To be fair, going by the track record, if Venezuela was an oil rich government under a U.S. supported authoritarian, Caracas would look more like Riyadh and there’d be no need for cruisers.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.
In line with your comment, I wish people that believed in the military industrial complex theory would look at the defense market cap more often and realize that, even in their own reality, their theory doesn’t make sense.
If money controlled politics to that degree, Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs. Apple alone has a larger market cap than every public US defense contractor combined and wars tend to not do good things for the rest of the market.
Putting aside his made-up backstory, which is admittedly ad hominem, I've listened to his arguments, notably his video on debt and mortgages. It falls into the same trap as a lot of broadly populist economics - demonization of morally neutral economic concepts and focusing only on one side of the equation. This[1] entire video is him focusing on the bank side of a mortgage transaction, while never once considering the value given to the mortgage owner in being able to purchase an asset they never would be able to otherwise and gaining equity. Investment isn't just a hole rich people dump money into that prints stuff out for them and no one else.
Call it biased, but I'm also a priori skeptical of any public intellectual that points to their one pet theory as the cause of society's ills.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Because the failures of the USSR occurred entirely within the USSR's borders, under its jurisdiction, and were entirely within its power to resolve. Meanwhile, the 9 million deaths of starvation you cite are across multiple countries with multiple overlapping legal regimes and are multi-causal, from corruption to war and failed states like Haiti and Syria.
There is risk to capital. The government does not bail out every business that fails. That's ludicrous. Investors like VCs can and do lose their investments all the time with no government intervention whatsoever. An owner is also risking in terms of opportunity cost - time lost to starting a business and failing is inherently riskier than working with similar talents and investing in safer assets like index funds for the potential upside of higher returns if the business succeeds.
Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.
It's none of those. It's a representative considering the interests of multiple stakeholders and acknowledging the deleterious effects that well-intentioned legislation can have. If these issues were black and white, the solutions would be easy.
Sometimes this translates even down to the individual level. I've watched a lot of police bodycam videos and it's surprising how many people make their situation worse by being loud obnoxious tightwads when calmly answering questions and handing over your license would have you on your way in 5 minutes.
I'd hope we could be nuanced enough to differentiate lobbying and bribing. "Bribing" is what you do in Russia or Tunisia when a cop pulls you over and you slip him $100 to get him off your tail. Lobbying, while potentially nefarious, has completely non-nefarious uses. Private corporations have a right to be involved in the legislative process.
If Congress was considering a federal ban on all electric cars in the United States, I'd want Tesla's government relations figures on Capitol Hill talking about it.
No it doesn’t “amount to genocide in all but name”. Genocide is a very specific crime with a very specific special intent. All of what you named are possible without a genocide.
I could be missing something but I don’t think any of those three have ever been convicted by the ICC.
The examples are domestic crimes because the argument is that the US doesn’t need to be party to the Rome Statute because it would enforce similar penalties on servicemen and leaders using domestic jurisdiction. Others countered that the US somehow can’t do that despite the former president literally being on trial as we speak and the above commenter provided examples to the contrary.
- You act like it’s unreasonable for the United States to not want US citizens held by bodies the United States doesn’t recognize the authority of. No sovereign country would accept this.
- What crimes and under whose jurisdiction are Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, and George Bush guilty of? Osama bin Laden was indicted by a US grand jury under US jurisdiction and refused for extradition by the Taliban, not to mention his Interpol arrest warrant from Libya.
You also linked the Wikipedia page for the Hague Invasion Act but didn’t bring up this paragraph from the Abu Ghraib one:
> In response to the events at Abu Ghraib, the United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty. Eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, these soldiers were court-martialed, convicted, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service. Two soldiers, found to have perpetrated many of the worst offenses at the prison, Specialist Charles Graner and PFC Lynndie England, were subject to more severe charges and received harsher sentences. Graner was convicted of assault, battery, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and loss of rank, pay and benefits. England was convicted of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and committing an indecent act and sentenced to three years in prison.
Let’s not act like the United States not being party to the Rome Statute means that US soldiers can commit crimes with impunity and not be punished under policy like the UCMJ.
The US putting a bounty on the head of an internationally-recognized terrorist and leader of a violent non-state actor like Al-Qaeda is nowhere near comparable to an international body putting bounties out for the leaders of sovereign states of millions.
Foreign interference is almost always bad and against the interests of national security. Lobbying on domestic policy actually has some important uses.
> Why don’t we just wait to see how things play out before making that kind of judgment?
The car was announced in November 2019 - almost 5 years ago. Delivery was delayed by 2 years and the car still clearly has manufacturing defects. Things have played out.
The media is an important business, but I just don't have a lot of respect for The Intercept as a publication. The two biggest blows I can think of are the Tara Reade story and a smaller article on DHS leaks I read around a year ago.
The Tara Reade story had so many rocky foundations, so much so that mainstream publications were hesitant on breaking it, but The Intercept decided to move ahead anyway because their angle is "leftist anti-Democratic establishment" and the story would hurt Biden. That story completely collapsed and Tara Reade is now a Russia Today Putin stooge.
The other was a story commented on by Crooked Timber[1]. If you read the article itself[2], it's even written poorly and disjointed. Add that with a pretty horrendous quote-butcher that CT mentions and it's clearly just a hack piece.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.