to the Donald the Dove bit. At the very least, a scapegoat must be found, for decency's sake.

Yes. This is a case that really looks bad -- it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?), but that Hegseth not only authorized it but lied about it, not just to the press but to his boss. If that's so, he should resign.

However, the press is so unreliable that it's quite possible this isn't the case, and e.g. even if they're telling the literal truth, the second strike was not to kill survivors but to destroy a drug boat after a first attack failed to do so.

However, the press is so unreliable that it's quite possible this isn't the case,

Yeah, this story sounds a lot like "A bunch of white Duke Lacrosse players gang-raped a black stripper" or "the Israeli government intentionally targeted non-combatants." From the point of view of a progressive, it's just too good to doubt. And usually these types of stories fall apart once the actual facts start coming out.

The basic rule of thumb is that any story published in the Western media which, if true, shows that the Left's out-group is evil, is probably false.

it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?)

I am very far from an expert in this topic, but perfidy is stuff like attacking while under a flag of surrender or parlay, or the use of protected symbols for that purpose. Double-tapping survivors of an attack might be a violation in other ways, such as violating the concept of hors de combat, but that gets a lot more complicated; even attempting to escape can leave a combatant as 'in', and being incapacitated does not mean that you act as a human shield for other nearby legitimate military targets.

That's separate from whether it's good: it's possible for something to be a war crime and tots not a big deal (eg, the famous Doom health pack examples), and it's possible for something to not be a war crime and still show a significant moral lapse.

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