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U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

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Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#521
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the UK could declare Palestine Action as combatants and hunt them down and shoot them.. but that doesn't seem very uh, appropriate. I sort of prefer them being arrested and going through courts.

Note that the UK would be committing war crimes in this case, since you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers, you are supposed to capture them and put them in POW camps. Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…

PA was armed.

> you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers,

That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.

To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.

> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens

I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conspiracy theory is that "24" was funded by the CIA (etc.) to build public support for measures like the Patriot Act. "24" debuted 11 days after the Patriot Act became law, so they were being worked on at the same time.

You’re missing something else that happened right before 24 debuted on November 6, 2001.

I’m not missing it, I thought that was obvious. See my other longer comment in this thread.

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reading further ... extremely selective and it has nothing to do with What paragraphs inclined you to think that?

> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism. Those stated beliefs are shockingly close to far-leftism. So I'm guessing the same radical exclusionary zeal is also being applied here. Also, for clarity, I'm not taking those definitions literally, but rather as dog whistles for a very specific group of pe…

> very specific group of people

These are Italians. There are all possibilities the spirits are different - unless globalization (of information and communication, "of culture") had merged the two.

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#525
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some "not mainstream" political views I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.

Anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-militarism? Good?

> Good?

That will depend on what the bearers will want to mean with it, as usual.

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#526
post #273

This administration is on a witch hunt for anything they can identify as "antifa" when no such central organization insists. Instead it's being used as an over broad label to attack organized opposition to it's broadly unpopular policy agenda. (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)

[flagged]

This is a terrible take.

Were the Allied powers antifascist?

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#527
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen, freedom of speech has been improving. It used to be that people could barely speak their mind on Reddit, Twitter or at universities without getting attacked or cancelled over who knows what. Now, people are expressing themselves more regularly in all of those places. Universities still have a ways to go, but it is improving. There have been some television networks that also had public licensing…

> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3. The solution to save the country is t…

> The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy?

Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.

The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.

China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.

The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.

I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.

> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?

Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.

Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.

What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.

> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.

I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.

If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.

Re: U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal will allow traffic analysis. You send the message to signal, if they wish they can write down to whom they send it on. It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.

Again: in every system there's always some kind of sleuthing you could do to attempt to identify a user. That's not the legal standard. The complaint against A/I is that they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK.

No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.

Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.

If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.

The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.

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