Altherion

He more or less said this, although the emphasis was definitely on the latter part of your statement. CNN has his speech in full (with some annotations) in case people want to read it. I think it's a pretty powerful speech. Here are some excerpts: This is an important point: it always starts with vandalism, boycotts and demonstrations that become riots, but it does not end there. He goes on to talk about October 7th, 2023 and then: He doesn't mince words here or hedge in any way; it's pretty rare for a politician -- especially when the people he is calling out are at least nominally part of his party. See, he does mention (if only briefly) that Americans have the right to peacefully protest... but also makes it clear what does not qualify as peaceful.

Biden gave a speech today condemning the recent surge in antisemitism: I don't agree with him on everything, but in this respect I think he's spot on.

Realistically, it would never get that far -- the ICC would be negotiated with (or browbeaten) until they let whoever the US wants go. However, due to an amusing quirk of US law, as pointed out in the previous page, the President of the US does in fact have the authority to invade the Hague if the ICC detains an American or one of our allies. There is some debate about whom exactly The Hague Invasion Act (more formally, the ASPA) covers; it definitely covers all Americans and almost certainly all NATO personnel, but it probably also covers Israel and other non-NATO allies. The ICC is a weird construct. It calls itself a court, but it does not really have the resources of a court nor the limitations of most courts. Partly because of this lack of limitations and the potential for politicization, many nations either declined to sign to begin with (China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, etc), refused to ratify (the US, Russia, etc.) or ratified and withdrew (the Philippines and Burundi). The result is that the vast majority of cases (the sole exceptions being Russians and their South Ossetian vassals who don't particularly care) and the only ones which have seen anyone detained are from various African countries. Honestly, this is definitely not how international justice should work and I'm not even convinced that it is better than not having anything of the sort at all: selective enforcement of is one of the hallmarks of unjust regimes.

That is a very strongly worded letter, but they don't actually have the authority to do anything of the sort -- they're part of the Senate minority so unless the US administration shares some part of their attitude, these threats are rather empty.

It's rather interesting how CNN, BBC and France 24 all had headlines along the lines of "Hamas accepts ceasefire proposal" without having any idea of what was in the proposal and to what extent it overlaps with what Israel might accept. It's a nice trick on the part of the Hamas media team, but it only works once: next time, the news agencies will not be so quick to bite. That said, the BBC now says: If it really means an end to the violence altogether, then that might be worth it to Israel even at the cost of a permanent ceasefire. Of course, it's all very vague and it's hard to see how Israel can possibly trust Hamas to follow through on such a thing.

BBC says: This does not sound to me as something Israel would agree to.

Do you think that this has deterred him to any extent whatsoever? As far as I can tell, it has not had any effect at all. Soft power is useful, but only when people actually value legitimate trade, travel and other interactions. Otherwise, it does not do much beyond creating a nuisance. For example: Neither Russia nor North Korea nor Hamas nor the Houthis nor any of the other powers and groups that flagrantly violate international law care at all about our norms and conventions and imposing further limits on ourselves and our allies is not going to change this.

How do you intend to do this when you don't have any power over the people who flagrantly break the law? The most you can do is put limits on what can be done by yourself and your allies -- there is some argument for doing this, but as we have seen over and over again, such limits will be exploited by enemies who don't share your values (e.g. if you put limits on attacking civilians, the enemy will deliberately intermingle military infrastructure with civilians so your army's job becomes a lot harder and the civilians die anyway).

I have a very hard time seeing this kind of tax go anywhere in a divided Congress. It would be nice to tax the billionaires somehow, but it's not clear how such a tax would work: would they have to sell some of their holdings (and therefore realize the gains and be subject to a different tax) or would the government take payment in kind?

In that case, the 1940 Peace Strike satisfies your criteria. Those students were against any US involvement in the already existing war -- including even assistance to the UK. Their actions were ultimately futile, but their cause was absolutely awful (imagine what the world would have been like had the US not entered WWII).

Yes, and in English, the word "cleansing" literally means to make something clean. Who could be against making something clean, eh? Literal meanings are pointless when applied to social actions. We all know exactly what these words really mean.

It's an interesting question -- I guess it depends on what qualifies as a "student protest movement" and also what you mean by "vindicated by history". Back in my college days, there were fairly large protests against the 2003 war in Iraq. Here's an ancient CNN article: You could argue that they were eventually vindicated by history in that the war was a bad idea, but they didn't accomplish much. If you go further back in time, there were large anti-war protests before WWII: You could argue that they were halfway on the right side of history in that they were anti-fascist, but they were also very much anti-war. Later, in April of 1940, there was the California Peace Strike which was much more explicitly anti-war (here's an image with some of their slogans). I think that set of protests is the most obvious candidate for your question.

What "authority"? I always cite or quote sources when I am posting something that I believe to be a concrete fact. Otherwise, I'm simply saying what comes to mind at the time -- like pretty much everyone else here. Regarding the leverage: if you go back to my post, I never said that that the US has no leverage with Hamas, just that we have much less leverage with them than we do with Israel (and more to the point, thus far not enough to secure the release of the hostages). I don't think this is controversial.

Why is it that every time you respond to one of my recent posts it is with some completely content-free insult? Can you at least put some effort into the trolling and say something on-topic?

The Biden administration is trying very, very hard to get some kind of agreement, but the US doesn't quite have the resources and/or the resolve to push the two sides to a peace. The administration has some leverage with Israel, but what it absolutely cannot do is convince Israel to have a permanent ceasefire without all of the hostages being released -- this would be a non-starter in Israel and extremely unpopular in the US. The US has much less leverage with Hamas and the latter will not release the hostages without massive concessions which, again, would not be politically palatable in either the US or Israel so... what exactly is Biden supposed to do beyond what he is already doing?

The Israeli strike on Iran was very carefully calibrated to allow Israel's leadership to say that they hit some military target inside Iran (and thus have retaliated for the barrage) while simultaneously allowing Iran's leadership to say that there was no meaningful attack at all (and thus there is no need for further retaliation). It worked out surprisingly well.

Everybody (including even most people who strongly support Israel) disagrees with some subset of Israel's actions, but as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not share the position of the student activists and are mostly aligned with my position. Here's a PDF of a detailed poll from late March. Most Americans support the recently passed aid package (56 to 44), support Israel over Hamas (79 to 21), believe Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties (66-34) and favor a ceasefire only after all of the hostages are released and Hamas is removed from power (63 to 37). There's nothing toxic about any of this and I would appreciate it if you tone down the condescension.

There is a rather fine line between publicly declaring that people from a specific group don't deserve to live and incitement to violence. The protesters are, as usual, a mix of different groups, but in this case, the mix includes some fairly rabid anti-Semites who are barely even trying to mask themselves as anti-Zionists anymore. And yes, it also includes the usual set of the ill-informed, those who have not thought the issue through as well as those with legitimate concerns about humanitarian issues and the people who are joining simply because it seems like the popular thing to do, but the genuinely toxic elements are sufficient for the universities to feel the need for a crackdown. You are completely right that they would definitely prefer not to do this and they know that cracking down will, at least in the short term, lead to larger protests, but they assessed the situation and concluded that the alternative will very likely be worse.

He will almost certainly be convicted again, but with a more legitimate trial. Here's potentially a new way of making false accusations: This accuser was relatively inept (among other things, he used computers at the place where he was employed to research how to do this), but he still managed to get a lot of traction: the principal has been suspended since January and his family needed police protection due to harassment at their home. AI tools are only going to get better from this point on and not everyone will be this sloppy so audio accusations of this sort (and, eventually, also video) will become more common.

Russia has to be extremely displeased with Iran right now. Prior to that drone and missile barrage, it was a pretty safe bet that the US House of Representatives would hold up the aid to Ukraine until at least the election, but it appears that with a sufficiently blunt reminder that the world is burning, they decided to make a deal instead.

It rather depends on why Canada would want a nuclear weapon in the first place. As the article points out, there are significant downsides to suddenly developing one so one would imagine that the reason to do it would be quite substantial. In that case, it's likely that the red tape and resource limitations that account for the overwhelming majority of that 10 years would not be present and it would take considerably less time. Remember, the original development took less than half of that.

I don't think this is within the bounds of expected behavior. Embassies and consulates are supposed to be left in peace, but, as has been pointed out multiple times within this thread, in practice, this is not actually the case and one can find multiple instances of attacks on both diplomatic personnel and diplomatic facilities. Typically, the response to this ranges from a complaint to the host country to attempts to track down the perpetrators to a strike on something associated with the perpetrators similar in scale to the original attack. Nobody -- and I mean literally nobody -- has ever replied to such an attack with a barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at both civilian and military targets.

That is sad. I had hoped she might recover.

Where did you see this? I saw a report that she underwent surgery and was in the ICU, but not that she died.

First, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from. The largest number I can find is on Wikipedia which cites some Syrian Observatory for Human Rights for the following: Every news source I've found gives numbers smaller than 16 so it's not clear where you get ~50. Furthermore, it's not really a question of victims. In response to the bombing of a single building, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at a variety of sites all over Israel. The fact that Israel and its allies managed to mostly neutralize the attack does not make the attack any less of an escalation.