Sorry, I strongly disagree. Comparing detaining someone for 10 days (for, apparently, a genuine violation of immigration law - self-employment on a TN visa) to killing twenty million people is in no way reasonable, and it's certainly not informative or curious. It's just a snarky ideological barb and a violation of those guidelines.
The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
If someone appears with invalid paperwork to a border crossing you simply turn them away, or in the case of international flights you keep them in a room for a couple of hours and send them back next flight home. You ban her for X years.
She was in some kind of kafkaesque simulacrum of a legal system with "constitutional free zones" and for-profit "detention" centers. Nobody knew anything inside or outside, only with a considerable amount of resources and luck they we are able to find her in the system. This is closer to the stories of my family during a dictatorship, moving earth and heaven to find close ones in jail when initially the police "didn't know anything about that". They were lucky, a lot of people never found their loved ones.
Sure, the US is not there (yet), but even then she could've been there 10 months or more there if she wasn't Canadian or wealthy.
So no, it's not a "snarky ideological barb" it's a good point that doesn't meet your aesthetic standards, at most the "skeptics like you" part makes it a bit too personal. Your strawman about his point seems worse imo.
> The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
This is so important and so often overlooked. The Nazis took power in 1933, but the persecution of e.g. Jews ramped up very gradually. At first, it was mostly boycotts and prohibiting Jews from working in government jobs. In 1935, they were stripped of citizen rights. In 1938, Jews had to change their names and carry a mark in their passport and Jewish children couldn't attend school anymore, and later that year Jewish shops were systematically destroyed and many Jews rounded up and imprisoned. But it wasn't until the start of WWII in 1939 that mass killings actually started taking place, and only in 1942 at the Wannsee conference was the holocaust as we know it today actually planned.
Many Jews stayed in Germany until it was too late because they didn't think that it could get worse.
That ellipsis that you put in my comment really is doing some heavy lifting here. Seems like you ignored everything else I said between those statements. It wasn't about one person being in jail for 10 days at all. I actually didn't mention that because I don't think it's one of the most pressing issues even if it is another example on the pile.
As someone from a country that's been the target of things like the VoA and much much worse. Ukraine isn't Iraq, this wasn't some dubious justification to preemptively attack. The gringo spooks were sure it wasn't gonna happen and were caught off guard, they didn't even give them advanced weaponry for a good while because they expected them to actually in fall in 3 days. Supporting Ukraine and being against interventionism isn't hypocritical. One only would see it like this if you flatten all context, opposing the Iraq wasn't flower-on-rifle pacisfism. The reasons for invasion were absurd, even if they weren't false.
But to your greater point, there's two things happening here. First, the American liberal was never inherently anti-war, just not as enthusiastic for it when presented with flimsy justification (see post-WW2 history). To the amorphous gas of person who deeply identifies with the Democrat establishment, (i.e dreamed to be Hillary Clinton intern) the "tasteful" use of the intelligence apparatus is Good and Justified, simply stuff you Gotta Do, you know? Advancing freedom and all. The average D voter doesn't actually give a shit about foreign policy, they just are obligated to care when inevitably the weight of reality demonstrates that something impossibly stupid is happening.
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan*. Anyone with two neurons will reactively want to stop it. Avoiding it is another matter, you have stop producing more Kissingers and change the environment and the people that give them power. A competent and independent leftist movement could do this, but any semblance of this was suppressed 'cuz dirty commies. So yeah, some liberals will genuinely shed a tear for the VoA for "freedom".
Second, even if you hate the spooks and state propaganda like me, they are still useful. Not at good things, but it's nonetheless baffling to see someone put themselves at a disadvantage for no reason. The critiques are about strategy, not the morality of the outcome. Don't be fooled, this isn't an anti-intervention move or limiting spending by conservatives (how are those tax cuts going?). It's a rejection of the subtle and move to mafia style negotiation. Panama is not a joke, it's a promise.
The leftists stayed small.
The liberals are still apathetic.
The conservatives metaphorically got rabies.
[] One of the only times I've been impressed by Trump, he managed stuff the hot potato of the withdrawal in the mouth Biden, winning the good press while avoiding the blowback.
> Because what argument do they have against being tortured if they don't believe in human rights?
Obviously, it's against the most basic principles that the humanist worldview of human rights is based on. I mean, you clearly don't believe in them sincerely, maybe you lie to yourself but you don't. You are the type of self-righteous goon that would happily disappear people in the Stasi or Pinochet's DINA.
> Afghanistan is prime pickings.
That's delusional. You cannot forcibly "reform" a culture in the short term (i.e., decades) that is not simply just near-total genocide. The Taliban cannot be weakened by overwhelming force. When invaders with absurd justifications (first Soviet, later American) commit "collateral damage," they create a sprawling network of causality that strengthens them. Kill the mother, justify the Taliban in the eyes of the son, and so on until the 7th generation.
The US never understood Afghanistan; they didn't want to either. You cannot outplan something that you don't inherently wish to understand, and Bin Laden knew that. Unlike the US, he comprehended both Afghanistan and America. It would have been so simple to send some spooks to snatch him after a couple of months, but that was never going to happen. Osama Bin Laden baited the United States of America, and it fell for it line, hook, and sinker. You lost trillions, thousands of lives, and more importantly, the last sliver of soul your country had.
As I have said previously, we need a two pronged approach. Keep killing off the hardliners, while flying those with seeds of civilization to western countries for training and acculturation and fly them back in when their relative count compared to the extremists is high enough they can completely and permanently change the culture of the place.
I truly believe in human rights. Therefore I believe that someone who believes in human rights should be treated like one. And someone who doesn't believe in human rights, should be treated likewise. Again tell me, if X is someone that does not believe human rights exist what argument do they have to tell you to stop torturing them? If they say their humanity, you can clearly answer they don't believe in it.
And regarding "genocide" argument. To take a really extreme example. Look at how many nazis we killed in WW2 to civilize them. If needed I feel even a 95% figure is probably worth it if we can make men out of Afghanistan.
The golden rule, or rather the modification if you believe in human rights I will treat you as such, if you don't believe in human rights...I will also treat you as such. Its only fair to give people what they want.
The monetary cost stings, but the calculus they are talking about really is about quality of life / expectancy. You are a relatively healthy 85 year old but you are still an octogenarian, you get a gnarly stroke.
Do you want to?
A: Get resuscitated and get "lucky". You are completely dependent on 24/7 care draining little Timmy's college fund or worse putting your adult kids in to debt. If a family member takes cares of you personally you will mentally break them. Also you cannot do anything fulfilling ever again.
B: Get resuscitated, die after 3 weeks with broken ribs. Yay morphine.
C: Get resuscitated and "just" get a little brain damage, maybe you become asshole or forget someone. Also, broken ribs and will probably happen again.
D: Quit while you are ahead.
So yeah, I'll get a DNR when a broken hip becomes inevitable.
You support your disabled son/daughter and have set up a trust to make sure their house is maintained in perpetuity. You get resurrected and end up in long term care. Not dead, so the part of the trust that kicks in is the lawyer selling/using assets to pay your bills that flow in after you or your medical POA fuck up the Medicare situation accidentally. You live for years and your son/daughter get booted out of the house you paid off and had meant for them.
One little slip up and ALL your money is gone while you drool helplessly in hell.
I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration.
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
That article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. This is the lede paragraph:
"In December 2018, a leaked letter from the Kenyan auditor-general’s office sparked a rumour that Kenya had staked its bustling Mombasa Port as collateral for the Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway. Our new research shows why the collateral rumour is wrong."
IMF forces countries to adopt austerity politics[1], causing lower economic activity and often leading to economy shrinkage[2], and forces countries to open their markets to foreign capital, which leads to surplus extraction abroad. Both of those measures lead to impoverishing the country that is taking the loan.
Honestly I'm more worried about the US backsliding to full authoritarianism with the usually "spicier" foreign policy. The more politically insular China from the current regime seems stable enough. Xi could have even 15 years left in the tank before succession shenanigans start. Obviously this from a LATAM perspective, I'm not in Taiwan or South Korea, I would be considerably more spooked then.
"HN discovers the concept of taxes, gets mad about it."
With that kind of argument sewers are also clearly unconscionable, after all they cost money you didn't donate. In that hyperbolic case where the EU throws 60% of it's productivity for the war effort, Ukraine would win in 6 months. That's an absurd amount of equipment, and more importantly with that kind of money you can set up a foreign legion that would vacuum every half-decent soldier without better prospects from Ethiopia to Perú. This will not happen of course, a wartime economy is not necessary to retake the invaded territories. The "WW3 totally gonna happen guys!!!11" is also exasperating, no, nothing is gonna be nuked unless someone attacks Moscow, which also will not happen.
