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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Phew. So, like, this is OK, right? Nothing to to see here, move along? Nothing to worry about 15000 (fifteen fucking thousand, like fifteen times a thousand, something like a thousand times my kid’s classroom size) dead kids, because it’s not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties? Thanks man, that really will help me sleep at peace with my conscience tonight.

    (If we were talking about 15000 dead Israeli kids, we’d be -rightfully- freaking the fuck out. But 15k of those other kids, that’s fair game. Super ethical too.)








  • In the 60s and early 70s, Spain, Portugal, Greece were all authoritarian dictatorships. The western European countries effectively cut off links with them and applied pressure. When the people of each of them overthrew their dictatorships, EEC/EU membership was used as a stabilizing force, and as an aspirational milestone for full democratization.

    The EU of the 2010s could have played such a stabilizing role in Mediterranean countries after the Arab Spring. Tunisia had a budding democracy. If the Europeans had taken it seriously and extended a hand for some kind of EU association/integration (like Iceland, Norway or Switzerland), it might have done for them exactly what it did for Spain, Portugal, Greece.

    Instead, the Europeans decided to hyperfocus on the symptoms of immigration and embraced democratic dumping. So long as the dictator in Tunis, this homunculus called Kais, stops the migrants, he gets to do whatever he wants. Just so racist northern European hicks don’t vote far right. Well, guess what, they still vote far right and the migrants stilll keep coming.

    Europeans just don’t seem to be able to wrap their little brains around the simple fact that they need to treat Africans as people who deserve to aspire to democracy and progress in their own countries too.








  • My understanding is that the overall argument for international law is not primarily its enforceability, but the definition of norms that let states pressure each other in a particular direction.

    Note also that the US has never recognized the ICC to begin with.

    But the US is not the only player. EU countries tend to also pollute a lot but also tend to be more international law oriented. This then reverberates in many other parts of the world.

    In all, don’t expect the crime of ecocide to cause heads to roll and don’t put too much faith in it, but also don’t underestimate it’s value as a political tool.