Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?
Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?
Israel performs precise attacks on valid military targets and with multiple measures to reduce the number of collateral damage to civilians. You are trying to equate this with terrorist attacks literally targeting civilians.
The carnage was too documented for too long of a period of time for those words of yours to warrant a serious response. I know that the only way to possibly attempt to repair your image is to relentlessly repeat the bullet points over and over again and hope that the new generations hear more of your words and less of actual documented reporting, but there is no reason for the rest of us to dignify such attempts of yours with a serious discussion about what are now established facts. While you're staring at that mirror, try to find a semblance of a soul somewhere deep if any still exists there. Collectively.
If the "carnage" was so well "documented", then it'll be quite easy for you to provide proof. Do you have any proof at all that Israel engages in systematic *terrorism* (i.e. "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims")?
Again, I'm not talking about collateral casualties in valid military strikes. I'm talking about sustained, deliberate attacks against civilians with the objective of killing as many civilians as possible. Do you have any evidence at all that Israel did this?
Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.
Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.
Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.
Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.
Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".
Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!
If you could press a button and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza, would you press that button?
If you could execute every Yemeni, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian tomorrow, gifting you a 'clean', and 'pure' world for Greater Israel to flourish for 1000 years, would you do it?
If your answer is yes. Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.
Do yourself a favor; go on to google maps and zoom out until you can see all these countries. Isreal is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.
What has happened, is that the large Jewish populations of Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon have gone to 0. So you got yourself a large “clean” and “pure” area. But it’s that remaining sliver that you are obsessed with trying to wipe out.
Is your argument that because these territorial incursions have not been successful to the degree the the Israeli government desired, that those incursions are unacceptable to resist?
> Isreal[sic] is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.
My sibling in [your preferred Deity], you cannot spell Israel?? What are we doing?
Do you acknowledge that expanding militarily is always illegal, or not? You can't make an argument like "Israel is just a smol bean that needs lebensraum" and make it sound normal in 2026.
I want middle-aged Jewish people that have 'purchased' stolen land in the West Bank to move back home to the States and be my neighbors again! That isn't 'wiping them out', quite the contrary!
Forestalling that, I want integration and democracy and an accounting of what was stolen, along with reparations. I want the children of that land to grow up and not understand why their parents were in conflict. To barely comprehend how it could have been so bad.
This is what I want for the United States as well. An accounting and reparations for both the decedents of the enslaved and those we committed genocide against, within our borders and without. We never completed reconstruction and we are all poorer for it.
This is why the current administration is tearing down monuments that remember our past, they'd rather live in a muscular fantasy of restoration forgotten 'white' greatness than acknowledge what we owe to each other. That we must find solidarity and love in shared humanity to resist the forces that divide us.
They have not expanded in 50 years because they have no desire to expand. It’s a scary bedtime story told to kids in certain cultures.
Do you also think that non-whites should leave Europe? Do you think that South Americans should be deported from North America. You think that lands belongs to races?
Your siblings in ideology are actively working to make Jews in America and around the world feel hated so that they are motivated to migrate to Isreal.
It’s the antisemitism of “anti-Zionists” that is boosting Zionism.
While I don't agree with terrorism, this is incorrect. International law is quite deliberate in allowing the victims of aggression to do almost anything against the aggressors to get control of their land back, including terrorism. Those who wrote the law hoped this would be a sufficient deterrent against invasions.
There is no such notion in IHL. IHL has a notion of self-defense, but that's only relevant to jus ad bellum. Once a conflict exists, there are no carveouts whatsoever for those who claim self-defense, or consider themselves victims, or claim that the other side violated international laws. Customary IHL doesn't care about such claims.
The pager operation has been one of the most targeted ones in history for its size. The ratio of civilian by Hezbollah member casualties was very low compared to other military operations or a war.
The perpetrators of pager attack had no way at all to know who would be closest to the pagers when they exploded, nor any way to know that the nominal owner of a particular pager were a combatant in the first place.
So the perpetrators did not know they would actually hurt a lawful target, they just hoped it might.
Oh yeah, just random chance that the Hezbollah combatants would have their military pagers close to them rather than with some random civilian. What an incredible coincidence!
Go get some life. I believe Hitler had the same mentality. Reducing casualty. He asked everyone to wear their stars if they had had circumcision and targeted them systematically. He could have bombed them all but decided to be more deliberate. Yes yes, flipping the script is antisemitism. Of course it is.
Completely bizarre how you are equating killing Hezbollah combatants (a terrorist group known for indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of rockets targeting civilians) with the Nazis exterminating millions of (obviously peaceful) Jewish people simply for being Jews.
You keep repeating than an operation, functionally equivalent to poisoning the water in an area you have seen combatants, is "targeted". It simply isn't, and you are just lying to yourself to feel better about the war crimes you support.
A water source the entire population of an area relies upon is in no way the same as a specific, small organization's private means of communication that it distributed to its members.
Or are you under the impression Israel simply loaded a Lebanese RadioShack with explosive pagers and hoped Hezbollah would be the ones buying them? You could argue that it was not discriminate because there were pagers distributed to civilian Hezbollah members, who may not have been valid targets, but that is not the same argument.
Every bit of reporting on it tries heart-string tugging, just to quietly reveal one of the unintended targets picked up the pager to bring it to a Hezbollah member father, uncle, or brother.
Wait but all the Israeli reporting is the same. Flipping the script, how many military age abled men/women were taken as prisoners? I’d argue y’all over obsess on the few elderly/young ones they took. They weren’t targeted, they just happened to be the grandmothers, sons, nephews of IDF reserve/active members. This sounds good dum dum?
How does one accidentally kidnap someone like Kfir Bibas? A kidnapper has to be physically present, at which point it's rather obvious that a baby is not a soldier.
I bet they feared for his life. Leaving a kid there could have meant death for him/her. Knowing the kind of weird cultist behaviors certain Israeli groups exhibit. Not to talk about fratricide. ;) certainly better than distributing fentanyl laced diapers. A kid could have worn those
I'm confused: you acknowledge the possibility that there could be non-valid targets in Hezbollah, yet you cannot see parallels to the case of an attack against a water supply?
The one distinction I can see you raise is about the spatial concentration of the affected persons, but I don't see how this essential to the point.
You are of course free to put your delineations such that the matter of concentration results in two different arguments, but frankly I think you should just reject the use of analogies altogether and save everyone else a lot of grief.
I do not argue that civilian members of Hezbollah as a political movement are unacceptable targets, I simply acknowledge that perspective exists.
And the location of the target is entirely the point when the alternative to the pager attack is a JDAM, an attack with greater collateral damage, but still a valid target. Imagine instead of an explosive charge, these pagers were somehow phoning home and providing location data that Israel could use to perform airstrikes. Based on that intel, those air strikes would be entirely legitimate, and they would include far more collateral damage than the charge in the pager.
An attack on the water supply is indiscriminate. A water supply poisoning makes no attempt at differentiating between the targets and the civilian population.
By your own definition that same civilian population is 1) actively sponsoring genocide through their vote and their taxes, 2) actively supporting it through military service. Aren’t Israelis using the same language for Palestinian these days?
Btw, y’all called the old Mandela terrorist too. No one cares who you call terrorist.
Also, it's interesting you think the comment about Hitler being more careful in his targeting than the IDF is persuasive enough you need to reply to it.
Unfortunately there is an unimaginable amount of ignorance on the internet so I think it's good to be very explicit about even the most basic things. I would also reply if it were some other insane comment saying that e.g. the Holocaust didn't happen or that "Hitler was right".
Now can you be explicit about what you are implying? You are implying that I found the comment persuasive. If I chastised some absurd comment saying that the Holocaust didn't happened or that "Hitler was right", would you say that implies I actually think those things are true?
I did not imply anything, I stated outright what I meant to say.
However, to clarify further I will say that your reply seems to indicate you confuse the property of being "persuasive" with the state of being "persuaded"
Israel being founded with the help of terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi and their current prime minister as well as former defense minister being wanted for war crimes, excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.
I heard many bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But this one, I can't even understand what you mean.
To be clear, do you deny that there are multiple terrorist groups targeting civilians in Israel such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and multiple individuals who attacked civilians indiscriminately with bombs, knives and guns?
Do you deny that Israel uses its intelligence services to detect and stop these terrorist attacks?
The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".
I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?
No, the original argument was that Israel - spelled out for you, because you are pretending you missed it - is using these technologies for the brutal suppression of the whole of the of the Palestinian people and that the overt motive of "fighting terrorism" is used as a fig-leaf to hide the ulterior motive of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from their lands.
Your question, which was really an assertion, asking if "it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism" is in bad faith, because you know very precisely that the person you were replying to does not think it's bad to "use technology to detect and stop terrorism", but instead you were using that question as a rhetorical device to assert that all Israel is doing is the overt action "detect and stop terrorism" in an effort to deny that Israel is also doing the ulterior ethnically cleaning.
Whether that is true or not can be debated, but the way you are asking the question is pre-supposing that it cannot be debated, because your assertion by asking that question is that the ulterior motive does not exist and you are trying to create a "gotcha".
You then went on to call the claim that Irgun and Lehi were terrorist organizations and/or the claim that two members of the Israeli government ware wanted for war crimes and/or the claim that the Israeli government might have overt as well as ulterior motives and therefore they might not be trusted on what they overtly say alone, a "bizzare conspiracy theory" about Jewish people in an effort to undermine these claims without judging them based on factfulness or truth.
I hope I cleared that up for you.
I tried to ask an LLM to be an impartial judge and give your comment a hasbara score, but it immediately banned me.
You are wrong. My question was not "in bad faith". It is unfortunate but multiple people really do believe that it is bad that Israel is able to detect and stop terrorism through technology. There are multiple comments even in this post that openly support terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Instead of assuming you can read my mind and falsely accuse me of saying stuff in bad faith, it would be better if you weren't so arrogant.
To your other point, I called it a bizarre conspiracy theory because it is in fact a quite bizarre conspiracy theory! The comment didn't say that Israel was using the facial recognition for doing X in addition to stopping terrorism. It simply denied that it was even being used to stop terrorism at all ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting").
Again, that's a completely bizarre conspiracy theory. There has been an immense amount of terrorism against Israel (and it would have been much more without Israeli intelligence). If that happened in any country there would be a huge intelligence effort to stop that terrorism and it would be natural and justified. Compare to e.g. what the US did when it suffered 9/11 (why do we need to take our shoes off at airport security?). Yet for the case of Israel the comment implies that somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter, the Israeli people don't care about suffering terrorist attacks multiple times larger than 9/11 and a constant threat to be genocided if another October 7th turns into a full war. What the Israeli Jews really did, according to that comment, is to just pretend to fight terrorism ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting"), to fight some mysterious thing instead! Do you not realize how that's absurd?
If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about.
The full quote is:
> excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.
That claim is not as as absolute as you make it out. It does not mean "Israel is lying about everything". "Not taking for granted" just means not to assume everything is true without questioning it. It just means, as I put it earlier: there is an overt thing being said, but there is also the suspicion of an ulterior motive.
The comment then goes on to give you a reason to be suspicious which in this case is the destruction of Gaza along with the atrocities the Israelis committed and the well documented dehumanizing rhetoric that points to a hatred against Palestinians as a whole that exists in Israeli society.
That comment doesn't argue that "somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter" - it says, there is more to it than just terrorism.
I am not sure why you are calling this a "mysterious thing" or "absurd" or "bizarre" - if you read any zionist literature or follow any zionist discussions, online or offline, then that viewpoint is regularly being expressed.
Or if you need another clue that technology is used for oppression and not just defense, go look at the West Bank and the land theft that is taking place there and how that is implemented.
Look, if you want to have a good faith political argument you need to consider that the people who you are arguing against are not all just crazy and stupid and that you somehow are in possession of some information that they somehow are not. People have different reasons for arguing different positions.
If you do not in fact actually believe that another person is arguing something crazy and bizarre, but instead you are using this as a rhetorical trick, then that is the almost the definition if arguing in bad faith.
But if you do actually believe someone's claim is crazy, mysterious or absurd, simply because you are refusing to understand their argument, then you are not contributing to discussion, and you need to go back and try to understand how it is possible that someone could come to a different understanding of a situation than you. You don't have to agree with it, you just need to understand it's possible.
Edit: Check how apropos the news is today
> “Destroy the idea of an Arab terror state; finally, formally and practically cancel the cursed Oslo Accords and get on the path of sovereignty, while encouraging migration both from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria,” said Smotrich, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “There is no other long-term solution.”
You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.
I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because you were asking why someone was accusing you of arguing in bad faith. You can do with that whatever you wish.
If you are interested in why it's easy to recognize your way or arguing ( and I just want to note that it was not me who accused you of 'bad faith' argumentation in the first place), I can recommend Schopenhauer's "Die Kunst Recht zu behalten"[0] - your original
> To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?
shows up there as Chapter 7 "Yield Admissions Through Questions" among others.
You will note that I gave you an entire explanation to your specific assertions instead of just pointing to some book.
The thing about that is, though, that it's a bit boring sometimes because It often seems like every thought has already been though before. We humans seem to like to go in a circle. Just like the two us are doing right now.
> You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.
You are wrong again. I quoted the comment as "he wouldn't take their word as to whom they're fighting" to highlight how the comment is denying that Israel is fighting terrorism. It is quite simple. There is no crucial information to be left out. Also it doesn't make sense to call that a "straw man argument" given that I simply repeated his comment and highlighted why it was absurd.
> I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because ...
Yes, I do believe Israel is using 'fighting terrorism' as cover for 'changing reality on the ground' (genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and at the very least displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank).
No I do not believe Jewish people as a general group are part of any conspiracy or whatever nonsense you tried to bring up to deflect from addressing the facts I pointed out in my comments.
You then had the meaning of my comments explained very well to you and still refused to address them.
To put it as plainly as possible and beyond doubt, so that even you can understand, when Israel says they're fighting terrorism, it's not that such a thing would be bad, it's that they're doing things that do not fit that metric by any stretch of the imagination, (mass murder of civilians, using starvation as a weapon of war, holding hostages indefinitely without a fair trial, imprisoning children, using area weapons in heavily populated urban areas, appropriating land that is not theirs, assisting Israeli terrorists in terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, attacking countries despite a 'ceasefire' etc,)
The fact that it was you who brought Jewish people into the conversation when they weren't mentioned before, as if either you or Israel spoke for them, shows that your argument was in bad faith.
At least that'd improve the chance of having peaceful neighbours, instead of ones who'll listen to any envoy from Iran saying that bombing Israel is the best solution for living in peace.
It really wouldn't make a difference. A country that is already so radicalized that it thinks bombing Israel is the best solution for living in peace would not change its mind for the Palestinians.
A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people
> The US should not be the decider of who stays in power on another country.
As opposed to what? Who "should" be the decider? China? Russia? Maduro? The Venezuelan Military?
The alternative is not that Venezuelans choose who stays in power democratically. The alternative, as we just saw until now, is that the Maduro dictatorship maintains power through force.
You seem to think US did this because Maduro was a dictator. They themselves clarified it's because of oil.
Why they don't attack Saudi Arabia then? Saudi's even had a role in 9/11.
Decades of lies shaped the narrative that all invasions US do is because countries have dictators, it's being the narrative even now when they explicitly say it's because of oil.
They didn't do it because of oil (well to take for ourselves). They did it because Venezuela has been cozying up way too much to Russia and China, and sending both of them a lot of oil.
The President of the United States quite literally plainly stated on national TV that we did it for oil and will be sending US oil companies in to steal their oil to sell for ourselves.
He even went so far as to say it was “our” oil a few weeks ago. That was quickly forgotten among a stream of other outrageous things that happen daily.
Today seems like a day to rewatch Team America: World Police
Maybe try learning something about oil extraction before making insane claims that it is even possible for an oil company to just roll up and "steal" oil and send it back to the US.
I'm no fan of Trump, and I believe he's basically gone rogue, but, literally, he never said what you say he said. If I missed something, please provide a reference, but I doubt you'll find anything. You simply misheard. He's been extremely brazen in mentioning such a crass topic as American interest in Venezuelan oil, which normally would be pushed vigorously under the rug, but he didn't go as far as saying that's the reason. The official (and preposterous by itself) reason is still the drugs.
My take concords with what @JumpCrisscross said elsewhere in this thread:
"HN sometimes has trouble understanding coalitions.
Some support for oil. Some want to unseat a dictator. Some are concerned about Venezuela being a hive of Chinese, Russian and Iranian activity. Some did it to destabilise Cuba, or lay the groundwork for hitting Iran. Still others are just plain psychopaths and like blowing things up."
I would add that personal pique probably had as big a part in this decision as anything else.
"We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so," Trump said.
Yes, and? Read my comment and the comment I was replying to. Nowhere did Trump "literally admit" they went in "for the oil". Nor that they plan to "steal the oil". I'm not saying that that's not part of the reason (probably is, but not the only one). Trump though, didn't "literally admit it". This whole adventure is outrageous and misguided enough as it is, without us needing to bend the truth to make it feel even more so.
HN sometimes has trouble understanding coalitions.
Some support for oil. Some want to unseat a dictator. Some are concerned about Venezuela being a hive of Chinese, Russian and Iranian activity. Some did it to destabilise Cuba, or lay the groundwork for hitting Iran. Still others are just plain psychopaths and like blowing things up.
Yes, and oil will now flow to Florida - for as long as an obedient US puppet lives. The gal who actually won the election is not obedient enough for Trump since she doesn't have "support and respect" of the nation according to Trump.
Oh, I don't think the US should just topple all dictatorships!
If the US could press a button and have all dictatorships automatically become stable, liberal democracies, I'm pretty sure they would do that and we'd all be happy.
But the US cannot just topple the government of all dictatorships at once. If it tried that, it would just cause immense chaos, and all those countries would unite against the West.
The US has to ally with some dictatorships against other dictatorships, like it did with the USSR against the Nazis and how it does with Saudi Arabia against Iran.
Iran hates us since the Islamic Revolution (when we supported the Shah), and finances multiple terrorist groups such as Hesbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship, but at least it's not a revisionist state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_state) and has a more peaceful objective towards its neighbors.
If the US refused to ally with dictatorships, the only country in the entire Middle East that it could ally with is Israel. It would have to fight all other countries at once.
They don't pay us anything to sell their oil. We have a relatively small partnership with them, but that's about it. And they're part of OPEC, which is deliberately designed counter to US interests.
As hard as it is to watch a people suffer a dictatorship; that's the Venezuelan's task, not the US's, not Russia's and not China's.
International law clearly states that a sovereign nation has the right to self-rule, without external intervention. The UN Charter doesn't differentiate between democractic and non-democratic nations - it's up to the people of a nation to select their leadership.
We've seen this principle violated before, when the Ukrainian people took the streets for months to topple their leader in 2014. Russia to this day takes this as an excuse to question Ukrainian sovereignty, framing the events as a "US coup" to justify their violent invasion of Ukraine.
The argument you make just plays in their hand. "There was a violent coup - we need to remove the coup government and bring back democracy to Ukraine", they say.
Because in your framing leaves open who gets to decide what it means to be democratically legitimized.
What if the US decides that it will not recognize the government of Denmark as democratically elected and moves to liberate the people of Greenland from their despotic dictatorship?
You're argument opens the door for unlimited military intervention.
I think you have some good points, but you take it too far. The UN charter is the way it is not because it's the optimal approach, but because non-democratic countries had too much power for it to be otherwise.
As an example, the American Revolution had support from France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Britain saw this as shocking interference in an internal matter, as did loyalists in America.
Personally, I think it was a good thing, helping a people determine their own fate. Applying the same measure here, I simultaneously think it's great Maduro is out, but that the manner of it is terrible. As well as being foolishly shortsighted, both for the US and the world more broadly.
The charter limits the powerful nations. Rule #1 is nations cannot start wars. Starting a war is a crime.
The charter requires some consensus by the international community to authorize use of force against another country.
Article 51 acknowledges the right to self-defence. The only country that has a right to violence is the defending nation and those who aid it from aggression.
And this is, once again, American aggression. We aren't doing it because it's right. We're doing it because we can. In violation of international law.
I doubt there is any other "optimal" approach, but do say what you would propose.
There will always be indirect interference anyhow (think social networks, books, press, people talking, tariffs, visas, etc.), so there is some possibility for states to push things in their direction.l
I think imagining there can be some "authority" that could decide when "direct interference" is allowed or not will be a disaster at some point, because even if at first is OK, as a society we don't seem to be at a point where we can have organizations that work well for hundreds of years.
I think the last part of my post makes it clear that I do. But if not, let me just make clear that we have to struggle through the Harding administration as best we can, but better days are ahead.
> As an example, the American Revolution had support from France, the Netherlands, and Spain
But to what extent did they do it to "free" america vs to take Britian down a peg because they worried Britian was getting too powerful?
I think most people here are doubtful of Trumps motives or that this coup will actually lead to a free Venezuela.
America worked out really well. There are many many examples in history where imperial powers interfering in a local power struggle worked out very poorly for the average person of the country.
Are these really separable? Even a an individual I generally have multiple motivations for an action. That has to be even more true for whole nations.
And I don't think there's any reason to be doubtful of Trump's motivations. He's a would-be tyrant and has made it clear that this is about world dominance, Venezuela's oil, and enriching American businessmen. He has no interest in a free, democratic Venezuela. If this does work out well for Venezuelans, it'll be more due to Trump's flaws (arrogance, laziness, increasing dementia, and the TACO phenomenon) than any intent on his part.
My read of your argument: international law says don't intervene in foreign government, and by intervening we legitimize future violence.
I'm not sure this argument makes sense. Maduro stole an election to force his way to dictatorship, is widely blamed for running the country into mass poverty, and continues to hold onto power through threat of violence. The Venezuelan people don't have any recourse here.
Also, in your example of Ukraine you indicate that Russia frames the uprising as a "US coup", suggesting that the reality of whether there even was external involvement isn't so important.
Even so, if some nation tried to use this strike on Venezuela as further justification for violence wouldn't they be violating the same international law you cite anyway?
Obviously the US has a rough track record of replacing foreign governments (a much stronger argument against this kind of act IMO), but so far this mission has looked pretty ideal (rapid capture of Maduro, minimal casualties, US forces instead of funding some rebel group). There is opportunity for a good ending if we can steward a legitimate election for Venezuela, assist with restoration of key institutions (legal, police, oil), and we avoid any deals regarding oil that are viewed as unfair by the Venezuelans.
You are deluding yourself. This is not some kind of "humanitarian" intervention, this is about controlling Venezuela and its resources[1]. Venezuela will not become a proper democracy after that, instead it will be an imperial US protectorate.
Whether Maduro stole the election or not is exactly and only the Venezuelans' issue. No one but them as a standing in the matter.
I did not mean to suggest that our motives were purely humanitarian. As I understand it there are numerous geopolitical implications with Venezuela, from China's loans-for-oil relationship to the Iran assisted drone manufacturing facilities. And of course we'd like some of that oil, too.
I'm just not convinced that removing Maduro is some horrible violation of international law. As I said in my original comment, I'd be more sympathetic to the argument that the US has a horrible track record with regime change.
Regardless, given the geopolitical significance of Venezuela's relationships with China and Iran it is ignorant to suggest that "[only Venezuelans have] a standing in the matter." And the illegitimacy of Maduro's election is not a topic of serious debate as your phraseology might suggest. He stole the election, he's bad for Venezuelans, and he's good for our geopolitical rivals. It is yet to be revealed whether our intervention will be a net positive.
Panama has done fine since a similar intervention.
The US didn't loot Iraq or Kuwait.
Trump is supremely transactional, so he doesn't do anything for free, but the high likelihood is that the US as a whole will spend more than it gets back in revenue, especially government revenue.
Panamá is doing "fine" because they actually own their fucking canal. If the US had its way and reestablished the Canal Zone, the rest of the country would collapse in on itself.
Which is exactly what they want to do with the Venezuelan oil.
Today, the Panama Canal is owned and operated by the government of Panama.
> The US first built Panama, and then built the canal.
We can concede that the US played the most significant role in the construction of the canal and applying pressure for Panamanian secession from Colombia, but Panama’s national identify predates the United States.
I love the USA too, but please chill with the rhetoric.
Right. I'm not disputing that the canal is, in fact, owned by Panama today. Nor am I suggesting the US should take it back even though I think it was pretty stupid to give it away.
The North did not attack the South; it was the Confederates who initially succeeded from the Union and fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861.
Yes it does matter because by succeeding they broke the US Constitution, and by attacking the US military they committed an act of war against the United States military. Your comparison to the current situation in Venezuela doesn't hold because the US Civil War wasn't a foreign intervention, it was a domestic constitutional conflict.
Ok! Imagine the North was the one to fire the first shot to end slavery. In a hypothetical different timeline. Apparently you would oppose this and would just support letting slavery exist indefinitely in the south?
the south was already signed onto the law for ending slavery, and were part of the same union.
you havent made a good enough hypothetical yet.
there's no lack of slave states around, including ones that the US does business with happily. i think yes, if you made your hypothetical "what if the US had a slaver neighbor" yes, the US would be leaving them alone, other than some economic pressures here and there
You’re assuming that’s the only thing at issue here. When the US starts these wars for resources we always make statements about “spreading democracy” so we can hide behind that bailey. But Trump actually explained what it was really about in his speech: restoring access to cheap Venezuelan oil. Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt here. He’s doing the sane thing George W Bush did.
> Because in your framing leaves open who gets to decide what it means to be democratically legitimized.
That was already the case. Our enemies don't care about the concept of hypocrisy. They aren't waiting for some moral high ground. They are going to do what they want to do regardless.
> You're argument opens the door for unlimited military intervention.
No it doesn't. If it is bad to invade somewhere, we can simply not do that. And we can judge this based on the situation and the consequences.
Your tut tutting isn't going to get Maduro back in power. That's what the guns and helicopters were for.
Additionally, if you want to actually figure out what was right or wrong, Id recommend that you go talk to some actual Venezuelans about this. The opinions are quite universal.
> International law clearly states that a sovereign nation has the right to self-rule, without external intervention. The UN Charter doesn't differentiate between democractic and non-democratic nations - it's up to the people of a nation to select their leadership.
I really wish people would accept that political realism is how the US really operates, rather than buying into the fantasy that there is some rules based order and quoting the UN Charter.
> The argument you make just plays in their hand.
Any argument made on this site by anyone here will have absolute no effect on the outcome in anyway. That has been the case for all of human history and will never change.
"Article 1 (2) establishes that one of the main purposes of the United Nations, and thus the Security Council, is to develop friendly international relations based on respect for the “principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”. The case studies in this section cover instances where the Security Council has discussed situations with a bearing on the principle of self-determination and the right of peoples to decide their own government, which may relate to the questions of independence, autonomy, referenda, elections, and the legitimacy of governments."
It isn't. There isn't a force standing behind to enforce the charter.
With politics and most importantly international politics, there is no law and no right & wrong. It's basically actions and consequences and whether the advantage you gain from your actions is worth the consequences.
People and groups of people (nations) will press their advantage. We press our advantage every day. Most people driving frequently exceed the speed limit - why? Because you can get away with it. If one could skip paying taxes and get away with it we would have done it. The reason the tax skipping doesn't happen often is because the consequences of doing it are high compared to the advantage.
The US just pressed its advantage today because it could get away with it and with minimal cost.
Pieces of paper don't do anything. They are not magic spells that enforce anything, and they only matter in so far as they are enforced by other actors with real power.
If you want to talk about what other countries with a military or trade power might do, go ahead. But the piece of paper is rarely relevant at the international stage.
That was certainly the case on The Walking Dead with the various surviving communities. But we should hope the actual world would operate a little more lawfully than a post-apocalyptic free for all.
So Russia's invasion of Ukraine will be legal if Russia wins? I doubt most people in the West will see it that way. Might makes right has never been a good basis for law.
I would argue that the concept of "legal" has no meaning in this setting. But if Russia wins in Ukraine, everyone will call it illegal, and nobody will do a damn thing to push them out. Eventually the world will recognize it as Russian territory just like they recognized it as Soviet territory and part of the Russian Empire before that. So yeah, it will be legal.
International law is real. It has discernible content, people who professionally study it, and it does influence (however incompletely) the behaviour of the world’s governments
This idea that law can’t exist if it doesn’t have a clearly identified enforcer is very modern-a lot of traditional/customary law (e.g. the Pashtunwali in Afghanistan or the Kanun in Albania) never had a clear enforcer but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, people sometimes paid attention to it, it influenced how people behaved even if they sometimes got away with ignoring it
Law is defined as "a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior".
International law is defined as "the set of rules, norms, legal customs and standards that states and other actors feel an obligation to, and generally do, obey in their mutual relations".
When people say that international law is not real, what they mean is that "international law" is to "law" as a "guinea pig" is to a "pig".
The primary differentiation is enforcement.
People bastardize the term law, because they like to throw the word "illegal" around and imply "evilness" without being arbitrary. But guess what: Trump can be evil, without his actions being "illegal".
Without international law, actions would be the same (Serbia gets punished, Rwanda gets away), but you would have to argue for morality individually. Instead, people can point to some tome some unelected people wrote and say "this book says you're evil and you can't argue with it". The book says it's illegal and that's that.
Yep, the "great cost" is something that seems to get lost in the shuffle sometimes in conversations about this. No leadership realizes the error of their ways before a lot of suffering.
Not to justify what happened here, but your argument would mean that the US would likely have remained a British colony given that French intervention on behalf of the colonies was a contributing factor to the success of the revolutionary war. It also would heavily imply that once the allied forces had beaten the Nazi's back behind German borders, that they should have stopped there. An extreme non-interventionist policy might be the best default policy, but it is implicitly an endorsement of might makes right as well. There are almost certainly times when a country should feel justified in intervening in another country's "regime change", but those times should be very carefully considered and (IMO) never ever viewed as a first or easy step, only a last (or nearly last) resort.
Your argument is perfectly well suited to justify the imperialist Russian aggression against Ukraine.
My point is that there's no entity with the authority to declare a government illegal - besides the UN security council. Next thing you know China invades Taiwan and it will be hard to argue with "sovereignty of nations". Nobody - not even the US - cares about it anymore, right? We just declare a government as illegitimate and presto - no need to justify it anymore. Here we go for some more foreign wars.
This is not about "liberating Venezuela" from a dictatorship. It's just about placing a new dictator at the head of Venezuela, equally illegitimate and equally authoritarian. Venezuela has become an US protectorate for the foreseeable future. At least until the oil runs dry [1].
> Your argument is perfectly well suited to justify the imperialist Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Once you accept that there may be cases where you need to interfere with another country’s internal affairs, you can make up all sort of justifications to interfere (or not) in any given case. So yes, Russia would argue that the specific circumstance justify their actions. I would argue they don’t, but clearly Russia doesn’t care about me (and frankly wouldn’t care even if my opinion was that there is never a justification for interfering).
> My point is that there's no entity with the authority to declare a government illegal - besides the UN security council.
Now that’s an interesting claim. Why does the security council have this authority? From where do they derive that authority? Just 15 nations can declare your government “illegal”? Unless of course the government you want declared illegal happens to be one of those 15 I guess. So some nations internal affairs are more sacrosanct than others? And what happens when the UN declares your government “illegal”. Can anyone just waltz their military in and overthrow your government despite the fact that no one is supposed to have the right to interfere with the internal affairs of another country?
> This is not about "liberating Venezuela" from a dictatorship.
You appear confused because I never argued that it was. I merely objected to the idea that there was never a justification to interfere with the internal affairs of another country.
The principles of self defense say that once you are no longer being attacked, any further aggression on your part is no longer defense. For example, you can use lethal force to protect yourself from a person attempting to cause you grievous harm, but once they stop attacking you and start retreating, if you chase after them and beat them or kill them, you’re no longer acting in self defense and are now committing a crime. By that same token, once the axis forces had been pushed back behind their own borders, invading them becomes an act of aggression rather than defense. Once they’re behind their own borders, fascist war mongering governments are an “internal affair” for the affected peoples to deal with.
Now you might argue that a declared war is no longer a situation where “non-interference” applies, but war can be declared unilaterally. So you might say that only the initial defenders have a right to engage in regime changes, but does that mean that the Ukrainian people have a right to overthrow the Russian government in response to the current war? Do the Palestinians have a right to overthrow the Israeli government? Do the Irish have a right to overthrow the British monarchy for their previous aggressions? Do the British have a right to overthrow the US government for the American Revolution?
Which ultimately is just a long way of getting back to my point that “non-interference” might be (and IMO is) a good default policy, it’s also an unrealistic one for all situations. At some point something about the current political landscape requires a nation to interfere in the “internal affairs” of another country. But that is a dangerous game that should never be the default.
Ukraine was a US coup too, decades of involvement. Otherwise, either Russia wouldn't have invaded, or US wouldn't have been afraid to directly fight Russia over it. The sad reality is that countries in this situations will get captured or proxied by someone or another if they don't play things exactly right.
Yes, so let's imagine for a second there was no US involvement (there was minimal, in an advisory and intelligence role); Would Yanukovich still be in power? Would 2014 would've gone any different? Do you know what events happened preceding the shootings? The police violently beating the protesters? Obviously not on all counts. So to say that the Maidan was a result of US involvement is a russian talking point on a good day and a blatant, filthy lie on any other.
If you imagine that there was no US involvement and Ukraine's leadership did not in fact repeatedly state its intentions to fully join NATO in the 2000s, sure. I won't claim that the US materially supported the Maidan uprising, because there's no evidence.
Now going with that, it means Russia invaded Ukraine in an act of pure aggression. Instead of the halfway support Biden gave, we should be directly fighting Russia over this. Putin won't start WW3 over us stopping a totally unjustified expansion, unless he's already intent on WW3 anyway.
Now we're in agreement. Boots on the ground by 1st March 2022 would've saved us a whole lot of trouble in the long run, and a whole lot of lives. A bully never stops when he remains unchallenged.
Except that didn't happen in 2022 or later, so something in this story doesn't add up. And there's no reason to ignore that Ukraine kept expressing interest in joining NATO, that's actually a big deal.
Ukraine was NEUTRAL and NON-ALIGNED when russia invaded in 2014.
Putin's "NATO expansion" excuse is a barefaced LIE, and it's time more people called it out.
"From 2010 to 2014, Ukraine pursued a non-alignment policy, which it terminated in response to Russia’s aggression. In June 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted legislation reinstating membership in NATO as a strategic foreign and security policy objective. In 2019, a corresponding amendment to Ukraine's Constitution entered into force." (https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/partnerships-and-cooperat...)
2014 yeah, only under Yanukovych who was on Russia's side. 2005-2010, Yushchenko publicly stated that he wanted Ukraine to join NATO and was taking steps towards it, while both Bush and Obama supported expanding NATO to Ukraine.
"I welcome the decision by President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and Parliament Chairman Arseny Yatsenyuk to declare Ukraine's readiness to advance a Membership Action Plan (MAP) with NATO" -Obama
Before 2005, there were already smaller steps taken, including granting NATO military access. 2005 was a disputed election with both Russia and US involved.
Why does history have to start in 2010 for a 2014 war? You're picking a Russia-backed presidency that was getting ousted before Russia attacked. There's no way they were going to stay nonaligned. That 2010 law was just a law, signed by the president, undoable by the next (and it was undone).
"Russia then occupied and annexed Crimea, and in August 2014 Russia's military invaded eastern Ukraine to support its separatist proxies. Because of this, in December 2014 Ukraine's parliament voted to seek NATO membership, and in 2018 it voted to enshrine this goal in its constitution." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations)
A full ten months elapsed before Ukraine finally decided to change its constitution. That rather destroys your argument.
Russia attacked directly after Ukraine removed their nonalignment leadership. I'm not saying Ukraine changed its constitution before the attack, just that the 2010 law was evidently possible to reverse.
Even if Russia didn't attack, Ukraine would've gone back to NATO alignment just as they were doing pre 2010. Maybe even more seeing how the entire point of the 2014 revolution was to push away from agreements with Russia, and the protest leaders were all loudly pro-NATO politicians. How could this possibly have led to nonalignment, aside from "this is a Russian talking point"?
You have to think of the long-term consequences of blatantly abandoning the rule of (international) law for might makes right. The end doesn't justify the means.
Not to mention that the "end" here is first and foremost enriching the administrative "elite" and extending their power. If they cared about democracy, they'd stand firmly behind Ukraine instead of humoring Russia.
> > It’s bad because it overrides society’s determinations about which foreigners to allow into the country and how many.
> No it doesn't. What if I want more foreigners? What if I want people to come here?
Then that's your preference, that's not society's determination! We theoretically live in a democracy. Policy should be determined by the Rule of Law determined democratically, not by @ivraatiems's preference.
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible, with a total of 6 million Jewish people murdered. They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives (as evidenced by letters where trains were used to facilitate the murder of Jewish people instead of transporting war supplies). Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.
I don't know what kind of rock one must be hiding under to not think that Israel was not trying to exterminate as many Palestinians as possible in the current genocide. It's all very well documented and indeed livestreamed. All levels of their society were calling for as much killing as could be done.
No amount low effort lawyering is going to erase cabinet ministers calling for ethnic cleansing, the use of food as a weapon, the rape of detainees, the celebration of the rapists, the double tap shooting of children by their hundreds, the killing fields of the fake GHF aid sites, the mass executions of medics and aid workers, the systematic destruction of water, health and education infrastructure....and on and on and on.
It is bizarre how you can be at the same time so arrogant and so wrong. If Israel were trying to "exterminate as many Palestinians as possible", Israel would simply perform semi-indiscriminate bombings in the wake of October 7th. This would kill many more Palestinians and would spend much less geopolitical capital. Instead, Israel spent two years performing a very targeted military campaign against Hamas. This resulted in many FEWER civilian casualties (in fact, it had a much LOWER rate of civilians-by-combatants casualties than average urban wars).
> They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives [...]
> Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
Yes. There are political constraints on the amount they can kill per day without drawing too much pressure from their backers USA and Europe. They spent a lot of time finding the horrible sweet spot that allows western politicians to largely ignore constant, neverending, Palestinian deaths, allowing the killing to never stop.
This weird so-called ceasefire (Israel has continued to kill and assassinate Palestinians despite it, about 150 have been killed) that is going on right now seems more like something that Trump insisted on and Israel was forced into accepting, but is doing their best to end.
Oh and, I replied to your naive talking points for the benefit of a bystander who might be reading and still be swayed by that after 2 years of a live-streamed genocide. I do not intend to reply any further, as the discussion on all these things has been largely settled, as evidenced by Israel's shattered reputation among basically everyone under the age of 40 in even USA.
> > The Nazis prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives [...]
> > Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
> Yes.
You just said Israel engaged in campaigns of trying to kill as many Gazans as possible just like the Nazis did with Jewish people. Do you have any evidence at all of this? We live in the most information-rich era in history. Do you have an evidence AT ALL for this? Again, not a military campaign with military objectives that accepts more civilian casualties than what you'd like, but a systematic campaign with the OBJECTIVE of killing as many Gazans as possible?
Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?