> I am still curious about the whole side bar about Washington being now safest and free of crime.

I heard that as Trump doing his usual thing patting himself on the back while justifying the continued use of our military for domestic law enforcement.

Why is this downvoted? He never misses a chance to say its a good thing that the military is being used on the American population. The recent ruling against the use of the National Guard comes at a time when Kavanaugh is just upset that his name is going down in history for the term Kavanaugh Stops

I'm not sure. Either people are reading it as though I'm approving what Trump does (I'm not), or they are and don't like my description of it.

More quotes in that vein,

> "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so."

> "We're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have it"

> "It's gonna make a lot of money"

> "Well, you know, it won't cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial"

Reading @atrupar.com 's live transcriptions,

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com

The joke about joining the US military to protect a billionaires oil investments is now just publicly stated government policy apparently.

He also indicated they will work directly with Maduro's second in command, not the putative winning candidate from the last election. This is purely about theft.

In the eyes of the US, the expropriation of American assets in Venezuela [0] and then selling them to Russian [1], Chinese [2], and Indian [3] interests was theft.

Russian-US relations are tense for the same reasons due to the saga of Sakhalin-I's nationalization from Exxon [4] following the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine and Russia's sale of Exxon's stake to Japanese [5] and Indian [6] interests.

The previous administration also stopped Saudi and UAE from invading Qatar in 2017 [7] due to Rex Tillerson's personal interests with Exxon's stake in Qatar's energy infra [8]

That said, assuming the US doesn't attempt a Venezuelan version of de-Baathification [9], this should be a fairly standard transfer of power - US-Venezuela relations only really tanked when Maduro came to power and hard pivoted Eastward, as even under Chavez American business operations continued and the relationship wasn't severely tense. And from the sounds of it, the faction backing Delcy Rodriguez chose to give Maduro up and (reading between the lines) roll back nationalization in return for staying in power.

Almost everything in political science can be modeled using Tsebelis's Veto Player model, Mesquita's Selectorate Theory, Kuran's Revolutionary Threshold, and the Agency Problem.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/may/02/oilandpetro...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuela-approves-1...

[2] - https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-ongc-says-oil...

[4] - https://www.upstreamonline.com/production/russia-takes-contr...

[5] - https://www.japex.co.jp/en/business/oilgas/sakhalin1/

[6] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-ongc-moves-cl...

[7] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/8/1/rex-tillerson-stoppe...

[8] - https://www.qatarenergylng.qa/english/AboutUs/Corporate-Stru...

[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

^ edit: "The previous administration..." should be "The administration previously..."

Any theory on the choice of state jurisdiction for DoJ case?

In a nutshell - "might makes right". Also, Maduro was charged all the way back in 2020 in SDNY [0]. I am not a lawyer, but SDNY is almost always used because most high profile cases have some sort of economic crimes component, which inevitabely leads to Manhattan (Rayiner can jump in and corroborate or correct this statement).

If someone pushes back on DoJ authority, the Trump admin will point to Juan Orlando Hernandez's (Honduras) indictment in 2021 [0] and get an opportunity to bash the Biden admin and call out "double standards" for his base. If not, then this will stand. That's why I find the drug indictment angle interesting - it seems that it is being used in lieu of the now revoked FCPA because it also gives the ability to leverage physical force whereas the former only really gave an economic lever.

Essentially, the rules-based consensus was a 1989-2014 era anomaly, and we already made a return to multi-polar power competition. Most foreign policy leaders under Obama 2 onwards have all been "realists" like Allison, Doshi, Mastro, and Colby and the worry of great power competition has been the primary topic of conversation for almost 2 decades now.

[0] - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/nicol-s-maduro-moros...

[1] - https://2021-2025.state.gov/u-s-actions-against-former-hondu...

Yeah, I was mostly surprised about the brazenness of it all. So the plan is to take over the government, take over the oil industry, sell the oil and in infinite grace give the Venezuelans some part of it back (minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country)

And all that as official doctrine, not even some secret strategy paper or covert ops campaign.

Edit: I had to chuckle at his "reviewing" of the Monroe doctrine as DONroe doctrine. There is "on the nose" and there is "punching someone in the face"...

> minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country

I don’t want to sound like I’m running coverage for the Americans, but wasn’t a lot of that infrastructure built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?

> built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?

If you follow this reasoning - after what happened today - you will get Iran 2.0: Venezuelan boogaloo

I have zero optimism that after this - ordinary Venezuelans will have better outcomes in 10 years time.

Current USA government is some weird klepto-oligrachy. Hates brown people. It’s not doing it out of benevolence to Venezuelans. Venezuelans will get either colonialist resource extraction treatment or some power vacuum will bring just another despot.

Ask the Guyanese next door if they think they are getting a good deal from oil exploitation: https://ieefa.org/articles/guyana-paying-oil-costs-20-years-...

What is Guyana’s GDP without western oil technology? https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Guyana/GDP_per_capita_const...

We have already seen this plot in Iraq!

Venezuela is the new Africa [or India [or Philipins]]

> Hates brown people

You're reading tealeaves to support your own hate-fueled nonsense belief. Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that.

It blows my mind anyone can hold this opinion after 10+ years of Trump very publicly spewing racist garbage. Let's just review a few recent examples:

- Claimed Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors' pets

- Currently claiming Somalian immigrants have setup vast networks of fraudulent daycares

- While he's worked diligently to stop immigration from, what he calls, "shithole countries" like Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan, he's advocated for increased immigration from "nice" or "beautiful" countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He also specially carved out a special South African Afrikaner refugee status for white South Africans.

- Habitually calls predominantly non-white opponents "low-iq individuals".

- Repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the Chinese virus, "kung-flu", etc.

- Told four congresswomen of color (3 of whom were born in the U.S.) to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came". A bipartisan resolution was passed in The House condemning these comments as racist.

- And we can go back a long time ago, and remember the Central Park Five, where he relentlessly attacked five innocent black and latino children, calling for the death penalty for them. Even after DNA evidence proved their innocence, Trump never apologized or acknowledged wrongdoing.

Each of these you could try to individually explain away as a misunderstanding or whatever. But there's an abundantly clear pattern of racism, not just with Trump, but much of his administration.

Your comment triggers so many thoughts, but the first one is I'm so friggin' naive, which is embarrassing. In my fantasy world corporations make investment decisions based on risk. They invest in a country like Venezuela and part of the due diligence is evaluating whether things may go sideways, like in any investment, and what plan b is if they do. And if plan b is getting the government to backstop you with money, guns and/or regulations then that would not be a viable strategy.

But, at every level in the US, that plan b is viable. And it's used over and over and over again, from small local businesses with local politicians to the US Federal Government and military for the likes of the oil industry.

At what point do you just accept the truth: that you (me!) are the dumb one because you hold onto this fantasy of how you think things ought to be as opposed to how they are?

Why is plan (b) bad? From my perspective it is certainly how things ought to be. If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.

And what is to say that plan (b) isn't taken into account when doing the risk assessment in plan (a)?

In your world everybody will be at war with each other. The way to deal with the risk of foreign nationalization of your assets is to price it in or to forego the opportunity. Expecting your country to go to war for your private interests is ridiculous. You can go to court if you want and if you lose you'll have to take your lumps.

1898 is a while ago (the Banana wars).

No, people won't be at war with each other because the cost and the likelihood of war will play a role in the decision on whether to enter war or not.

In this case, the administration (correctly!) assessed that there was virtually no cost or risk (albeit, a very high profit.)

Damn man, no risk?

It must be lovely to exist in a world where you think you can punch someone in the face and nothing will ever happen to you if they don’t respond immediately.

Good thing the window of opportunity for retaliation is now firmly closed and we’ll never see anyone come back years later for revenge.

Unrelatedly, has anyone seen the twin towers lately? I visited NYC for the first time in 30 years and I couldn’t find them anywhere.

Indeed, and that was just a loosely knit organization of US haters that figured if they can't do anything in a direct confrontation maybe an indirect one would work.

One of these days someone is going to set off a nuke in a capital somewhere and we're all going to wonder where that came from...

Incidentally, I believe Bin Laden is in part responsible for Trump's election.

"Incidentally, I believe Bin Laden is in part responsible for Trump's election."

I assume you don't mean he does that from his secret base on the dark side of the moon, but rather 9/11 -> patriot act - war on terror -> ..?

That and the wider division between humans with different amounts of melanin.

Who is going to come back for revenge? Maduro was vehemently hated.

You may have not seen the update, but as per the king we will be running Venezuela.

This isn’t over and out adventures like this tend to create adversaries that bite us in the ass later, even when a competent admin is the one with their hands on the wheel

The US has sent nun rapers all across Latin America, puppet leaders, outright military takeovers, and everything in-between. The people we make enemies with haven't forgiven us for all those things, and I can't imagine there is much remaining unaccounted overlap between people that disagreed with all the other stuff, and those who were ok with the other stuff but not this.

This is one of those weird moments where I have a hard time wondering what new people we can even piss off that somehow weren't already against us from prior LA incursions.

Ordinary citizens were bombed in Caracas. There are videos of such bombings. Please do consider that the loss of the lives of ordinary people is a risk.

I am obviously speaking from the perspective of a superpower or a nation, not my own perspective. To a superpower, the lives of 40 people is indeed "virtually no cost" for the benefit of $17T worth of oil reserves and a favorable regime change.

> Expecting your country to go to war for your private interests is ridiculous.

At the risk of coming across as flippant: Why? I don’t think the math has worked out on most peer conflicts during the past hundred years. The cost of the operation has likely already exceeded the value of whatever infrastructure was left in Venezuela to be reclaimed. But why should we expect courts and bailiffs to enforce the law domestically and not expect soldiers to enforce it internationally?

Maybe because war is terrible and no one wants it? Especially if it means protecting private companies’ revenues.

There is always a cost/benefit done for these decisions, it is never as simple as "war as terrible so we just shouldn't do war."

The benefits definitely do not accrue to you, though. There is no direct or indirect benefit to you supporting the invasion of another country where you can now bomb locals with impunity.

What if military intervention was an explicit part of the investment agreement in the first place? I’m not saying it was, but would it affect your judgement?

what do you think nationalise means? it wasn't taken without compensation.

My understanding is that courts ruled that some (though not all) of the 2007 expropriations were made without proper compensation.

It's fair because privatization of public good is generally not made with proper compensation either.

Compensation is complicated.

As far as I recall, in Guatemala, United Fruit had undervalued the worth of their land to reduce their taxes. So when they were compensated for the nationalization of their land based on their own valuation, they said that they were under compensated. United Fruit complains helped trigger the US intervention.

Of course it's taken into account. Feel like you didn't read what I wrote.

Question back to you: who decides when the government gets involved in getting your property back? You cool with it if they don't do anything to get your property back because of the size of your property; the cost to make it happen; you're not friends with the right person; etc.? Or better yet they don't get yours back but they get your competitor's/neighbor's back? Seems like the thing that happens in these situations is that someone maybe gets their property back and then the dick swings to piss on the people who didn't.

Like I said, fantasyland over here.

> swinging its dick around

I'm sorry, I can't resist extending your metaphor:

The problem comes when "swinging your dick around" you accidentally get the other country pregnant. Then you have to co-parent the resulting child government, and they are always moody, rebellious, and ungrateful.

As soon as they're standing they run all over the house, painting the walls, breaking things, and costing you gobs of money. You can't ever go out, because the moment your attention wanders even a little they throw a party and invite their hooligan friends over; and wrapping up the party and throwing out their friends is another expensive debacle.

Not to mention the endless shady boyfriends/ girlfriends that parade through the place. They're "just experimenting" they claim: fascism, communism, and dictatorship are just phases they're going through as they explore who they really are.

Eventually they get resentful and want to live on their own. To accomplish this they kick you out of the house, and you end up leaving your car and many other possessions behind, and many times they trash the place as you leave.

If you're lucky, you both mature and you can develop an adult relationship in time. If you're not, they end up beating up their cousins and you have to break up the fights and pay for the broken furniture.

In short: don't swing your dick around, and if you must, be sure to use protection. I'm not sure what that equates to in this metaphor, but it's obvious the U.S. flunked sex-ed.

> If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.

In this case your property is actually not your property though. Assuming property == oil, then it belongs in Venezuela - you seized control of it but it’s not really yours.

Imagine you start a business in another country where the law says your business assets will be seized if you don't file tax form 123(a) before August. That is to say, non-filers don't have any business property rights. And you don't file the form.

Do you:

(Plan A) Realize you fucked up

Or

(Plan B) Send in the military to kidnap the president and take over the country, retroactively claim the law wasn't the law, undo its effects (but only for you) and then change the law so that property rights work exactly the same way they work in your country.

Now you see why people are saying plan B is bad, and would cause everyone to be at war all the time.

And Venezuela was well aware of plan b when accepting the investment.

As someone living in a country where all of our oil wealth is being extracted by American corporations - America has a very special talent for "convincing" government officials to sign away their citizen's oil wealth. Not repairing that theft by nationalizing the oil seems more criminal than allowing the corporations to continue

At least you are paid fair share of taxes instead of being sent to gulag for questioning your dictator.

That’s the story in every oil producing third world country. Without western countries, and these days China, they would just have oil in the ground because they lack the technology and capital to explore for it and extract it. They want the colonizers to come just long enough to install the oil spigots then leave.

I admittedly don’t know much about the industry, but didn’t most other countries not elect to expropriate the infrastructure? My understanding was that a lot of the problems the Venezuelans are having now arose from alienating themselves from the international supply chains and expertise necessary to maintain the equipment used to extract and refine petroleum.

They just do not want colonizers to steal their country and interfere in their internal decisions. Unfortunately, this is the story with every First World colonizer: they do not agree with that.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. Here, the Venezuelan government invited western oil companies to develop its oil fields. Then they broke the deal and stole the infrastructure the western countries had built.

That’s very different from actual colonization, where countries showed up and expropriated resources the natives were already developing.

So strange that only the US has the expertise to do prospection and build oil rigs and no one else...

These countries are also mad at Britain and the Netherlands. In a few decades they’ll be mad at the Chinese too.

If these countries had been smarter they would have negotiated better deals and solicited competition from international companies to get the best terms. But that’s their own fault.

Oil companies were apparently compensated, but also allegedly not enough. Companies were awarded further compensation in international arbitration, but Venezuela has avoided fully paying up.

If that's all accurate there are numbers out there for what they owe, and it shouldn't be whatever the POTUS decides.

If it was done in a legal process then it should be litigated in that country.

What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported? Does the USA somehow reverse it and make it disappear?

Such a line of reasoning used to justify this kind of extrajudicial and warlike activity is somewhat similar to France’s nonsensical demand for long term reparations from Haiti for colonial infrastructure.

> What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported?

I believe “built” here refers to the financiers. Like when someone says “I’m building a house” they mean they’re paying to have a house built, unless they’re actually in the construction business, etc.

> "And all that as official doctrine"

The Donroe Doctrine.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mbjv2l5otf25

I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between geopolitical control and economic control.

Being explicit, I'm saying that having access to a resource doesn't mean you get to sell it to whoever you like.

Nobody from Latin America is surprised, the US has been a bully state since the cold war.

American interventionism in Latin America goes back hundreds of years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Corollary

There has never not been a bully in anarchic systems.

> the plan is

There is no plan. Again.

Machado is standing by. But she’s a woman so Trump has ruled her out.

He's just said she's not being considered.

Which makes total sense, the military has been Chavismo's strongest asset for as long as it's been a thing

That won't change just because Maduro isn't there, whomever does take control, will need external protection, or the US acting as an unspoken enforcer (Unspoken because "No boots on the ground right now" but "prepared for a second wave")

I suspect there is also consideration of strategy here. The regime's lack of democratic approval is actually a benefit. A client state that has democratic approval has much more leeway to go against its master. A client regime that is unpopular with its population has no other base of support than the powerful country that put it there. This maximizes leverage.

> Which makes total sense

Which implies it's may not be the actual reason. The reason might be as trifling as being salty over Machado getting the Nobel peace prize, and not Trump.

The military clearly moved (or strategically chose to indicate they wouldn't move) for a paranoid, military-aligned dictator to be captured by a small force with only naval backup exactly when everybody most expected the US to move. Unless there's a faction there that actually likes Machado she may even be lower on the next-leader list than "Maduro pays his captors off with the contents of his offshore accounts, meaningful promises of oil money and empty statements about cracking down on narcotics trade". I assume he has ways of finding out who his loyalists are and who they aren't too...

Correct. I spoke unclearly. I meant that we have a good option, our Endara to Noriega, but instead Trump is hard pivoting to the Baghdad model.

You mean the lady that basically called for this invasion, praised Trump and MAGA, promised she would let western companies extract whatever they want in exchange for personal power? Yeah, surely this will end well for Venezuelans.

She could had gotten everything she wanted if she only understood that blowing smoke up Trump's ass isn't good enough anymore. He demands bribes as well.

If $1-6 million buys a pardon, how much buys a country?

It’s reasonable for her to say such things in order to get support of the nation most capable of removing Maduro and allowing her to rule. It doesn’t make her a bad person or speak negatively on how effective a ruler she will be.

> the lady that basically called for this invasion

Like Jefferson lobbied France to help us out with Britain.

I was completely unaware that Maduro was a foreign colonial power like Britain.

I missed the part where Jefferson promised Louis the XVIth exclusive access to the colonies' wealth, and then France abducted the King.

Better analogy would be Pinochet's coup. Nationalists calling for the US to coup their own country and place them in charge in exchange for acting like docile puppets to US interests. This is exactly what is happening there, Trump said so a few hours ago.

This particular quote isn't dementia, he's making a joke, it's the "Donroe Doctrine" because DONald Trump is now expanding it or whatever.

Did we watch the same debate? He was diminished, at the end of his term, during a tough campaign. But not crazy. And certainly not a puppet.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

You’re right. And it was bad.

This is bad too.

Prepare Canada and Greenland, you can see the standard American right wing response to unchecked war mongering right here.

On a technology note, anyone got any bets on which company gets all the free loot? Did Erik Prince rebrand for the fiftieth time? Seems like he’d be a safe bet.

US oil and gas companies are probably a safe bet to profit from this? Or is this all calculated in already?

> Your turn

I genuinely don’t get this argument. You’re saying Trump is a vegetable like Biden and counting that as a win?

The official doctrine yesterday was they were killing Americans with drug trafficking. That didn't even get mentioned today.

Not taking sides here, just trying to steelman: some Venezuelans might be so done with Maduro, that they consider US getting the oil profits to be a fair price.

This is all irrelevant - it's completely unacceptable for the US President to send the military into another without Congressional approval, and to kidnap a leader at all (especially without a declaration or war or UN authorization).

“ it's completely unacceptable”

How do you reach this conclusion that you can’t help suffering?

As Jonathan Turley reports https://jonathanturley.org/2026/01/03/the-united-states-capt... this operation will be justified as executing the criminal warrant (issued by the Biden DOJ and outstanding since 2029) and responding to an international drug cartel, a very similar legal framework to the one used against Noriega in 1989 - which was tested in multiple US courts. So like it or not there is longstanding court affirmed precedent supporting that earlier operation, which will now be used to defend the actions in Venezuela.

Does this mean trump will be pardoning Maduro on receipt of a sufficiently large bribe? That seems like the only explanation for recent pardon of former Honduran president Juan Hernandez.

I assume that's rhetorical question?

Even before Trump v. United States, Maduro would have enjoyed immunity as a head of state. They still need him as a source of info on the generals. And if the drug smuggling explanation works, cartel details justifying maneuvers in Mexico.

The USA does not have jurisdiction outside the US borders. Shocking, I know.

But it doesn't, so the charges of "possession of machineguns" [0] is an utter bullshit. Talk about kangaroo courts...

[0] https://xcancel.com/AGPamBondi/status/2007428087143686611

So a thought experiment: If China were to put out a warrant for Trump's (the most unpopular president in US History, someone the majority of Americans disapprove of, a convicted criminal, and a pedophile who raped young people and has not been brought to account for these crimes as of yet) under the pretense that some of his victims were Chinese nationals and then invaded the Whitehouse to forcibly remove him to China, would that also be legal and justified ? What would you expect the reaction in the US to be ?

To be very clear I do not support this -- out leaders should be held to account to their people, not foreign invaders deciding for us. Even if it seems unlikely that they ever will be, it's our process and people.

This argument doesn't really hold water because the jurisdiction of a nation isn't the whole world.

If we have a warrant for a Sovereign or someone else with Diplomatic Immunity we -- at the very least -- should not invade their territory to carry it out. That's not how the civilized society works, and that's not how we want it to work as evidenced by the thought experiment above.

If we are at war with a nation or people, and reject the premise of their fundamental sovereign or diplomatic nature of course it's a different story since we are talking about a fundamental disagreement of reality. There's a separate process for that weighty decision by the US people's representatives.

well, there are ICC warrants. They do ignore diplomatic immunity. And opinion of many people that, for example, Netanyahu should be at least arrested if he lands in Europe and at most "somebody" should send extraction team to kidnap him

It seems like we should not invade another sovereign country unless we are at war -- a weighty process we should undergo because it's how the will of the people manifest in power.

The US isn't a participant to the ICC, so I'm not sure what exactly your implication is... ?

I do not think we should invade Israel and kidnap their leader. I believe the people of that country should self-govern within their sovereign rights. I don't think China should invade the US and kidnap it's leader. I believe the people of the US should self-govern within their sovereign rights. I don't believe the US should invade Venezuela and kidnap their leader. I believe the people of Venezuela should self-govern within their sovereign rights.

i was pointing out that diplomatic immunity (of head of state) that you mention is trashed by ICC warrants (in countries who are party to it. i.e. good chunk of europe).

so, in the moment that something as basic as diplomatic immunity can be violated by warrants for investigation (not for trial), invading another country to arrest somebody based on warrants that you had issued domestically is not that big of leap

You are talking about a after a country has decided that they want to participate in the this process by ratifying their participation intentionally. How does this relate to a unilateral invasion ?

Vienna Convention (1961): This treaty standardized the rules, making diplomatic immunity a binding obligation for its over 190 signatory nations

And then comes ICC (via Rome statue, ratified by 125 countries and half a dozen of them in process of withdrawal) and trashes with it warrants diplomatic immunity.

So in case international law/treaty from 1961 is all of sudden not binding, why wouldn't uniliteral invasion (actually it looks like it more of arrest operation) (which is probably prohibited by some other international treaties) not be ok ?

I do not understand the point you are making. You cite a treaty that countries explicitly agree to protect diplomats while they are guests in another country -- I'm not sure what relationship this has with one sovereign nation using force to rendition someone from another country.

The only country that has agreed to the terms of the ICC here is Venezuela -- but there is no ICC arrest warrant for anyone involved, nor is the US acting on behalf of the ICC nor does it have any authority to do so.

The invasion (which was required to perform the arrest, since it was within the territory) was definitely an invasion and morally wrong.

As noted several times, there are many ways that this could have been done that are in accordance with civil society it. It wasn't, and that is bad.

my point is that diplomatic immunity is international law. signatories to rome statue said that they will violate it (diplomatic immunity of Israeli head of state) because of icc warrant.

this is violation of international law that multiple countries openly stated that they will perform.

essentially it means that international law is not binding and selectively enforced. this is slippery slope.

if you can ignore vienna convention why not ignore whatever other part of international law that prohibits invasion ?

PS. UK and France just bombed ISIS in Syria. Is it also invasion and morally wrong ?

I still do not understand your point because as you state there is no conflict between the two agreements, and further there are no pair countries involved that mutually agreed to the ICC:

- Diplomatic Immunity (through various treaties): Countries that participate will respect diplomats - ICC: Countries that agree will participate in ICC judicial process

From what I can tell, you seem to be under the impression that there's some conflict here. If that is your position then you are wrong. A country can both simultaneously respect foreign diplomats and work with the ICC to ensure that local citizens are held accountable in the ICC.

BUT, a further point -- international law can never be binding. It's between sovereign peers, and is based on the concept of reciprocal benefit. International treaties give the participants some benefit in exchange for something else. This has to be the case because there is no superior entity to arbitrate violations of the law. If you don't keep up your end of the bargain, you risk the other participants not keeping up their end of the bargain.

This is, for example, why having the top US officials committing war crimes is bad -- it's not because some superior nation will inflict justice upon the violator (because no such entity exists) but because other signatories have no legal obligation to not commit war crimes against us (although, many people are morally opposed to most war crimes and wouldn't commit them anyway).

A further note about your PS, which seems unrelated to the topic is that bombing isn't itself an invasion (it may be part of one), but for my opinion I think that killing people without due process is bad and should be a last resort for defense.

in my example countries stated that they will arrest diplomat covered by diplomatic immunity based on icc warrant. not local citizens.

in case international law is not binding, than whatever US did is ok.

and according to usa it was law enforcement operation. not invasion. just like uk and france didn't invade but casually bombed

So it sounds to me like you are stating that you are okay with the original premise that it would be okay for China to come to the US Whitehouse and forcibly remove Trump to China to stand trial for the crimes he may have committed against Chinese nationals ?

I've had some additional time to reflect on this thread and I think I can spot the core disconnect.

Do you believe that the Vienna Convention requires that countries treat their diplomatic representatives in some special legal way ? For example, do you believe that the Vienna Convention obligates the US to extend diplomatic immunity to the US Ambassador to France ?

If so, that's backwards. It doesn't obligate one country to treat their own diplomats specially inside their own legal system, it defines how participants of the treaty will treat FOREIGN diplomats. The benefit of being part of the treaty is that your diplomats are treated specially when they are in foreign lands, and the cost is you treat foreign diplomats specially when they are in your land.

The currency of treaties is reciprocity.

A treaty can never be binding, there exists no superior entity for which to bring your appeal which can then ultimately use their monopoly on force to extract justice -- each nation is sovereign and a peer in that respect.

Finally, I didn't address your last paragraph but I will now: It does not matter if the USA calls it a law enforcement operation and not invasion, it was still an invasion. It was an invasion because it meets the definition of the word. But ALSO it wasn't a law enforcement operation because the laws of the US do not apply in Venezuela. Also, it's illegal in the US to use the US Military for enforcing US laws except in times of invasion... although it sadly specifies that the US must be the entity being invaded, not just there be an invasion.

"This paper we wrote shows the legal justification for the kidnapping, so the kidnapping we performed is completely legal."

Well, in this case, yes. This is the trouble with growing executive power, they can indeed give themselves permission.

They don't have jurisdiction over another country that's not how this works

Reality is reality. There is only one reality and the man is on the ship. No matter what you think. Reality is "how this works".

Indeed, why bother having states of law at all? Jungle law works well enough in reality.

You believe in something which has never existed and will never exist. In international relations, there has never been anything besides "might is right". Anything else is an illusion. At most something that leaders pay lip service to, when it aligns with their own goals.

The law of the jungle is reality. World War II was won by terror bombing civilians. It is lamentable, but reality is reality. So to say "that's not how it works" is denying reality.

“Never”? Not once in the Story of Us has any dispute between large groups of humans been resolved by anything other than a superior application of brute force? Strong claim, but I’ll run with it.

And you appear to believe this is a pretext for humans to ignore their own laws and commit atrocities, when they could choose otherwise.

It may be reality that jungle law is currently how humans almost always handle conflict at nation-state scale. Non sequitur that it should remain so.

No one is claiming that humans should be at war with, or rely on violence to assert authority over, one another.

Just because something is happening doesn't mean it's according to the law or even morally justified. We are discussing whether it is lawful, not whether it actually happened or whether they are capable of doing it with or without consequences.

I would love to live in a world where every government was democratically elected by an informed populace and never tried to assert authority outside it's borders.

> not how this works

When you say this, what exactly are you referring to?

Every arrest is a kidnapping.

That is how any legal system works, just to be clear.

That's not how the international legal system works

I mean to be fair.. the "international legal system" generally doesn't really work. It only works when governments think it works for them.

This usually means weaker (militarily/economically) countries banding together to hopefully provide some dis-incentives for strong arming.

It only works until someone calls the bluff.

what is "the international legal system"?

Unfortunately thats how the politics and economics of violence work when you are the most powerful country in the world (n.b. I am not American and think this situation is deplorable, but the legal facts and construction support Trump’s actions)

No they do not

Why? It's not a war they were just capturing someone to face charges. In the same way we didn't need to declare war against Pakistan to go in and get Osama

Don't think we (Americans) would be happy if another country invaded and started capturing people to face trial in their country.

This is naive. No other country would dare do this to the US because the US would simply rain literal hellfire upon them.

Your mistake is in equating the US to other countries. You cannot. It is a superpower.

When other countries act hostile to the US, it can simply ignore their sovereignty at a whim, and this is a huge benefit to living in US.

Is it unfair? Sure. Who cares?

This is wrong and hilariously short sighted. Other countries don't respect America due to military might - they do so because of decades of mutually beneficial trade agreements. Soft power is infinitely more useful than hard power.

Both play a significant role. Many countries absolutely respect us because of our military might. They rely on it because they don't want to divert funding from welfare to build out their own militaries. As such, they ally with us, creating inroads to trade et al.

Obviously, there's more than just military might, we have the most innovative and powerful economy on the planet as well.

However, with a country like Venezuela, where none of our allies truly care what we do (sure, they might blow hot air but whatever), we are free to use hard power to achieve our objectives.

You can take that into the past tense now I think.

People who don't live in a superpower. People who care about international law. People who would rather the most powerful countries didn't act like bullies whenever it suits their interests.

"Who cares?" was glib on my part, I admit. It was obviously stated from the perspective of an American relying on that power, towards other Americans.

However, international law has always been a thin veneer over the reality of international relations. History shows that nations act in their own self-interest, regardless of the "rules."

The concept of one country "bullying" another is irrelevant moralizing. You are applying playground rules (or the rules of civil society) to a global stage defined by anarchy: there is no "teacher" to stop the "bullying" here. It is a zero-sum game of security and power. At this level, "bullying" isn't a meaningful concept, only leverage is.

Should the world be this way? I wish not. Political realism is a grim framework. Unfortunately, game theory tells us that so long as any one superpower believes in realism, the rest of us must as well, or risk getting outmaneuvered. And Russia/China certainly believe in it.

> "Who cares?" was glib on my part, I admit. It was obviously stated from the perspective of an American relying on that power, towards other Americans.

> there is no "teacher" to stop the "bullying" here.

It's funny how the same person can mention "realism" and then proceed to "leverage" in the same conceptual realm of thought about the present day US. Just wait until three to four (insignificantly) smaller powers collude, target, and act against you like hyennas do, then try applying your leverage of ... what exactly?

"Realism" is not being used in the sense of the colloquial word, but as in "political realism," the framework that governs international relations between most superpowers today and in which "leverage" through hard or soft power is the core concept.

The United Nations was created to avoid future world wars by managing conflicts. If the US decides as the world's superpower to go on an imperialist rampage through the Americas without regard for what the UN, Europe or Russia & China thinks, eventually the rest of the world is going to team up like the Allies during WW2.

The UN is simply ignored by all superpowers, and many lesser powers. Failed experiment. It is, at best, a forum for communication, but with no real enforcement capacity of any "rules."

> Is it unfair? Sure. Who cares?

What do you mean, "who cares"? Obviously a lot of us not from the US care, and many Americans care, too.

It should obviously be read as: "Who cares [that matters to the superpower at hand, and are they willing to actually do anything about it?]"

Even if the answer to the first part can be narrowed down to a few nations, the answer to the second part can be narrowed down to zero.

Israel did that in Argentina with Adolf Eichmann, and the US celebrated it.

They actually had 6 million good reasons.

And he was head of state? (retorical question).

What Trump just did is an act of war, undeclared and deceitful in every way.

It makes diplomacy much harder to do in the future. It makes the US untrustworthy.

> It makes the US untrustworthy.

That's explicitly been the case since 45 was elected a second time. Even if we get an adult in charge again, there is no guarantee of stability anymore with the way the population is.

Like who? Biden a puppet with dementia, Obama invading Libya and helping kill Gadaffi (and actually killing his family), as well as drone strikes on individuals in lots of middle eastern countries, Bush and Iraq/Afghanistan, Clinton and .. Iraq? but also war on drugs and Mexico border fence. Previous Bush - Iraq again?? Before that, South America again.

Biden became worse in the last year, but he wasn't a 'puppet', certainly not like the current president is. I'm not a fan of Obama's actions but he at least gave justification instead of inventing it and lying like Bush.

Kamala was the obvious choice and the only adult running in the last election, but she lost largely due to sexism, racism and gullibility of the red state population.

Assuming we get to have another election, we'd hopefully have someone like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren.

Democratic rejected Kamala resoundingly in the primaries, and then the Democratic leadership tried to force her down everyone's throat. That's on them, not the voters. They asked people to eat a sandwich some shit on it instead of a shit sandwich and not surprisingly voters weren't too enthused.

No, it's on the voters, 100%. A primary would have been messy. She may not have been everyone's first choice, but she was 100% the responsible choice. People screwed over the country out of spite, but that's 100% in line with how immature and uneducated the US population is. Not to mention bigoted in various ways.

Obviously she was not everyone's first choice. She was almost no one's first choice. Democrat voters let her know that when they only gave her ~7% support in the 2020 primaries. Maybe a messy primary that everyone feels a part of would have been better than a few leaders of the Democratic party attempting to anoint the next president. Maybe you think it was the responsible choice, but that certainly isn't what Obama thought in 2024, since he was pushing for open primaries before his hand was forced into endorsing Harris.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both performed significantly better than Harris did in the 2020 primaries. Maybe one of them would have been the responsible choice.

> Obviously she was not everyone's first choice. She was almost no one's first choice.

Right, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that she wasn't the ideal choice, it only matters that she was so much significantly better than the alternative.

Clearly that was a miscalculation then. Maybe because when people vote, most people don't think "Who is better - Trump or Harris?", they think "Do I like my party's nominee?"

I agree, the problem is the voting population. Democracy doesn't work when you have such a petty ignorant population.

Bernie Sanders vs. Trump. That would have been interesting. Two populists, but also two geriatric white men. Trump would have the advantage of insults and better media savvy, but Bernie would have the advantage of not being Trump (and not being tied to Biden either).

If Trump successfully stole the election in 2021, I'm sure there would have been many Americans who would be happy for Canada or England or France to capture him and put him on trial..

That other country will quickly learn why America doesn't have free healthcare ;)

Bombing a capital city and kidnapping its political leader and hijacking its oil tankers is not the same thing at all. Not to mention Pakistan was and is officially an ally of America, and despite them harboring terrorists, officially Osama was a criminal there too.

Who is "we"?

America

Osama Bin Laden wasn't the leader of Pakistan, he was just hiding there.

Capturing the de facto leader (elected or dictator) of a country is an act of war.

You could argue the war is justified, or that this dictator was bad for both his country and the US, but it's still an act of war.

How come the US can engage in acts of war without legally declaring it? Shouldn't congress be involved?

We all mocked Putin's "special military operation", why are we not accusing the US of doing the same thing?

That will really be up to the new Venezuelan regime to decide whether it was an act of war or not. I don't think Maduro will have much ability to declare it as such.

Is your position that if someone commits a coup, some other country or the international community can't go in and uninstall that person from power?

Regardless of whether the leader of a country was a dictator, elected or not, another country going in and kidnapping the acting leader within the borders of his own country is an act of war.

This doesn't depend on what the successors think. They might later declare this act of war was necessary for the liberation or whatever, but it's still an act of war.

You may agree with the act, but it's an act of war.

Do you dispute this?

Well, I'm certain Maduro considered it an act of war. But he's not president any more. Does the current President of Venezuela consider it an act of war?

> Well, I'm certain Maduro considered it an act of war. But he's not president any more.

It doesn't matter what Maduro thinks. It doesn't matter whether he's a bad guy or a dictator. The situation after the fait accompli also doesn't matter.

What matters is that the military of a country crossing the borders of another country without permission, to conduct a military operation, and kidnapping the (de facto or legal, doesn't matter) leader of said country is an act of war.

There's no "it depends". It might be a justified act of war, but it's an act of war.

It boggles the mind that you dispute this. You seem to be confused, mentally adding "evil" or "illegal" to the words "act of war".

> Does the current President of Venezuela consider it an act of war?

Yes. Why does it matter?

> Is your position that if someone commits a coup, some other country or the international community can't go in and uninstall that person from power?

I find the assumptions behind your question fascinating.

Where did I say anything about what a country can or cannot do? A country can do whatever its military might and ability to absorb repercussions allows it to do.

This is completely unrelated to whether the path the country does decide to take constitutes an act of war or not.

If you're asking me whether I like that the US is playing world police and deciding who must face the law, and take them by force anywhere in the world, weeeell... let's say it's really messy to try to justify the US when it supports some coups, some dictators, and some brutal regimes, but acts against others, and the overall rule seems to be "if they play ball with the US it's ok, if they don't then war".

A small consolation is that the US is seemingly stopping their horrifying practice of extraordinary renditions and torturing suspects abroad, outside the scrutiny of US society and institutions. I think that was Bush era, but maybe it persisted during Obama too.

charges for what? he is a Venezuelan in Venezuela. You can't say "he broke our laws" and take him to fucking New York.

That said some people in the US ought to catch international charges for human rights violations of all sorts

Sure you can. Why do you think we could go into Pakistan and assassinate someone there?

I have yet to see it in this thread, but the WSJ reported that the "crime" they "extradited" him for is running a drug cartel and dumping tons of cocaine into the US.

I know this is what they claim (well, they also say because of oil and because he was friends with US rivals, but that's less defensible), but anyone really believe this is about drugs? Was there ever any proof Maduro was a cartel boss?

They are getting their message very confused. Is this about drugs? About the Venezuelan elections? About oil? All of the above? None of the above? Who knows anymore.

Still waiting for the shoes to drop on Osama and Saddam.

> It's not a war they were just capturing someone to face charges.

Invading a foreign country with military force is a war even if the purpose is to effect an arrest. And when the President claims that the intent is also that the US will run the country afterwards, its even more clearly a war.

> In the same way we didn't need to declare war against Pakistan to go in and get Osama

Congress had already exercised its power to declare war with an open-ended declaration almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, which covered the operation direct against the head of al-Qaeda.

https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ40/PLAW-107publ40.pdf

You act as if they don't have loopholes for this or that there will be consequences when the military industrial complex is behind things. Were there any consequences for Iraq WMD BS

The War Powers Act actually does allow this. Congress has to be back filled within 48 hours after the action (and they were). He can also station troops up to 60 days without congressional approval.

Completely irrelevant what “some Venezuelans might” want and literally can be used to justify anything if you accept it as a premise.

For example:

Not taking sides here, just trying to steelman: some Americans might want to sell their relatives into sex trafficking.

Can you qualify “some Venezuelans” in any meaningful way?

This framing implies that the US administration considered US or Venezuelan public opinion before taking this action.

We have no evidence of that.

Well at least the nearly 8 million who voted for the opposition in Venezuela and the nearly 8 million who have left.

Are you implying that a vote for the opposition is a vote for the US to take over?

No I'm implying that most people in Venezuela are happy to se Maduro gone and hopefully his whole regime as well.

Admittedly I cannot, I'm not Venezuelan and not familiar enough with the country.

Some Taiwanese will welcome china,

Some ukrainians welcomed russia,

some polish will welcome russia,

some estonians will welcome russia

etc etc etc.

Look, you don't just regime change, It didn't work in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. It only really kinda worked in Kosovo, but even then it was touch and go, require lots of troop time and a load of money and ongoing international police.

“We will be greeted as liberators”

Has not come to fruition for previous US regime change operations.

This kidnapping operation doesn’t give insight one way or the other into the will of the Venezuelan people. It, in fact, completely disregards it.

if we’re going to steelman we have to acknowledge that many venezualans liked him too.

we can’t simultaneously say we don’t like corruption of socialist governments while literally bombing another nation and imprisoning political enemies just so we can have its oil for our cronies.

Trumps approval rating isn't great either but I doubt many people would see that as justification for another country kidnapping him in the middle of night to charge him with "has an army with machine guns" before taking American oil

I say what goes around comes around.

If Trump made himself king and dragged the US so far into corruption and poverty that another country could so easily capture us, yeah I'd be fine with them bagging him.

I suspect you'd be in the minority, but hey if he lives long enough you might just get your wish. He's off to a great start.

It wouldn’t have been a justification before now, but he’s created the precedent. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Trump said Machado doesn't have support to be leader and endorsed Maduro's VP as willing to work with the US. It seems unlikely the Venezuelan people are going to see any benefits here. They will get more of the same.

Maduro's VP was just photographed in Orcistan, presumably she is the new neighbor of Assad and Yanukovich. So I wouldn't bet any money on your theory.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-vice-presid...

There should be a sitcom where Assad, Yanukovich, Snowden, and the Venezuelan VP are sharing an apartment in Moscow. In the Christmas episode, Putin shows up and teaches them the true meaning of Christmas.

Not impossible given exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heil_Honey_I%27m_Home!

Make it in a similar style to the death of Stalin and it’ll be 10/10!

Some of the Austrians Wanted Hitler to annex them!

Didn't a lot of Austrians want that?

Didn't the East Germans later want to be annexed by West Germany?

Don't the people of both Koreas want unification?

This is exactly what Putin said about Ukrainians living in the Donbas.

which was true

No this is a Russian canard and not true. In fact some of the fiercest resistance to Russian occupation came from the Donbas.

And yet, it's not a justification for what was done there, and it's not a justification for what was done in this case either. Wasn't a justification in Iraq with Saddam for that matter. I remember the day the Iraqis pulled that statue down, they seemed very happy to be able to do that. And then...

My understanding is that the US military is not so great at the "hearts and minds" game, to put it politely. It doesn't take much time for locals to be outraged by macho assholes acting like they own the place. Makes the recently dethroned dictator look somewhat decent in comparison.

On top of that, I don't think the common Venezuelan laborer was getting much benefit out of the Maduro regime capturing the oil wealth. From the point of view of the less fortunate, there isn't much difference between a Venezuelan elite enriching themselves off the local oil vs an American elite enriching themselves off the local oil.

There's a massive difference, and that difference is that American oil companies, unlike the Venezuelan state run industry, are actually very competent at extracting oil. This means more good paying jobs, more state revenue, and massive economic growth. Contrary to the claims of most of the economically illiterate morons commenting here, having a functional local oil industry run by foreign companies will actually be great for Venezuela.

I think you got it wrong. It might be better for Venezuela, but it will for sure be great for those companies.

your comment sounds alot like nationalist chest thumping, the reason they were unable to do much with their oil is much more related to the usa deciding they would sanction the country meaning basically worldwide they can't sell the oil

Right, that’s not the issue. The issue is national sovereignty. The US just started taking over South America.

Claims of sovereignty are meaningless, what happens is whether those claims hold up in real life, and in this case they clearly don't.

A country is either powerful enough to enforce sovereignty, or it is not actually sovereign; so this hand-wringing about "Venezuela's sovereignty" is meaningless. It's already been proven false, to some extent.

The US is free to do what it wants with Venezuela, or virtually any non-nuclear country in the world. Always has been, really. It simply doesn't exercise said power very often.

Is this then a call to assassinate local politicians you don't agree with? Some might makes right thing? We're all at least momentarily able to overpower or mortally harm one another, but often don't choose to. Why do you think that is?

You seem to be mistaking my comment for a moral stance.

I am not making a call to do anything, I am simply describing the nature of international relations throughout the vast majority of human history (including the current day), in a framework most commonly defined as realism.

Superpowers act in their self interest, ignoring "international law" when the benefit meaningfully exceeds the cost. They can do this because there is no one to stop them. They will do this because it is in their self interest.

Americans will probably benefit from this action, or at least that is the administration's thesis. Is it moral? No, but discussions of morality are irrelevant on the world stage, which is a zero-sum game defined only by leverage.

I think I assumed you're commenting for a reason because it doesn't make sense to make these comments otherwise - they're more or less vacuously true, and there's no value to them outside of an assertion of some sort.

> the world stage, which is a zero-sum game

I'm not at all convinced this is true.

You should think about the question posed in my first comment - why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?

svnt and HN's misunderstanding of international relations and the concept of "sovereignty" is what my comment is directed at: in discussions about superpowers on the world stage,

(a) moralizing is simply irrelevant, discussions about whether this is "good" or "bad" are childishly naive and have no place - only whether it was advantageous or not; and

(b) sovereignty is meaningless if a nation does not have the hard/soft power (and the will) to back it, just as if you declare your house a "sovereign nation" it will not be respected unless you are able to back it up.

Perhaps this is an obvious/vacuous truth to you, but most HN'ers are clearly failing to grasp this.

> why do you think we don't choose to overpower one another regularly to take what we want?

Because it is not always advantageous to do so. When it is clearly advantageous, nations tend to do so (as evidenced by virtually all of human history, including the current era.)

It's appalling to read that on HN, and there's plenty of comments like this one in this thread.

To think that some like to pretend HN is better than reddit.

Please leave a substantive comment instead of just calling something a "redditism" and "appalling."

You may not like the framework of realism but it is the reality of international relations today (and throughout most of history.)

Rules-based international order has always been a thin veneer over the fact that nations will always act in their self-interest regardless of what they say.

Finally, game theory tells us that as long as one superpower behaves according to the principles of realism, the rest must as well, or risk getting outmaneuvered.

People don't like to see difficult to accept facts stated plainly. And sometimes equate a statement of unfortunate fact with endorsement of status quo.

More on topic, I hoped there would be some support from Colombia, Russia, and China in place to help with this situation. Instead it seems like Maduro took an exit deal and left the country at the hands of the GOP who openly promulgate the idea that the US should lord over all other countries in the western hemisphere.

There's nothing substantive to the comment I'm replying to.

It's explaining in too many words that might makes right. We all know that.

On the other hand I believe, but I could be wrong, that the many comments of the sort in this thread are a way for some people to cheer these sort of actions without being too obvious about it because they know it's not a good look in some circles, hn being one. So rather than chanting usa usa usa like their gut tells them too, they resort to such emotionally distanced statements, obvious to everyone, pretending to simply constate the gap in military capabilities of the US versus other powers.

And indeed, I find that appalling.

The last year has been eye-opening for me as a HN reader. I've gleaned a lot of insight into the thought process of the soulless tech bro.

Thanks to the regulars on here, I now hear clearly when folks like Alex Karp, Peter Thiel or Lucky Palmer speak.

Their combination of intelligence + lack of empathy + arrogance will eat the world.

So much of the past decade has been the internet infecting the population with 19th century thinking like this. Alliances are a thing, and might makes right is something we have told ourselves for generations that we oppose. I am so tired of this nihilism dressed as edge.

This isn't "nihilism dressed as edge," this is political realism, and it is the framework under which our rivals operate wrt international relations.

Yes, alliances are a thing, and the framework fully accounts for these.

Definitely not, but the furthest away the ones profiting from something are, the worse it can get.

It is definitely not a guarantee that a local enriching elite will at some point lead to something better, but most examples that come to mind about "colonies" (places very far from a center of power), resulted in said places to develop much harder.

But neither the Venezuelan elite nor the American elite will tolerate any hint of democracy. And neither elite will be satisfied with merely exploiting the oil.

I prefer this honesty over the unrealistic expectations the US set up in each Mid East country plus Afghanistan.

but why put yourself in a false dichotomy?

There isn't one, the third option was to do nothing. But there wasn't a fourth option.

You can actually “prefer” none of what’s happening.

Being honest about doing bad things doesn’t make them less bad. Doing bad things covertly is still bad.

I'm not convinced that this is a good or bad thing yet

You’re not convinced that the US invading other countries and deposing presidents is bad? In a world where nuclear weapons exist?

It's an objectively fantastic thing when those presidents are doing things not in our interests.

We obviously haven't and won't do this to a nuclear-armed country.

> We obviously haven't and won't do this to a nuclear-armed country.

Right... which means that every regime knows they have to become a nuclear-armed country.

Absolutely, this has been clear for a long time. Countries are only truly sovereign if they have a reliable nuclear capability, otherwise they are always at the whim of another country with a sufficiently powerful military.

They need the military either way. There's no country that just has nukes and nothing else, except for North Korea, see how that's going for them.

What the fuck do you think China is going to do next time the US does an “exercise” in the china sea?

What the fuck do you think Iran is going to do next time Israel acts up and the US supports it?

> What the fuck do you think China is going to do next time the US does an “exercise” in the china sea?

They will continue to blow hot air but ignore it, unless they truly and sincerely believe it is a real military action worth starting a war over (and destroying both economies over.)

> What the fuck do you think Iran is going to do next time Israel acts up and the US supports it?

They will continue developing their weapons program thinking they can do it in secret, and it will continue to get compromised and/or blown up.

The brazen callousness with which you advocate for the spread of nuclear weapons and the subjugation of other nations’ sovereignty is disgusting.

You’re probably one of the worst people I’ve ever interacted with.

I don't really care what you think of me, but please adhere to the HN guidelines[1] for civil discussion, this sort of fulminating and personal attack simply has no place here (though there are other websites for that, if you so desire.)

Re. nuclear weapons, sovereignty - I am not "advocating" for anything. I am simply describing the factual reality of international relations, and "political realism," the school of thought that governs international relations between superpowers in the current day and throughout most of human history.

That you are ascribing to this description some sort of moral stance on my part is a judgement error on yours.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> It's an objectively fantastic thing when those presidents are doing things not in our interests

Why wouldn't China do the same in another country whose president is not acting in China's national interest? If you were Iran[1], would abandoning your nuclear weapons program for sanctions relief still be an option?

1. Or Saudi Arabia

Of course each of these countries are ignoring international law in various respects and doing things in their self interest.

Anything as brazen as capturing a president? Not yet. But I can absolutely see them doing this if they deem the cost/benefit great enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if China goes further and launches a full-scale invasion of Taiwan in the next decade, they've certainly been preparing for it according to our intel.

What's the implication here, we're supposed to threaten to nuke them instead? It only works if you're willing to follow through.

Instead of strawmanning and presenting yet another false dichotomy, try answering their question.

I'm not the one who brought up nukes and legit don't understand what they meant by that. To answer the other question, yeah I can generally see some valid reasons to remove a foreign leader from power. Not sure about Maduro.

Who’s we? I’m guessing you’re not a general in the US military, so I don’t know why you’re inserting yourself into this decision.

Do you think a nuclear war would be good for you? Obviously not, so you shouldn’t want your government to threaten to start one. And you shouldn’t support your government when they signal to the world that the only way to be safe from interventionism is to develop nuclear weapons. Or when they signal to other superpowers that they don’t respect international treaties, or the sovereignty of other nations.

Nuclear war with who?

Does it matter?

If the answer is "nobody" then yeah. Venezuela doesn't have nukes. North Korea or Russia aren't going to nuclear war over a country they don't even have a security agreement with, or even if they did. The US has already attacked Iran, Iraq, and Syria (under Assad).

Then your understanding of US foreign policy and what’s currently happening is too shallow.

So are you an expert on Venezuelan politics? I'm not.

No, but I am one with regard to US foreign policy.

Since you’re not (by your own admission), spend more time reading the globalist (1950s - present) reasons why the US meddles with foreign governments and what forcibly creating a power vacuum does for the local populace.

Then you’ll be better equipped to have a conversation with knowledgeable people about the topic at hand, instead of blithely wondering “hmm, is it actually bad when we extra-judiciously remove a head of state because we want oil?”

You don't know me. I know for sure that an actual US foreign policy expert wouldn't be so arrogant.

Yeah, and no true Scotsman would put sugar in their porridge.

Read a book. Brinkley's Rise to Globalism is a good start.

How about not going there at all for whatever reason, under any circumstances. And there are bigger issues at stake, no amount of drugs "made in Venezuela" inhaled by Americans can kill them as much as one North Korean Nuke.

I'm surprised no lesson the US learnt from similar overthrows in the past, but again this is Trump. The country can get so unstable that by the time Marco start giving out "legitimate" orders, there will be 30 different groups fighting and killing each other. True unchecked anarchy. So what's then? Boots on ground. Are we still in the spirit of sacrificing 150,000 American soldiers in the name of freedom, like we did in Iraq? When we kicked out Russians from Middle East we were not aware they kept islam jihadists at bay, then Al Quaida came to live and we all now how it ended.

> I'm surprised no lesson the US learnt from similar overthrows in the past, but again this is Trump.

Its not Trump, its the US.

Someone always comes along trying to attack/occupy a country. Making big promises. Years later when nothing is achieved. Someone else will come along talking about how much US is spending, taxpayers dollars being lost, failures etc.

In recent example, Afghanistan and Trump come to mind. Everyone talked about how Afghanistan was a waste of taxpayer dollars. But now here we are.

The only thing which I can say specifically about Trump is that I wouldn't be surprised if the flip towards "Venezuela was a waste of taxpayer money" happens during his administration and he comes out saying "I have never heard of Maduro".

I wasn't even thinking about the drugs. Is that a real thing? North Korean nuke isn't a real concern.

Iraq had no goal. The stated reason was WMDs and 9/11, so bogus and unrelated. Stability wasn't our concern either, I mean we funded Saddam Hussein to begin with. US companies did set up oil drilling, but I really don't think the driving motivation was oil, otherwise we'd have gone to Venezuela first.

You think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was not related to oil?

Afghanistan has no oil. Iraq does, but the US showed no interest in taking it for decades. It was most likely pushed by our "greatest ally" there who also has no oil.

The Kurds are our greatest ally in Iraq and they most definitely have lots of oil in addition to letting US operate on their territory in exchange for protecting the oil interests. I suppose you could say that's not us taking the oil but we still get value like we had taken the oil and provided fair market rate to host bases in exchange.

Saddam was already selling the oil at fair market rate.

I said fair market rate to host bases. Saddam was definitely not leasing us military at fair market rate in Iraq (or Syria for that matter, where Kurds also host US base).

I see that now. Sorry for my sloppy reading.

I highly suggest you look into the Afghan pipeline project.

I know about this one, it's eh. There are pipelines everywhere and no smoking gun.

The point is that there are certainly oil interests in Afghanistan. To act like there aren’t is inaccurate.

Ok, to put it this way, we'd have gone into Afghanistan with or without the possibility of a pipeline.

Oh also they didn't even set up that pipeline during all the time we were there

Let's not sacrifice anymore Americans in the name of freedom, but the number was substantially fewer than 10,000, not anywhere close to 150,000. Perhaps that many Iraqis died, or maybe even more.

“ How about not going there at all for whatever reason, under any circumstances.”

What moral and ethical system brings you this supposition?

>Are we still in the spirit of sacrificing 150,000 American soldiers in the name of freedom, like we did in Iraq?

What are you talking about? Even Vietnam only had a third of that many casualties. Who told you this bullshit? ChatGPT?

> Cuba is a disaster and it has so much untapped real estate and vacation potential.

Is this sarcasm, or are you just a horrible human being?

> then fix Mexico

Do you mean kidnap the president, stage a coup, bomb it, impose a blockade, or did you have something else in mind?

> When we kicked out Russians from Middle East we were not aware they kept islam jihadists at bay, then Al Quaida came to live and we all now how it ended.

I thought the US was well aware of this, since the US was funding the Mujahideen at the time?

>>"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and >>judicious transition"- And then a few seconds later: "US oil companies will go >> into Venezuela"

The new President of Venezuela will be called Fulgencio Batista...

Hehe. Ok. This is not a funny thread but that is funny.

The ironic thing is that nationalizing the oil was pretty much the most defensible part of Chávez's legacy.

(To be clear I'm not a fan of Chávez or of Maduro.)

The policy that led to a collapse in oil production in a petro state? The policy that led to an economic collapse so severe that 20% of the population has emigrated? That's the policy you call defensible?

That was the policy that allowed him to build a social welfare state for people tired of being exploited. Famine decreased, life expectancy increased, and the HDI became high. Unfortunately, this ended when the country was sanctioned and embargoed.

Why do these strong, socialist countries anyways need US trade to function?

The Venezuelan economy was dying before the sanctions.

Burning the economy to hand out free money isn't good for the people.

Maduro and Chavez fixed the exchange rate, imposed price controls, printed money and did a wave of nationalisation (not the oil infrastructure that was in the 70s). USA isn't to blame for Venezuelan dysfunction.

> socialist countries anyways need US trade to function

Sanctions go way beyond just direct trade with the US; they attempt to prevent all countries on earth from trading with the sanctioned entity, by force of the USD settling system, or as the past week has shown - the US Navy. So it reduces the number of potential trading partners from hundreds to a handful with (near) reserve currencies, and a navy that's not a pushover.

Now I hate your typical south american dictator just like the next guy and know a thing or two from the ground about what sort of instability and crime wave his regime caused across much of South America, but some reality check - if US blocks you from selling oil and you are a regular country and not a china/russia, you practically can't sell oil, not in stable big numbers that can contribute to economy. Yes bits here and there on black market for much lower price, but thats it. And all oil is sold in USD, hence the popular 'petrodolar' expression, and US will fight till its last soldier and missile to keep that status.

Also tells you how serious US is with sanctioning russia and its army of oil&gas resellers btw, which is the primary cash flow financing russian war in Ukraine.

As it was all collapsing because no one cared enough to make oil to support those things?

They were under embargo, they can pump as much oil as they want but pdvsa can't sell it.

The Saudis did it in the 1970s. It's a great policy.

Where it failed is that Venezuelans are an utterly corrupt people lacking any sense of nationalism or patriotism.

You mean due to the collapse that the United States engineered?

Chavez actually did quite well in the early years. I'm not sure he nationalized oil but took greater amounts of the revenue in tax and used it for positive things for the people. It went downhill after a while with many of the problems common to communist policy though.

He was awful from the start, sending political opponents to prison and transferring oil money to himself and his croneys, but he claimed to be taking from the rich to give to the poor, so the Western left lapped it all up. It took them years to realise what he was actually doing (from the start).

He could give a hell of a speech. I've listened to him make speeches where pretty much everything he said was correct from a policy standpoint. The problem was he was an incompetent administrator running a personality cult.

I'm reminded of Noam Chomsky and what has recently come out about his social time with Epstein. He would talk about how the media only allows leftist thought in public as a sort of controlled opposition. Then he turns out to be exactly what he was complaining about. One moment he's calling Steve Bannon the enemy and the next he is smiling with him and Epstein, in a photo I've heard multiple people describe as "the happiest they have ever seen him".

All this is to say: it's not enough to "say the right things". Your actions have to match.

Can’t believe that both sides of the Chomsky Foucault debate were possibly diddling children!!!

Also can’t believe that no matter who I voted for in 2016 I had to vote for someone who performed fellatio on bill clinton.

> sending political opponents to prison

sounds like a common theme… only this one involves war and prison and taking oil money for US cronies.

whole thing truly makes me skeptical of anyone’s claims that “socialism always leads to corrupt leaders while capitalism doesn’t.”

Chavez was corrupt but the people he replaced were also corrupt. Even when Venezuela was "rich", most of the people were poor and felt like they weren't benefiting from it. The US is probably going push Venezuela to that prior state, where the country is rich on paper but most people are struggling, setting up a call for another Chavez. That assumes the US can just waltz into the country and take complete control, which is probably not going to happen.

Better some people are poor than everybody is poor, which tends to be the result of putting leftists in charge.

How large is your ideal value of "some"?

Typically this translates into everybody below me on the social ladder.

The upper class Cubans in Florida want their plantations and slaves in Cuba back, is that a reasonable tradeoff so some people aren't poor?

> Better some people are poor than everybody is poor

Well, technically it's only better for the few that are not poor, for all of the others, it's the same. It's even probably worse because rich people in a country with mostly poor people tend to be very efficient with capturing most of the value produced by the others.

You always get that last golden egg out when you kill the goose.

>ZERO concern of the current US administration about the welfare of Venezuelans

I get the impression they are concerned at least a bit with the welfare of Venezuelans. Maybe a secondary consideration to drugs and oil but here's what Trump was saying:

>We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious

transition. So, we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get

in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the

country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious

transition. And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about. We

want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. (https://youtu.be/cQdRlS4uf0E?t=3784)

Then the hook is thoroughly in your cheek, if you haven't swallowed it

I'm a bystander but mildly optimistic.

You may as well be a bot

Bots don't have much of an opinion on these things. I'm disappointed that everyone is so cynical. At least the Venezuelans seem cheerful even if some HN commenters are not and sound like they'd be happier if Venezuela had another twenty years of poverty and dictatorship.

People who remember Iraq and Libya understand the difference between stable dictatorship and unstable warlord era. Removing those dictators left the countries more deadly and poor than otherwise. Libya in particular created the European refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. I suspect one outcome of this will be even more Venezuelan refugees, including illegally in the US.

You cannot possibly be this naive. Are you doing a bit?

Christ how old are you? Anyone alive during Iraq 2 has no excuse to be this naive.

How exactly will the US run the country? They have just one guy

It will not. Chavismo did not end with the death of Hugo Chávez. Nor will it end with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro.

Every time the puppet president fails to meet targets, they are executed by missile strike?

It should be one of the Trump kids to run it. Whichever one knows the most spanish. «¿Como hacer país muy bueno?»

And Republicans won’t see a problem with that.

Oil companies already had contracts that Maduro violated.

> Washington being now safest and free of crime

I'd make the case it depends on who's defining what is and is not a crime.

Consider that the POTUS is a 34x convicted criminal, and yet he not only has total freedom, he literally has the highest quality personal protection ecosystem on the planet, and so much more.

So, who is the criminal here? Which are the crimes? And what is _actually_ going to happen?

When you're talking about changed laws, are you referring to the civil case against E. Jean Carroll? And when you are talking about "charges that the banks said weren't even an issue" are you talking about the civil fraud case? No banks were victims in the hush money case, which is where the felonies are from.

There was no victim in the hush money case which is why the prosecution was clearly political. Even Andrew Cuomo, Democrat and former NY DA, said that those charges never would have been filed against anyone other than Trump.

What made it a felony under New York law is the claim that the falsified records were intended to conceal another crime, specifically efforts to influence an election.

To a decent approximation, if Trump had not been running for office when he did this, then it wouldn't have been a crime. But then, he wouldn't have cared to cover it up.

Covering up that he got off with a porn star isn't the problem. Like Bill Clinton, it's the actual particulars of the coverup rather than generically that there was a desire to cover up an extramarital affair itself that's the problem.

Technically opening up your neighbor's mailbox is a felony. But in practice you will never be charged for it. Same thing with the hush money case. There is no law that makes covering up an affair illegal while running for office and Trump was not charged with any campaign finance violations. He was charged with the vague crime of "falsifying business records" which, while technically illegal in all cases, in practice is only ever charged if there is a victim who has been defrauded by the falsification. In this case there was none.

The Clinton case is exactly the same concept and is also 100% a politically motivated prosecution. So is the Hunter Biden gun charge. Nobody else ever would have been charged for that.

Yea, I read through the court cases. He got 3rd party valuations on property and just decided to change it on his whim to get a better deal on loans.

I understand that the rich are usually not prosecuted for this fact but if one of us plebs did that and the banks found out, they’d be all over us for fraud.

No, they really wouldn't. People do this all the time. Take the example of the (politically motivated) charges against Leticia James for mortgage fraud. Everybody lies about the house being their primary residence to get a better interest rate and nobody who doesn't piss off politically powerful people are ever charged for it. Fraud is essentially never charged if the loan is paid back.

From what I've heard, "primary residence" is a different issue, something along the line of US banks asking this at time of issue and never checking about updates.

Saying the property is worth more or less than it is… I don't know how this would even happen. The countries in which I've looked at mortgages, the banks don't give an option for a self-assessment. Is the US not like that? Or is it specifically a thing for getting a loan secured on a property that you already own rather than a new purchase?

The point is that in both cases it was a lie on a loan document, which is fraud. Donald Trump's loan was not a simple residential mortgage so the same underwriting process does not apply.

He got materially better rates than he would have based on lower valuations.

Banks have never given me or the other plebs the grace of fucking the risk profile of their investments to our own benefit when it’s found out.

You’re conflating the fact that it’s usually not worth the cost of investigation and enforcement in the event that the loans are paid back, with the idea that it’s not enforced in general

If the bank is stupid enough to give a loan on Donald Trump's own valuations rather than insisting on seeing the third party valuations then they have some employees that need to be fired. The criminal justice system just doesn't get involved in these matters where there are no civil damages, whether you like it or not.

It wasn’t above board.

It was fraud.

The bank was unaware he had changed the valuation.

Also wasn’t it just for the fraud, it was because this fraud was connected to his attempts to manipulate the election.

If we are going to go further in this conversation I need to know if you can point to an action he has taken that you think is bad, other than appointing someone he turned on later.

You need to stop repeating things that are not true. His charges had nothing to do with the election. They were "falsifying business records". This law has nothing to do with elections and it is not a arguable point. Also, "manipulate the election" is a completely meaningless phrase.

Nope, you can't argue out of both sides of your mouth on the electoral bit.

Yes people are rarely prosecuted for this crime, because its usually not worth finding out and dealing with. His was found because in this particular instance his crimes were found because he was committing them while trying to manipulate the election via hush money payments that were connected.

You're either one of the sanewashers for this guy or the ones who fell for his shtick, but just because he's constantly committing crime all the time, including while engaging in politics, doesn't mean he has an aura of protection because of it

That isn't manipulating the election. It has absolutely nothing to do with the election whatsoever. NDAs to cover up embarrassing personal matters have always been legal.

I don’t have anything to say further to you. I cannot help you reason your way out of an emotional position and if you think the stormy Daniel’s shit wasn’t done to hide the story during a campaign then you are in an emotional position.

Of course it was done for the campaign. But that isn't illegal, which is why he was not charged with any campaign finance related charges. You really can't seem to get that through your head, can you?

> It has absolutely nothing to do with the election whatsoever.

> Of course it was done for the campaign.

Did a 180 in two posts. Disrespectfully get fucked, I think you’re here in bad faith

You do know that "it" can refer to two different things at different times, right? In this case the action, which had everything to do with the election, and the charges, which had nothing to do with it.

You are confusing different cases. The one he was convicted for was falsifying business records. That was an open and shut case where no banks were involved and no law has to be changed.

There were a couple of dpdgy cases against him but he was not convinced of any of them.

I challenge you to name the crime. "Falsifying business records" is not a felony in NY.

I'm a Norwegian without direct skin in the game, but according to these[1][2] sources it was "§ 175.10 Falsifying business records in the first degree"[3], stated to be a class E felony in New York.

Is this not correct?

[1]: https://www.factcheck.org/2024/05/qa-on-trumps-criminal-conv...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/g-s1-1848/trump-hush-money-tr...

[3]: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/175.10

  Penal Law Section 175.10
  Falsifying business records in the first degree

  A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof. Falsifying business records in the first degree is a class E felony.

- https://newyork.public.law/laws/n.y._penal_law_section_175.1...

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but that does rather look like you need to eat humble pie.

Me neither but I guess so.

Falsifying business records with intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime.

The 'another crime' was never specified.

I guess he joins all the other people convicted of falsifying business records with an intent to commit another crime unspecified.

It does seem a bit made up for him. I'm sure lots of people have errors in their business reporting and how do you defend against being accused of an unspecified crime?

I'm not really a Trump fan but I think it would have been much better to prosecute him for something real like trying to steal the 2020 election than the above silliness that was just ignored and let him get back into office.

Get real

There are different categories of crimes and violations.

You can call it "The penal code", "Common law", or "Crimes" (as opposed to violations).

And in almost all countries in the world the list is the same and has been for hundreds of years: Murder, robbery, theft, rape, battery and so on.

Do you think people walking the streets of Washington DC are less safe because of crimes such as those Trump was convicted of? Or are their main concern murder, robbery, theft, rape, battery and such?

Edit: Of course my comment nets a hacker down vote instead of a discussion, but for example Nordic countries make a difference between "crimes" and "illegal things" in their laws. And so do South American countries.

The United States has the "felonies" category, which is very comparable. But they also include victimless and non-serious crimes such as tax evasion and copyright infringement.

Law and your list is not the same.

Trump definitely killed probably 100s of thousands of people, with how he handled COVID, and USAID. The law doesn’t consider those as murders, but it’s quite obvious that they were.

The rape on your list is even funnier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T... Oh sorry, sexual assault.

And theft is the funniest, because he was convicted basically for stealing from his companies.

Trump has lost lawsuits related to sexual abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T...

Also, the laws of the world have definitely not had the same list for hundreds of years, and the old ideas of those things are somewhat different to the modern versions. For example, for most of those hundreds of years, "rape" wasn't just about intercourse, it was about kidnapping (same etymology as "rapture": snatch and carry off). This is specifically why spousal rape, in the modern usage of the term, needed to be added to the statue books: little to no thought given to the idea of a husband kidnapping their own wife.

Also on that list for hundreds of years: charging interest on loans.

Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy" quote sounds like an admission of sexual battery to me. Now, it's important to note that I'm not a lawyer, but here's the thing: lawyers have also said this about that quote.

Even if you ignore all the stuff about Epstein, even if you limit yourself to just that self-chosen set of goalposts, he's a wrong-un.

> Also, the laws of the world have definitely not had the same list for hundreds of years

You're correct. The list has been the same for thousands of years, not hundreds. Since the great Hammurabi. Then it has been added on to, and very rarely redefined. As in the good example you give.

> Also on that list for hundreds of years: charging interest on loans.

Usury is still a crime, but has been redefined away by legislators. Just as rape is again being redefined away in some countries right now.

Now back to the topic at large:

> Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy" quote sounds like an admission of sexual battery to me.

> Trump has lost lawsuits related to sexual abuse

If you go to walk the streets in Washington DC, would you be afraid of Mr. Trump charging out of the White House to sexually abuse you, perhaps grabbing you by your genitals? Or stealing your purse? Or would you be more concerned about your more common criminal doing something like that?

Because the hacker above claims Trumps crimes somehow negates public safety campaigns in Washington DC.

> You're correct. The list has been the same for thousands of years, not hundreds. Since the great Hammurabi.

No it hasn't.

First, I've read some of the code of Hammurabi. Fun stuff like this:

  7. If any one buy from the son or the slave of another man, without witnesses or a contract, silver or gold, a male or female slave, an ox or a sheep, an ass or anything, or if he take it in charge, he is considered a thief and shall be put to death.

…

  110. If a "sister of a god" open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.

…

  282. If a slave say to his master: "You are not my master," if they convict him his master shall cut off his ear.

- https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamcode.asp

(Also, bit of fun, number 6: "If any one steal the property of a temple or of the court, he shall be put to death, and also the one who receives the stolen thing from him shall be put to death." - to which I point at the photos of all those documents he was supposed to return after his first term in a bathroom in Mar a Lago).

Second, I've also read Leviticus. Fun stuff like this:

  Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man of you bring an offering unto the LORD, ye shall bring your offering of the cattle, even of the herd, and of the flock. If his offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd, let him offer a male without blemish: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the LORD.

and

  Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.

To quote others on this:

  The "Law of Moses" in ancient Israel was different from other legal codes in the ancient Near East because transgressions were seen as offences against God rather than solely as offences against society (civil law).[6] This contrasts with the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100–2050 BCE), and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BCE, of which almost half concerns contract law).

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Moses#Law_in_the_Ancien...

> Then it has been added on to, and very rarely redefined.

Oh gods no. Even the Christian Bible has seen significant politicised re-translations, famously with the King James Bible, but also fundamentally the New Testament itself is a refutation of almost all Torah law.

Even just within European Christian nations, there's been huge variations of what was allowed. 1066 England, Normans became a ruling military elite over the now-conquered Anglo-Saxon population, a native Englander killing a Norman triggered severe penalties, but a Norman killing an Englander did not.

And I've not even touched on Islamic law, the range of things in pre-contact Americas, across Africa, across the east Indies, in Asia.

Not all cultures even have a concept of personal property for theft to be a coherent concept. You may object that you said "countries", but go back pre-Westphalia and you don't even find something we'd really recognise as countries.

> Usury is still a crime, but has been redefined away by legislators.

That's tautologically false: if something is "still" a crime it cannot also "have been redefined away by legislators".

> Just as rape is again being redefined away in some countries right now.

"Away"?

At most, I'm seeing a return to the old definition (IIRC, this would include Russia?)

> If you go to walk the streets in Washington DC, would you be afraid of Mr. Trump charging out of the White House to sexually abuse you, perhaps grabbing you by your genitals?

Given I'm not his type, too old and too male, that's a silly question.

If I had a teenage daughter, I'd avoid DC just in case.

> Or stealing your purse? Or would you be more concerned about your more common criminal doing something like that?

I would not fear a common criminal stealing my purse before or now.

Trump, however, I would fear ordering his people locking me up with a demand that I hand over money to make the problem go away.

It's not like he's obeying the constitution or anything.

> Because the hacker above claims Trumps crimes somehow negates public safety campaigns in Washington DC.

Just look at the subject of this very thread: he's essentially just stolen an entire nation.

The run-up to this involved ordering the deaths of 114 confirmed dead plus 1 more missing presumed dead, by way of the strikes on alleged(!) drug boats, when actual convictions even if those boats had reached US waters would not have been death penalties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_alleg...

This, *by itself*, is about twice the difference in DC homicides between 2024 and 2025, 187 -> 128.

I would add that for vast swaths of time in a lot of areas of the world in between Hammurabi and now, there wasn't even a written code of law, it was more based on customs. Rome did not have written laws for the first 300 years of its founding. A friend I was talking about this was in disbelief when I mentioned this.

Good point. That Rome fact raised my eyebrow, but then I remembered how low literacy has been historically, and the eyebrow returned to the usual position.

Because the basic crimes are so universally understood and detested, that there needs to be nothing written. Murder, theft, robbery, etc. Every person knows from birth that those things are wrong, and it takes severe brain washing for people to change their minds on it.

> Murder, theft, robbery

Have inconsistent definitions over time. Hence my example of legalised murder in post-Norman conquest England, and cultures without personal property where theft is a nonsensical concept.

Also, just ask around left- and right-coded answers to "is taxation theft?", or in the US specifically "is abortion murder?" or "is the death penalty just state-sanctioned murder?"

  "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"

And, pertinently to this thread, when is a military action murder vs. not murder? There's lawyers looking at the videos of Venezuelan boats being destroyed saying "the US murdered those people". Is one of the sides here, pro or con it doesn't matter which, a victim of "severe brain washing"?

Similar disagreements (albeit by non-lawyers) are had regarding all wars I recall in my lifetime.

The existence of grey zones doesn't negate the existence of clear cut cases.

You can argue for or against anything by quoting edge cases. That doesn't mean that every case is an edge case. Very few cases are edge cases.

> There's lawyers looking at the videos of Venezuelan boats being destroyed saying "the US murdered those people". Is one of the sides here, pro or con it doesn't matter which, a victim of "severe brain washing"?

What's the argument being made? That's war, which is of course murder. A soldier's job is to murder the enemy.

As for your examples, they are probably not as certain as you think. Good luck secretly taking somebody's favourite hunting spear from him and then tell him that personal property doesn't exist.

Congratulations on knowing that people have different perspectives on most things, and that these can vary through time and through places. You are not the only person who knows this. What is interesting are the common values which sprung up in different cultures, different times and different places.

If somebody murders your child or your sibling, you are going to be outraged if you are a human. Only severe brainwashing and total dehumanization could make a person react in a different way.

I appreciate your reply very much, it was nice reading. But between you and me, I sense that you might be getting a bit too high on your own supply of intelligence.

Certain crimes tend to be low in dictatorships, so I don't think that's a good indicator of anything.

What about the storming of the Capitol 6th January? The criminals got pardoned and the people investigating the crimes conducted that day were fired. This shows that Trump does not care about law and order at all, only about personal power and control.

So one batch of crimes is fine? Is that what you’re saying?

This seems like an intellectual gymnastics exercise in justifying corruption

One batch of crimes is awfully much worse than the other. That is what law takes into account. Dismissing Trump's public safety measures in Washington because he himself has been criminally convicted is what I myself would call "intellectual gymnastics". But sadly also typical of hackers, who seem to forget to feel empathy with the victims of street crime.

We'll probably find out sometime around the first week of January, 2029.

> Consider that the POTUS is a 34x convicted criminal

To be fair, they were political persecutions and show trials just so that people like you could write that sentence and help the Democrat Party keep the presidency.

I’m not saying Trump is innocent in life, so don’t mistaken what I am saying for that. I am clearly and specifically saying that the 34 convictions are a joke and that only the gullible and the zealots buy into them.

Isn't the 34 counts due to the fact that the trial concluded that Trump paid Daniels via Cohen but hidden the payment as "legal expenses" and therefore falsified 34 different documents?

It is not like they invented extra fake actions that Trump did not do, it is all part of the same fraud. Either you recognize that Trump was guilty in this affair, and he gets X counts of fraud, X being a large number due to the number of document involved (and maybe someone can argue on the exact count, but 34 or 28 is not a big difference, so it is a different argument that move the goalpost), or Trump was not guilty at all. You cannot really say "well, Trump is guilty for the first 2 counts, but then not the 32 other counts": how can he be guilty in one document and not be guilty in the other which is basically identical except for the date?

Also, isn't a large number of counts of conviction pretty common in case of fraud? (for exactly the reason I've given: the falsification of each document counts for 1 count)

People who claims that 34 counts of conviction is the result of a political persecutions seems to have no idea that 1) this is usually how it works, this is usually what people get for fraud, there was no special treatment for Trump, 2) pretending that it was maybe 1 or 2 counts of felony but not 34 does not make any sense, 3) even if they wanted, it would not have been possible for the trial to conclude "just 1 or 2 counts", and it is therefore ridiculous to pretend that this number is the result of a political bias where they choose the higher number just to be mean toward Trump.

> and help the Democrat Party keep the presidencty

You're writing your own narrative there bud. I'm not even a USA citizen, I have literally zero ability to influence the USA electorate to any degree. So cut the rhetoric, it's tiring and frankly destructive to real discussion.

I'm neither gullible nor a zealot. Trump has a long standing history of ripping people off for many millions of dollars, regardless of the currency. There's an endless supply of receipts, give me a break.

And that's long before we even consider that he's literally operating illegal wars (not approved by congress), which _is_ breaking USA law.

The 34 crimes are these:

- falsifying business records - 1st degree

- falsifying business records - 1st degree

- falsifying business records - 1st degree

...

- falsifying business records - 1st degree

https://www.scribd.com/document/737791944/Trump-verdict-shee...

He was charged 34 times for the same payment, multiple times per check, because they were entered as payment for lawyer instead of hush money for porn star.

"Falsifying business records" is a not a crime, unless it's done in the pursuit of another crime. The other crime was trying to influence the election (literally his job as a candidate). This is despite the fact that the books were cooked as payment to lawyer in 2017, after the election.

Alvin Bragg, the person who convicted Trump, specifically ran on prosecuting Trump.

It was entirely a political prosecution. If Trump had paid cash, he would have 10000x counts against him, one for each dollar bill.

34x of 4 years means he could have been convicted for a maximum of 134 years. One count for 4 years wasn't enough, they had to give him more time than some serial killers.

The judge specifically postponed the conviction after the election to see if he should receive prison terms or not. He absolutely would have had he lost.

I think it’s normalization. If they can ignore Congress, lie to them, break American law, ignore international law, what’s to stop them from violating the constitution? It’s how they will ultimately deport 100 million Americans, like they proposed a few days ago on the DHS Twitter account. Don’t fix things through the political process - just ignore them and use military force.

>> Never the US has been so honest around so many lies in the same speech.

Its more this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1q34556/mill...

> And then a few seconds later: "US oil companies will go into Venezuela"

Venezuela is down to 1 million barrels per day, down from 3 million per day from the 2000s because of the sanctions after Hugo Chavez. They own the worlds largest reserve (about 300 billion barrels worth) and it was always my understanding that we worked with them before Hugo Chavez went the route he went and brought a great nation to shambles for a power trip.

I think Venezuela will recover with our aid, but a lot of their old infrastructure is gone, they will need investors. They will also need to deal with their crime problem and hold real elections for once.