361–370 of 587 posts
How to make a supervillain, step 1 Jokes aside, after 5 years, I'm not sure how he will not hold a serious grudge (if he didn't have one already) against the USA.
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While USA does not ban everyone from doing trade with Cuba, USA does ban everyone who trades with Cuba from doing trade with the US. You can clearly see how this creates insentives for not trading with Cuba and instead trading with the far larger market next to it.
A lot of countries do international trade with Cuba. USA is not banning everyone who trades with Cuba. I can go to any licor store in my country and buy a bottle of Cuban ron, for example.
Any company in the world doing business in Cuba is also sanctioned by the US and it's employees are barred from entering the US.
You may be able to buy a bottle of Cuban rum at your liquor store, but that store can not do business in the US, use US banks, and the senior employees may be barred from traveling to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms%E2%80%93Burton_Act#Summa...
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The sanctions are intended to exacerbate the destitution and starvation in North Korea in order to provoke political upheaval. They are also just the current strategy, and have been ineffective from a humanitarian perspective. I wouldn’t undermine them personally, but I understand how a rational person could come to believe it was even a moral obligation to do so.
> intended to exacerbate the destitution and starvation What support is there for this statement?
We are openly doing this to Russia right now, rooting for the economic collapse and stark decline of living standards.
In both situations we assume that making life much more difficult for the people now will achieve our goals.
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The USA has a similar incarceration rate to North Korea, albeit with better conditions.
The fragment "albeit with better conditions" is doing a lot of work here.
# Prisoners being beat to death
# Prisoners' shackled in restraint chairs being nasally force fed and tortured
# Solitary confinement for 40+ years
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How are bullets and war different?
Sanctions are war.
If you built an economy entirely dependent on foreign trade for the survival of your own citizens it's best not to bite the hand that feeds, eh? But making sure your citizens survive is your responsibility and yours alone - not that of your trading partners.
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Sanctions are war.
This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.
If your sanctions cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence.
I'm not against sanctions depending on the circumstances, but you're just wrong
What if he did the exact same presentation in youtube, and in NK they saw that presentation? What if someone in NK downloaded the open source implementation of that blockchain, participated on it, or even mined quite a few coins? Could be argued the same about any open source program (and their developers) dealing with encrypted information in any way? What was the problem? Going in person? Answering questions in the…
I guess if he hadn't committed a crime, then he probably wouldn't have been arrested.
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Sabotaging your own military's weapons still sounds an awful lot like treason
Sanctions have never ever in human history worked, so more like sabotaging one's placebos...
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I'm no lawyer but I can only dream that they might find more stuff to throw the book at him but somehow i doubt this. How you go and help a country that your own country is at war with, starves women and children, sends a prisoner's entire family to prison camps for three generations where do all sorts of horrible things and spend only 5 years in prison. People have been sent to prison far longer just because they ha…
The santions are resposible for starving women/children. Should he be in prison for helping children eat?
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The santions are resposible for starving women/children. Should he be in prison for helping children eat?
With all due respect, that's the point of sanctions. You've brought it up as some sort of gotcha. It's not. They're a means to cripple the war-making ability of a nation without actually bombing them into submission or shooting them. As such they're not just placed on a nation for fun or random purposes.