We started the process two years ago and I’m helping friends get sorted too. It sucks

Yes my family and I fly out next week

Read the room

Hear that everyone, it could be worse

Thanks for the enlightening framing. When they’re rounding up people they don’t like we should tell them it’s ok, it’s been worse

Nobody fucking cares. This isn’t some academic exercise to rank crazy times. This is the very real political strategy of a party about to take power in the US. This view from nowhere shit is so exhausting.

It’s not just real it’s their actual political strategy. This isn’t fringe shit, this is what they will do when they take office.

Yes, this is probably the real motive. “Arrest and execute my political opponents” cannot be ignored by the military without a coup or being in dereliction of duty. I think another nefarious change here is not that the actual power has changed but that the Supreme Court has given face value validity to illegal acts. The President has always has unmitigated pardon power for federal crimes. They could order the military to commit illegal acts and pardon them preemptively so that they were not punished. A reason why that hasn’t happened is that the optics of that are horrifying - the President and military must admit to a crime being committed to pardon that crime. With this ruling there is no admission, no face value legal wrongdoing, and plenty of plausible deniability.

SCOTUS knew precisely what they were doing. This is a significant expansion of presidential power, yes. But they know that the real issue is political. What they want is the President to be able to argue that illegal things are legal because the President did it, instead of arguing that illegal things are not punishable because the President pardoned the criminals.

The President can literally shoot someone in cold blood, in public, and as long as they can deem it an official act it is de jure legal.

You might be asking why the right isn’t worried that Biden will abuse this - the answer is because they know he doesn’t have the balls. The left still thinks we’re in 1968 fighting for rights with mostly peaceful protests. We’re in 1938 and we’ve already lost.

You keep using all the classic rhetorical terms reserved for people who have argued themselves into a corner. You’re not very good at this. cIaO CiAo

Bad arguments like “the president of the United States tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.” Man the gaslighting from you is wild.

I don’t dislike nuclear, I dislike bad arguments and bad decision making. The president wields enormous power over the stability and infrastructure required for nuclear to be safe and sustainable. You cannot have watched the debate last night, or the events of Jan 6, and feel confidence that anyone involved can be trusted with a goldfish, much less consistently providing a stable nation capable of securing nuclear plants.

If your argument is “don’t worry a sitting president may have staged an insurrection, but it was incompetent so it’s totally ok to leave him in charge of nuclear plants” then yeah, I think that’s a bad argument. And embarrassing

The sitting president did it…the commander in chief. I get you like nuclear but this is embarrassing

That bunch of idiots are the ones who control the tanks, artillery, planes, and funding for infrastructure that is required to keep nuclear plants from melting down

We just had a failed insurrection four years ago, wtf are you doing pretending like this can’t happen

Nuclear power relies on stable, safe, and advanced nations not like, I dunno, starting a land war in Europe that threatens to flood the continent with fallout.

I wouldn’t argue “old people suffer from cognitive impairment” is a valid criticism of a politician without clinical evidence that that politician is suffering from cognitive impairment. This just smacks of ageism.

What? I thought everyone knew they were the mouthpiece for that weird Chinese shen yun cult, falun gong

Well the Geneva convention didn’t exist during WW2 so that’s a moot point and “the US did it” is not a defense of war crimes. The US wantonly commits war crimes. An indiscriminate attack is not what you described. It is an attack that makes no effort (or insufficient effort) to target only military objectives and protect civilians.

This conversation has reached an end. You don’t understand the issue, and worse don’t seem to want to.

You didn’t link those because those are the ones Israel singed, you linked them because you didn’t know the difference.

The protocol I provisions on indiscriminate attacks define what and which civilian deaths are acceptable. Indiscriminate bombings - like blowing up a car in front of a completely unrelated building full of civilians - are unacceptable under protocol I. If your argument is that those attacks are moral because Israel is not a signatory of that protocol I’d argue they’re still committing war crimes, they just don’t admit it.

Again, same tired arguments. You are claiming the same thing bigots have claimed for time immemorial.

When women were fighting for the vote the argument made against them was that they would make poor choices. You arguing differently about women now doesn’t matter - you are making the same type of argument against Palestinians that were made against discriminated against groups at every turn.

White enslavers argued that black slave revolts justified continued enslavement, and this is precisely the argument you’re making.

Killing an enemy combatant is a military objective, so attacking a building containing an enemy combatant does not meet any of those criteria.

You seem to think that the presence of a military objective justifies any amount of civilian damage and death. A plain text reading of Protocol I - which you have clearly read for the first time, considering you linked the wrong articles earlier - says exactly the inverse of that. You are interpreting Article 51 of Protocol I to mean what you want, not what it says.

No, explicitly wrong:

Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective; (b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or © those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol;

What you are describing is unequivocally a war crime. the ICC didn’t charge Netanyahu with war crimes just for the fun of it.