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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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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.

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