War with…Venezuela?
- Thread starter sporkman
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Ends justifying the means isn't accountability, justice, or anything else you might imagine it to be. It's merely weak minded people exercising force, making everyone less safe and less free.
You have no freedom, real or perceived, when unchecked powers can unilaterally and extrajudicially use their power to their own ends. You cannot be safe or secure in a country or world where that's the behavior. You last only until someone decides you don't.
Lack of stability only benefits those with means and power. The wealth and income gaps grow even faster than in a "healthy" stable economy. Power and money both get consolidated at accelerated rates. People with means aren't going to go without and they're not going to relinquish the power they have - people without means will find they have even less power.
A broad weakening puts far more people into desperation, and that will be heavily exploited by those who can. What you see happen in mild recessions will get exaggerated. You think a near oligarchy owns the government and the power here now? Just wait until an economic collapse.
There's no evidence Trump is in charge of anything in Venezuela other than him saying it. I'm betting that doesn't work as well in a foreign country as it does in the US where he has a giant enablement system.
Maduro and Putin have long shared a relationship built on a hatred of the West. it extends Putin's sphere of influence geographically. As was stated up thread, however, Putin was willing to trade it for Ukraine. Whether that was part of Trump's thinking, we don't yet know.
We're only a few weeks out from Machado's Nobel Peace Prize, and we're days from her saying she was ready to take over power there. To me, that seems like much bigger motivation for Trump, who has been very loudly sore about the Nobel Prize for a long time. It makes her his opponent, much like Clinton, Obama, and Biden, and he'll need to very publicly dominate her to make himself feel better.
The US media coverage of this is utterly awful so far. Parroting politician talking points, and very few headlines or even articles on the fact that this was plainly illegal. It's disappointing how easily they've been intimidated by him. How the fuck are they so willing to cede the narrative to a perpetual liar?
First of all, it was illegal. Then, how often has toppling a dictator somewhere worked out well? One person doesn't hold power in a dictatorship all on their own - there's a massive reinforcement infrastructure for it. That doesn't go away after one quick operation, and a functional democratic system isn't just sitting there idle waiting to step in.
I had no real hopes for WaPo, etc. I had higher hopes for NPR and others.
I don't think most legal scholars have issue with the idea that someone orchestrated the trafficking of drugs into the United States can be prosecuted for that. That's generally accepted. Standing on the other side of a line isn't protection in and of itself. If someone stand on the Mexican side of the border wall and tosses drugs over the top, we'd all agree that it's reasonable to indict, have Mexican authorities apprehend and extradite. Standing further away and organizing others to do it doesn't absolve you.
What's at issue here is that the way to accomplish apprehension and prosecution is to work in concert with local authorities to arrest and extradite. You cannot simply ignore sovereignty. Diplomatic immunity is very slightly murky in this case, as most countries didn't acknowledge Maduro as the rightful leader, though I believe the UN did. I would assume that there exists some treaty or agreement somewhere that delineates how that qualification is made, and the UN is the most likely consensus for that.
I don't know why I continue to expect that people might wake up and realize the absurdity of the position. The only real unknown at this point is whether, with enough time, people will eventually look back and realize how nuts it was. There have been plenty of other examples in history of absurdities/atrocities where people realized after time and distance how wrong it was.Have you not been paying attention since January 2025? Any law, international or otherwise, that goes unenforced isn't a law but a statement of opinion.
At some point, once the crazies are in the past, we're going to have to put some real safeguards in place to correct the fact that safeguards didn't really exist.
We like to think there's a long slow march towards progress and that there are signs along the way that we're better than the past. The two Trump administrations are ongoing reminders that we're still just tribal animals and there isn't any real progress.
I'm less bothered that individual like him exist than I am by the fact that there are people that support him, enable him, and choose him over nearly any other option. You'd expect a greater portion of the bell curve to be able to figure it out and see it.
I’m all for prosecuting every one of them.
Also, I expect Maduro to appeal to SCOTUS about it all being part of his job, so it can’t be a crime.
It can't be more than one thing? If you think he's not salty over the Nobel, you're definitely wrong. He's exactly that person.
It's certainly taken headlines away from the failure to produce the Epstein files on the law's timeline. It will be hard for him to sustain the attention, and people are clearly not losing interest in the Epstein files.
The quotes in that article sound like they were written by the administration.
I will either turn off Trump / Fox News or ask the business to do so. If it remains on, I’ll leave. Zero tolerance for being forced to hear or see any of that.
Exxon are in the business of knowing how to make money in oil and gas. There's a lot to it. They're experts in it, and their financial history demonstrates that they're consistently quite good at it. Additionally, they don't have long history of Musk like promises that never deliver.
A failed real estate developer and his fanbase think otherwise, so the CEO of a massive and consistently profitable company in that industry must be foolish and wrong.
You may not want to hear this, but the calculus for Exxon might change considerably if Trump weren't involved. He's a wildcard, and not in a good way. He gets butthurt about something, and he'll turn the government against you and the 42% will stop buying from you (but they won't call it "cancel" because that's what the evil libs do).
He's the CEO of a publicly traded company. He could have stayed quiet, but he can't publicly play along with something they don't plan to actually do, or he'll have shareholders suing or the DOJ going after him. He also has to account for activist shareholders. An influential billionaire investor or two decides you're going in the wrong direction, and you have a whole war going on to force a vote and distract the entire enterprise. They're not too big for that to happen - it's happened to very large companies.
He has responsibilities to the shareholders he has to take seriously to keep his job and stay out of legal trouble.
Gas price have little to do with the president or his/her actions. People like to perceive that the opposing party drives them up when they go up, or their own party drives them down when they go down, but reality is that's just not correlated or causal.
They put information about why here. It was clearly a directional award, not not one based on specific accomplishments. It was controversial at the time and not universally accepted as a great choice. Reading between the lines of what they said, it certainly seemed like it was an endorsement of moving away from the GWB worldview and hope for a different future. Given that, there's zero chance they'd give Trump one since he's hellbent on going even farther than GWB in the direction the Nobel Committee was happy to see in the rearview mirror.
Near as I can tell, we've succeeded at a "regime change" once ever - Panama, and that was a situation where there was an elected government ready to take over and just needed Noriega removed from the situation. We've never succeeded in other situations where anything more than that was needed.
I disagree with those that assert that. They started the war, they lost decisively, then a large alliance of countries got them under agreement as to how to proceed.
I think you meant that Trump's bored of peace.
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