As an outside observer, the US administration is an embarrassment to the country. You're never going to come back from this. Well done.
Pretty sure even a lot of the current President's voters are slowly coming to this same realization. I predict soon in casual conversation almost no one will have voted for this man.
I voted for Dean Phillips in the primary. He was blackballed. Local party officials even tried to keep him of ballots.
It even got to the point where Ezra Klein was loudly complaining about what was happening, and even he was criticized.
If you want to understand why the Dems keep losing, you have to understand the party machine. Looking at how the Phillips campaign was treated, and the Sanders campaign before that, show exactly how someone can run on exactly the issues people care about but be shut down before it ever comes to a vote, because it harms the political interests of the higher ups in the party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Phillips#2024_presidentia...
The Democratic Party's electorate aren't really paying attention.
"Democrats eat babies, are Satanist, globalists, shadow-government elite that trump is saving us from!": said the Coin Dealer.
I wish I was doing hyperbole... I really wish that I was...
Pretty much everything that is worse because of decisions that Trump made.
You cannot identify idiocy if you are an idiot.
The ones that remained till now are happy cheering for a constantly lying pedophile who has behavior of a spoiled child and mental capacity of even less. I am not holding my breath anything can move them. Other folks who voted for him and now understand, well drown in shame for all I care, it doesnt change anything since this was obvious years ago and you still voted a childish pedophile in.
The amount of people who are still in that immovable category is what I find most horrifying. I'm not sure what the fix for that is. Less lead in the water? Better education?
Can you imagine?
There's an US law that says the US will invade Belgium (edit: Netherlands) if the court wanted to investigate an American (???)
I remember Hillary Clinton, in the Obama administration, saying the US is an exceptional country that deserves exceptional conditions regarding this issue
It's frankly ridiculous
Pretty wild that the US has a law that literally says it must invade another country if they judge Americans for war crimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
It's not a corrupt court. It has judged crimes against humanity cases before, and a lot of countries give credence to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_the... the people in this list all deserve to be there, I can't see a single exception
My own country (Brazil) supported South Africa charges of genocide against Israel because we believe in this court and the role it fulfills.
For me, the sole problem with this court is that it's reluctant to judge American war crimes and crimes against humanity. But as Europe leaves the US sphere of influence, maybe they will grow a spine. It would be unfortunate if people like George W Bush, Dick Cheney, John Choon Yoo and Jay Scott Bybee died before they were indicted by this court.
If your justice system, as a matter of policy, refused to ever arrest any while brazilians would you say it was still corrupt even if every black/brown brazilian they convicted was truly guilty and fairly sentenced? It's corrupt. If their hands truly are completely tied because of credible threats against them by the US then the US is the source of their corruption, but it's still corrupt.
"We will respond against the ICC and its personnel to the extent permitted by U.S. law. We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45474864
As for the ICC turning a blind eye to the crimes of the US, its track record speaks for itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_committed_by_the_Un...
Giving one party a free pass to commit crimes while convicting other parties is corrupt, even if all the people who did get convicted deserved it.
The bigger loss is in soft power, the power that comes from economics, having the worlds reserve currency, and even the trust and respect of our allies.
Neither does the US anymore.
US influence has gone up in the smoke of broken economic agreements, psychotic bloviation, and tariff wars.
If all you can do is threaten other people/countries to stand beside you, you have no friends.
Bridges are burned that will never be rebuilt.
What makes you think of this? Also, why wouldn't China pick up this role, when they heavily rely on this, or why wouldn't bilateral agreements be enough?
The Strait of Hormuz has entered the chat.
So much of American "power" in the past few decades has been based on perception, not reality. And other major powers, including China, have largely played along because it has suited their interests too.
But it's a mistake to assume that just because other major powers haven't sought conflict with the US, it means they're not capable of challenging America's power credibly in certain regions and domains.
Of note: the US doesn't even have an aircraft carrier in the Pacific right now. The only thing keeping China from, say, moving on Taiwan, is Pete Hegseth's testosterone.
For example take a core grassroots issue - immigration reform. Slowly building support for decades against the corpo imperative for cheap labor. But after it finally gets critical mass, what does this actually result in? A personal enrichment shakedown dynamic for employers of imported labor, concentration camps, and homicidal gangs of jackboots roaming the streets itching to summarily execute people for exercising their Constitutional/natural rights. All that hard earned political capital squandered on nothing more than a performative con man "for the cause". And in a few years we'll be right back to hearing their pissing and moaning about Democrats being responsible, even though they did it to themselves.
(signed, a libertarian)
The root of the problem is in the collective mind of Americans. We are the problem - we've been hacked to be both stupid and proud of that stupidity, to cease recognizing "character" or "virtue" as a signal, to cease caring about reality that doesn't support opinions that were installed on us, like malware, or anything really except entertainment. Because that's the ONE thing we do get out of all this - we get to be entertained. How funny when he says outlandish things like immigrants are eating the cats, eating the dogs! How hilarious (and macho!) when he brags about grabbing women. How wonderful it is to see the discomfiture of the libs when he parrots Nazi propaganda or when he encouraged the Proud Boys to storm the capital to overturn his loss, and then his lackeys claimed it either didn't happen or was a false flag. "Hang Mike Pence!" is what an obese, fentanyl- and TikTok-addicted mind thinks is doing something! And hey, you can say "retard" again without getting canceled.
I've got kids and I'm terrified for them.
Arguably the richest in terms of the GDP per capita, but I don't think Americans have ever been the most educated or healthiest in the world.
Democracy is fine and well, it's an indictment of americans. Considering the 2 times this century the popular vote winner didn't get into power. And that the current president was given power twice.
> It is difficult to imagine a people - on paper the richest, most educated and healthiest in the history of the world -
The fact that you think these are true is part of the problem.
As for the future who knows.
(I am from the country that voted to leave the EU...)
Sometimes it can be learned with a simple first degree burn. Sometimes you get blisters. Sometimes the government in power is determined to hold their hand to it and get third degree burns.
Hopefully the pain from this round of burns can be remembered for a while longer before its repeated again.
This seems like an overstatement. After all, Germany came back from Nazism.
I also think this is not a uniquely American problem. If anything, the US is a political bellwether. And I would note that Australian Rupert Murdoch for example has been funding right-wing propaganda in the US, as well as some other countries, for decades. (Donald Trump himself is known as a voracious consumer of right-wing media. He's in their target demographic.) In addition to donating massive amounts of money to US Republicans, South African Elon Musk has also taken an interest in other countries such as the UK. The Israel lobby is of course very powerful in the US. This is an international problem. As arguably the most powerful nation in the world, the US is a natural target for those who would abuse that power.
So all we have to do to come back from it is have Nuremberg style trials for GOP leadership and to ban their ideology and symbology from being displayed in the country?
This is not a thing that exists in the world. ;-)
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It is very frustrating that, as long as there's even a tiny bit of ambiguity, dismissive quips (like your response to my initial comment) are very likely to happen. They derail the discussion by deliberately choosing a weak interpretation that has obvious inconsistencies.
With regard to "flawless behavior", I think the issue is not just ambiguity but overlooking the long history of abhorrent behavior by the US, which has constantly bombed and invaded other countries and interfered in other inhumane ways such as supplying weapons. Given that, I have to wonder where in history you would find decades of flawless behavior. I would ask seriously where the military attacks against Iran and Venezuela would rank exactly in your list of grievances against the current US administration. It's true that you could be talking about something else, but I think that in itself is problematic, to ignore the worst atrocities and focus instead on other things.
Inside the US, we have roving gangs of Trump-controlled paramilitary thugs shooting and beating people in the streets, and who may threaten polling places next month. Our economy has been sabotaged, our government sold to the highest bidders. The news media is consolidating under control of Trump allies. We're experiencing outbreaks of diseases that had been eradicated. Our scientific research has been defunded, our universities cowering in fear, and our environment has been opened to unmigigated pollution. To be frank, the reputation of the US in the rest of the world is among the least of our problems under Trump. Thus, when I'm talking about the Reichstag fire—i.e., the end of democracy in Germany and on analogy a similar event in the US (already foreshadowed by January 6, 2021)—and you respond talking about a "positive relationship with the US", as if that were the most important problem in the world, I felt that this actually trivialized the conversation.
But I do still take some issue with your own approach. I would have preferred to criticize your arguments, had you brought any up! Of course it's impossible to always respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of anyone's words, but at least you should have settled on any plausible interpretation. Your reply clearly showed that you chose an implausible interpretation, and I stand by my view that it is a bigger violation of the guidelines than you seem to think.
I don't understand what this means.
> Your reply clearly showed that you chose an implausible interpretation
How should I interpret your reply? Wouldn't it be better for you to explain rather than to complain and make me guess, perhaps wrongly?
Saying that they don't have authority to make a decision implies that there's some universal set of rules that internationally lays down what anyone's authority is - precisely the kind of thing you appear to be opposed to, because such a set of rules would likely need a court!
You seem to have arrived at a suitable definition of "authority"
I have to applaud coming up with a sentence like that. The same sort of beauty one might find in an Escher piece.
Let me address the point underlying that contortion by asking a question: In the alternate semantic universe we're constructing, if that Russian later passes through a US-friendly country and is arrested, did the US court turn out to retroactively have had the authority to issue the warrant, and we pretend it always had it, or is it supposed to work some other way?
And undoubtedly I agree that if Putin or Netanyahu pass through Europe they should be arrested. But I'm not sure if that's a legal decision or a political one.
There was no hostile intent or ill feelings. Some things were meant to be humorous, but in good spirits. If anything came across otherwise, that's a communication failure on my part. I'm sorry.
Likewise I think where I'm uncertain with Putin is that while he's undoubtedly a nefarious guy and we have written down rules and norms he has broken, those norms do not apply to the Russian world. We claim they apply, but we could only make them apply through force of arms which runs opposite to the rule of law. That is rather the rule of "might makes right."
I'd say that these things are not opposites. Rather the rule of law is a way of tempering the power of force of arms. Look at your Nuremberg example - having won the war and enacted occupation by force of arms, the Allies were in a position where they could have simply imposed summary execution. Legalization was a stepping back from this dynamic - likely due to the amount of unilateral killing that had just gone on.
> those norms do not apply to the Russian world
The crux of the matter here is that parties on the receiving end of aggression (Ukraine, Palestine) have assented to adopting those norms. The legalistic theory is that by aggressing onto those parties, the aggressors become subject to the jurisdiction of whom they're aggressing against. I personally don't particularly like this model of international jurisdiction, but it is on solid longstanding ground. And so while I'll argue against this sort of thing at an individual level (especially where the nexus is say electronic communications), I don't feel much sympathy for leaders who end up suffering this dynamic because they decided to attack other countries.
In reality of course yes, to apply those laws requires force of arms - for there even to be something to temper in the first place. So Ukraine/Palestine assenting to those treaties is essentially asking would-be allies to defend them in some well-scoped circumstances, modulo the underlying diplomatic concerns.
Refresh my memory, what did USA choose about that?
If you equate what the Presidents of the USA want to what the USA itself wants, then the USA have decided they don't want that.
If not, then you'd need to organize a referendum and let the population itself decide on a one person, one vote basis.
Our founders smartly chose against direct democracy. The more I look around, the more right I see they were.
Then they got mad that the rest of the world didn't approve of actually doing the horrific things.
And then no one wanted to buy bonds from the country endorsing the horrific acts.
Rules for thee, not for me.
This pivot to brute force exposes the hypocrisy not in the world, but specifically in America, as represented by the American citizen I am talking to.
It's also not "how the world works", it's how the world works while America has the power to make it work that way.
Thankfully, it is a self-defeating approach.
As a simple counterexample to this universalism, think of the European Union. Germany and France could impose their will on smaller neighbors (and did, in less enlightened times!), but they don't, because y'know, they actually believe in rule of law, consent and consensus.
Or as an example closer to home - the Canada / US relationship before recent American aggression.
Things don't have to work by unilateral aggression. It is a specific ideological choice, it is not a law of nature. Now I understand it might feel different while enveloped in said ideology (it literally determines what we perceive to be possible after all!), the same way a Muslim fanatic would attribute everything to Allah's plan, but I'm not really interested in self-justifications.
and do...
For example Hungary is being fined daily for attempting self-determination https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clww729180po
It is hilarious that you think they WANT to be fined.
Additionally, this is from 2024, Hungary has since democratically elected a government on the express platform of getting rid of the wannabe dictator that got them fined.
You've mistaken the mere existence of enforcement for domination, just like you keep mistaking ideological preference for natural law.
Also notice the words you used: "attempting self-determination". Weren't you just making the point that might makes right? In that view, Brussels has the power, Hungary doesn't, News at 11, yada yada.
But nobody actually lives by "might makes right", you included. As soon as its somebody you're sympathetic to, the cold realism drops and we're back to consent and sovereignty. That is my point. It's just a line people use to defend power arrangements they like, to be dropped for ones they don't.
EDIT: forgot the peace prize, trump likely mad over that again.
That is authority if you like it or not.
The U.S., along with China, India, Russia, and many other nations, are not members and do not grant any weight to ICC rulings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...
The U.S. had peripheral involvement in these actions.
I am upvoting you, as I don't find your line of questioning abrasive enough to warrant down votes.
I am not talking about the current ethnic conflict between Israel and Palestinians because that is a century worth of conflict has gone far beyond what courts can rule on. I am talking about USA absolving itself from being accountable in presence of evidence.
Why should we believe in the fantasy of the nation state, but not in the fantasy of international law? It's all just social constructs to create an ordered society that stops the worst excesses.