> The psychology here is as fascinating as it is absurd.
> Both devices capture identical images.
This is so obviously false. The photos definitely don't look identical. If you're carrying a DSLR, it's a darn good bet you believe it'd take better photos than your phone. And someone who does so is going through the trouble of carrying one is more likely to spread the photo publicly than someone who's using their phone. Hence the stronger reaction.
It's always sad to see when people tarnish a good point with bad arguments. Doubly so when you're accusing other people of acting irrationally, based on clearly false premises. It hurts the cause you're trying to advance rather than helping it.
> This is so obviously false. The photos definitely don't look identical. If you're carrying a DSLR, it's a darn good bet you believe it'd take better photos than your phone.
gonna push back a little on this one. Today, the best iphones can easily take pictures as good a DSLR, providing conditions are right (good light etc)
The quality of the photo btw, is irrelevant to the camera used.
But what the DLSR has that the iphones etc don't have is the ability to excel at the edges of technical capability. E.g. low light, large telephoto, interchange able lenses, filters, more control over exposure, better autofocus, more control over Dof etc.
It's like a Ferrari and a Pickup. Sure they both do the same thing on the face of it. Take you to the store, go a for a drive, visit friends. But that time you wanna go enjoy some twisty roads? you need the ferrari ? That time you need to haul trash to the tip ? You need the pickup.
And so the DLSR 'beat's iphone in some cases, iphone beats DSLR in some cases, but they both take decent pictures and if there are destined for screen only then it can be hard to even tell the difference.
There's youtube videos of people comparing exactly this, and until you print and blow up your image to 2ft x 3ft you can't see any difference.
> And someone who does so is going through the trouble of carrying one is more likely to spread the photo publicly than someone who's using their phone.
In this era of social media, is that really true?
Most people I've known that use an actual camera take thousands of photos looking for that one perfect photo. A journalist is looking for the perfect Front Page photo, not to publish an album. They also tend to care about getting a "clean" shot without awkward strangers in the background.
Conversely, people on social media seem to have much, much lower standards for posting, and will routinely capture audio and video. They also don't care nearly as much about some awkward person in the background, and might even be intentionally filming an awkward person to make fun of them on TikTok.
Dunno the historical reason but I sure as heck find it nice to know without ambiguity that the folder called "share" corresponds to that special directory and isn't a random folder in my home directory for files that were intended to be e.g. shared with someone.
> No, the EU might not contain the top-of-the-top when it comes to people aware of what's going on, but not even EU is so dimwitted to brush aside an invasion of Greenland as "not our concern".
So far the French president is welcoming what happened in Venezuela. How do you imagine he feels about the implications for Greenland and Europe?
You can imagine anything from the US trying to steal any valuable materials or information related to lithography that it can, to actively destroying what it can't usefully steal, right? It's not like both sides would just sit there and declare foreign strategically-important companies off-limits.
It seems naive to assume Canada isn't on Trump's shopping list given he has said the exact opposite in the past, though I'm also not sure I understand what you mean/what that had to do with my comment.
That's exactly what I'm talking about too. Some combination of intelligence/military operations would almost certainly target companies like ASML during war, no? Why would you assume its assets would stay intact and remain on the Europe side?
Article 5 does not, contrary to popular belief, require military response. Go read the wording. It basically requires members to do exactly what they would be already required to do: whatever they want.
I think the (disputable) argument is that, for global stability and equilibrium reasons, there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.
Most of the people who make the argument I described probably believe the UN is the only legitimate body that could make this decision, based on some combination of practicality, historical precedent, and international agreement. And the UN absolutely has a mechanism for doing it (the security council). But one alternatively might argue the UN is broken/dysfunctional/corrupt enough that it can't be relied on despite having the "proper paperwork", just as national democracies can be for national affairs.
It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.
Well, as always, who decides the leader is illegitimate? Are the Saudis illegitimate, according the the rubric we put on Maduro?
The UN deliberately has no mechanism for this because it's a talking shop intended to help avoid war by providing a talking venue. That's the whole idea, they're not the world police, there is no such thing. They're a forum.
I'm absolutely not defending any given dictator but history shows that every attempt to remove a dictator "for the greater good" is usually 1) selfishly motivated and 2) backfires horribly.
I'm arguing against the US installing leaders in Latin America, sorry if I was unclear. I happen to have some Chilean friends and stories from them, from the Pinochet era, have helped shape my perspective.
To phrase it more completely, regime change and general destabilization of Latin American countries has definitely led to the immigration crisis in the United States now. Lack of stable governments and economies has absolutely exacerbated the production and transportation of drugs into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed or disappeared by US-empowered gangs or governments.
Now that said, I don't know what the world would look like had their right to self-determination been preserved. Nobody knows. But as a general rule, countries whose power structures were not toyed with by colonial powers do better than countries whose power structures were toyed with.
Imagine if Hitler was removed before... Instead, foreign powers favored appeasement and trade; conservative elites thought they could control him, Nazi propaganda and terror consolidated power, and Germans were disillusioned with democracy after WW1.
> are you seriously saying Maduro had Hitler-like potential to ignite global war if we didn't stop him?
No, and in fact the comparison to Hitler felt out of place. I'm simply saying that it isn't as black and white that one should NEVER remove a head of state.
What I will concede is that catch 22 of not knowing how the future will play out, so how COULD you confidently and with wide agreement intervene BEFORE someone commits atrocities.
I'm still not convinced removing Hitler before his invasion of Poland would have been a good idea, it seems possible someone like Himmler would be just as capable of picking up Mein Kampf as an ideological framework to continue imperialism and kick off genocide. "Look what the Jews and communists did when we tried to stand up to them, they killed the leader of our movement," etc etc.
Once the genocide started though I do thing all considerations, including national stability and continuity, are lower priority than ending the genocide as fast as possible.
Like Hitler, Trump has (or rather, had, based on recent performance) the power of oratory. Himmler did not and I wonder if he would have been able to whip up the kind of fervor that Hitler did.
That's what made Trump so dangerous, it is insane that such terrible people have such a charismatic appeal. To me they are horrible men, to others they seem to come across as some kind of savior.
Basically, "leave it to the population to sort out themselves, even if they've lost the democratic means to do so," up until a government has gone so insane it's massacring its people, or other people.
So we should have done a much bigger intervention in Syria, much earlier? We should intervene in Sudan right now? We should finally intervene in Russia where they slaughter their own children and Ukrainians in a genocidal war of aggression? We should finally intervene in Palestine and destroy Hamas (and in Iran and destroy their Mullah-sponsors) who've committed a genocide on October 7th, killing thousands of Israelis and ten thousands of Palestinians?
From a purely moral standpoint, my answer would be "yes, absolutely." Unfortunately, most of these interventions are not practically possible. Taking out a dictator in US's backyard is so much easier (and easier to do bloodlessly) than any of these examples.
General rules don’t apply to superpowers or the countries they protect. China, US, Russia get to do whatever their military or economic power affords them, unprovoked aggression, war crimes, terror acts.
There are general rules against war crimes and they still happen day after day, under flimsy excuses. Bombed a hospital or a wedding party? There was a suspected terrorist there. White phosphorus over civilians? It was just for the smoke screen. Overthrew a government overseas? Freedom for those poor people.
Right but "Don't kidnap/assassinate the enemy leaders" is often a good policy even when nobody will enforce that rule on you by force.
For example if your country is subject to a terror bombing campaign, it's very tempting to assassinate the one leader who had the power/respect/authority to order the attacks to start but often they're also the only leader who can order the attacks to stop
In the 1970s/1980s presumably the UK could have had IRA leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness assassinated. But it sure turned out to be useful, in the late 1990s peace process, that the IRA had identifiable, living leaders who could engage in negotiation, sign an agreement, and get the bomb makers to stop making bombs.
The definition is probably not very precise. They started a war of aggression and every other country is tiptoeing around them. Iraq was also a regional power and got a very different treatment. So the “power” line isn’t so clear.
China on the other hand doesn’t get visibly involved in almost any remote conflict and they’re obviously a (if not the) superpower.
Russia has neither industrial nor economic base to project power outside of its sphere of influence. The only reason why everyone tiptoes around them is because they’re world’s gas station that attacked world’s bread basket. And largest stockpile of nukes.
> , there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.
Since ideas don't execute themselves, who would you pick to enforce this prohibition, never mind even getting 100%(?) alignment from countries what the conditions are for "kidnap", "assassination", and "de facto head of state"?
Of who? If the PRC invades Taiwan and starts brutally oppressing the people here, you ostensibly have 1.3 billion people in support, plus possibly PRC allied, a non insignificant number of tankies abroad...
If people would still default to boycotting war-mongering states, the PRC would have a serious economic problem afterwards. Since, the relevant states (EU) are already in a (mild) crisis, they messed up there foreign economic diversity and individualism is all the rage now, there won't be.
> the PRC would have a serious economic problem afterwards
Don't get me wrong, I live in Taiwan so it's not something I want to have happen, but the PRC seems focused on localizing its economy as much as possible, so it may be that if that time comes, it doesn't matter if other countries boycott it. Didn't seem to matter that much to Russia in the Ukraine situation, or at least, it didn't stop them.
It's not about what should be the case. It IS the case. If we should decide to change that it won't work if one government unilaterally decides who stays or who goes for obvious reasons. Last month we saw Trump prostrate himself before MBS, who is apparently totally legitimate.
Case in point : if you had the biggest military in the world, and no one to credibly oppose you, you'd have a lot of arguments to convince everyone that your bank account is actually full.
Lesson 1 of W.Spaniel course on international relationship is that "international order" is the longest running form of anarchy.
Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.
It's a good thing the current emperor is old - at least we have patience and trusting biology as an option. Successions are often messy, and I don't see Emperor Trump as the kind to cautiously pick his heir.
That is a misunderstanding. The stated and actual purposes of the UN are different. The actual purpose was to give great powers a place to negotiate with each other, so that we wouldn't get a third world war.
That is why the 5 most powerful countries were permanently put on the security council with complete veto powers.
There was a brief period, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Bush's invasion of Iraq, where "rules-based international order" was not a joke, and in fact was taken pretty seriously by quite a lot of people.
Democracy, free trade, free speech and freedom of religion had "won" over the soviet union. International treaties were reducing stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons. The WTO had just started resolving trade disputes through negotiation rather than trade wars. International peacekeeping forces were preventing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there wasn't anything like oil motivating the peacekeeping forces. Planners of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal.
Then-UK-Prime-Minister Tony Blair believed in this stuff pretty earnestly - in fact he wanted to get a UN resolution authorising the Iraq invasion so badly he was happy to submit fabricated WMD evidence to get it.
Of course, even at the height of the "rules-based international order" there were always some stark inconsistencies - especially in the middle east, for example.
You imagine wrong. It was a point that I first remember seeing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Dyer. Who is not from the US, but is an expert on the subject.
It was in his documentary series War, but I don't remember which episode.
It's also widely acknowledged that elections in Russia are rigged, and yet the US was quite angry at Ukraine over Russia's (false, as it turned out) claim that Ukraine attacked Putin...
The 3rd section of the 14th amendment[1] states that no person having engaged in insurrection[2] shall hold any office, civil or military, in the United States. So technically Trump isn’t a legitimate head of state either.
> The 3rd section of the 14th amendment[1] states that no person having engaged in insurrection[2] shall hold any office, civil or military, in the United States. So technically Trump isn’t a legitimate head of state either.
Was he tried and convicted? As far as I know the powers that be instead decided for some reason to attack him on other charges (sexual misconduct, corruption, etc.)
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump engaged in insurrection as a matter of fact. That is, they deemed it so obvious from the evidence presented (much of which was publicly available) that it didn't require a trial for determination.
This was appealed to the US Supreme Court, who didn't rule that this wasn't true, they ruled that the 14th amendment needs to be applied by Congress for reasons of consistency across states... which sidestepped the entire issue and was a dereliction of duty in my opinion, in the sense that they are the highest court and could have ruled on the issue of insurrection, or at least required some kind of jury proceeding at that time. They basically didn't do their one job.
Then Jack Smith later amassed a case about it, with grand jury approval. He ran out of time to try and convict Trump before he was elected, basically published a summary report of his case. Recently he testified before a congressional committee about it and asserted he was extremely confident Trump would have been convicted. He testified that he never consulted with Biden about the case, and asked that the rest of his materials from his investigation be publicly released.
Legally speaking there is a strong argument that Trump engaged in insurrection; he's just been shielded from the consequences by political maneuvers and poor timing.
Put differently, one state supreme court decided he so obviously engaged in it that it didn't require a trial. Another federal attorney presented his evidence to a grand jury and they decided he was likely to succeed if it went to trial.
My personal belief is historians will look at the evidence presented and conclude that US Congress made catastrophic mistakes by not impeaching Trump the first time (for obstruction of justice first, and insurrection second), and that SCOTUS made an equally catastrophic mistake (or corrupt decision) by not ruling on insurrection as the highest federal court, either on its own or with a grand jury trial.
You think you are making a counter argument, but you just managed to be welcomed to the end of the thought process of this exercise as contending can be done by just about anyone. It reinforces a bad precedent.
You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to contend that Zelensky is not the democratically legitimated head of state of Ukraine. For Maduro, it's much simpler: He lost the election, yet he remained in power.
Seems silly to ignore that the last date in your list had an event closer to what OP is referring to than any other year, no? Considering he was already crying election fraud in 2016 you could certainly view this as a line with upwards slope…
Alrighty then, in a few years you can test your model’s accuracy against my prediction based on history and an understanding of how our laws and civics actually work.
TSMC running stateside != "nevermind Taiwanese independence"/"US withdrawing military protection for Taiwan"
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
The Ukrainian Constitution suspends elections in a State of Emergency. The State of Emergency is renewed regularly by the Ukrainian Parliament. The Ukrainian people are broadly supportive of Zelensky, who is publically open to holding elections if given the space and resources to do so. Which is a ceasefire, and some time and money.
I think following the constitution is a good thing, even if bombs are falling. I mean, look, people are dying, and yet the country is not just hunkered down in bunkers for the last four years. Life is going on. People are getting up and going to work and coming home and eating dinner and going to bed. Surely they could also go and vote... if the constitution did not say what it says.
I would agree, but Russia has shown that they're not about fair elections in their own country and they've bombed plenty of civilian targets throughout this conflict. I'd assume that Putin would crank up the notch about 10x on all fronts if he knew elections were taking place to make it impossible to have anything resembling a fair process.
> He won the election in the most corrupt country in Europe.
He won by a landslide regardless of corruption (if there ever was one during those elections). Everyone was fed up with Poroshenko, and Zelensky was seen as a new wave, young politician who will bring change (on top of his popularity as a comedian).
> he suspended the next election and no more elections have been celebrated ever since.
Zelensky did not suspend elections. Ukraine's constitution prohibits the holding of elections under conditions of martial law.
"However, martial law—imposed after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and still in place as the war continues—has prevented elections from taking place. Under Ukrainian law, elections cannot be held while martial law is in effect to ensure continuity of governance and support the nation’s defense." [1]
> Then, he suspended the next election and no more elections have been celebrated ever since.
Yes, but that may have something to do with the fact that his country was invaded and he has been at war ever since. Suspending elections for that reason is legitimate by "our" standards.
We didn't suspend elections during World War II. We had been attacked (and overseas parts had been invaded and conquered), and we were at war. Elections still went on as normal.
Even during the Civil War there were elections, even though there was fighting in some of the states that were voting.
> We [industrial superpower dwarfing whole axis combined, surrounded by ocean with no neighbors who can challenge us and unique geography that makes it literally impossible to invade at the time] didn't suspend election during World War II. We had been attacked [parts so insignificant compared to the whole that there was no reason to even consider delaying elections]...
This is the most `ShitAmericansSay` argument ever. What's next? Poland should've held elections while being pounded from both sides? Russia had "elections" during WWI and look where it ended up.
As opposed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Mother Russia, who won every single one of his extremely fair and properly done democratic elections with a landslide. 88.48 at his last democratic election! So beloved!
Honestly, I'm getting increasingly fascinated with the utterly absurd logic that states are putting into their justifications for war.
You get "preemptive self defense" that urgently requires "buffer zones" on foreign territory, which then mysteriously become your own territory and have to be defended with even more buffer zones.
Some Terror Regime of Literal Nazis is doing Unspeakable Atrocities to its own population which practically forces you to invade the country purely out of empathy and the goodness of your heart. Nevermind that the population has never asked for the invasion and will in fact be worse off through the war than before - and that this other state who is your ally is doing the exact same things, but then it's suddenly "realpolitik" and just the way the world works.
Someone has broken the law of his own country. "Internal affairs" or grounds for invasion? Depends if he is your ally or enemy.
Pardon the cynicism, but my growing impression is that war justifications only serve as discussion fodder for domestic audiences and have very little to do with the actual war.
> war justifications only serve as discussion fodder for domestic audiences and have very little to do with the actual war.
Two things intersect here:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means" - Carl von Clausewitz
"Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex" - Frank Zappa
There's a third quote that kinda sums it all up neatly: "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it." — George Orwell
The media in the US, being a wholesale production of the oligarchy now, has been brazenly honest about the fact that this is purely a large-scale looting of Venezuela.
Just speculating, but I wonder if there is another purpose as well: To hand the military a story it can tell itself to assure they are still the "good guys" - i.e. ensuring "troop morale".
If you have thousands and thousands of servicemembers, not all of them might submit to drill or be motivated by money or career advancements or other personal goals - some people might ask questions about the bigger picture, about why they are doing an operation, etc. I imagine for situations like this, it's useful for an officer to have some ready-made answers available that they can use to counter those questions, even if the answers really don't make a lot of sense.
For all the personnel who executed the Maduro operation, the "we're just helping law enforcement to arrest a criminal" story was probably the practical reality for the last months, no matter how ridiculous it is in the larger context.
You know the president said that the Epstein files were a democrat hoax, right?
I feel like at this stage the US administration could contend that the moon is in fact made of cheese and news agencies would respond by running news stories about the implications of this on future possible lunar missions.
Interesting that they felt the need to redact a hoax and even include an innocent photo of Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson that was redacted to make it look suspect.
Trump is a sex offender. He's also a convicted criminal. He is also completely devoid of ethics or morality.
But because of the car crash that is American politics, you have to address all of this through the theatre of the set of documents associated with the world's most infamous paedophile (who also appears to be his best mate).
Well, I'm just an onlooker, so I don't have any influence on U.S. politics. I'm just constantly astonished that the U.S. people would vote for such a charlatan. Twice.
The problem is you’re getting all your information from the internet (I’ll bet social media?).
The impact of that is on display in this very thread. Random unproven accusations, conspiracy theories and repetition of “facts” that have been disproven long ago.
If your goal is to educate yourself about the US leadership, or really any subject, you’re not going to do it by what you see on social media.
> > Random unproven accusations, conspiracy theories and repetition of “facts” that have been disproven long ago.
Every person who has been out in the world had to deal with a Trump like person in the workplace or wherever .
And people don't like it, as a matter of fact they despise it, he's only kept afloat by those who fail to connect the abusive bullying behavior of DJT with their own personal experience with a similar character and those who enjoy bullying or are paitiently waiting in line to do some bullying.
There is nothing to understand about Trump, he's a know it all bully who enjoys bullying people and given the fact that he was born in privilege has always enjoyed the luxury to pick targets way below his stature as subjects of bullying. As bullys do. Picking on weaker people because they enjoy the process , and actually find it way more enjoyable than winning against equals or god forbid be the underdogs in a confrontation.
An open society shouldn't have all the mainstream media in the control of just a handful of people - that's a recipe for abuse and cover-ups. It reminds me of hierarchical religions where just certain people (e.g. priests) have access to the "higher powers" and can thus mislead the masses.
> Both devices capture identical images.
This is so obviously false. The photos definitely don't look identical. If you're carrying a DSLR, it's a darn good bet you believe it'd take better photos than your phone. And someone who does so is going through the trouble of carrying one is more likely to spread the photo publicly than someone who's using their phone. Hence the stronger reaction.
It's always sad to see when people tarnish a good point with bad arguments. Doubly so when you're accusing other people of acting irrationally, based on clearly false premises. It hurts the cause you're trying to advance rather than helping it.
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