Trump is getting rid of the system, so his subordinates in the hierarchy will conduct drone strikes without the approval of the president. So it won't matter how cavalier he is. He won't be responsible (or accountable).

If we're going to make arguments based on the temperament of Trump, we should be able to do the same about Obama.

Obama was elected as an anti-war president. It seems that that was a reflection of his moral convictions. Why would he perform targeted killings, unless it was really necessary?

It strikes me that when Obama came into office, he thought the USG had gotten distracted from the war on terror by focusing on the Iraq War, and wasn't doing enough to preempt terrorist attacks. Doing so would require going after the leaders of terrorist organizations and taking them out, destroying the operational capacity of the groups. He saw what the threats were, and thought they were serious enough that something -- i.e., drone strikes -- had to be done.

So, boring argument: Given who Obama is, it seems we should've trusted that he had to do it, and that it's seem more reasonable if we too could see the intelligence.



Thing about that: Obama set up institutional and legal structures that required the president to sign off personally on most (but not all) targeted killings (although he was informed of the others). Trump is getting rid of the system, so his subordinates in the hierarchy will conduct drone strikes without the approval of the president. So it won't matter how cavalier he is. He won't be responsible (or accountable).

What are all your opinions on Wikileaks? Are they connected to Russia? Are they trying to distract? Most Democrat comments/articles I read online are convinced of this.

This is the part where anarcho-capitalist theorists explain to me how the marketplace of feudal governments will be forced by "market" forces to do a good job of running their kingdoms, simply because by owning property you are automatically incentivized to make it a utopia (like it is in all big companies).

(The funny part about this is that taken to the extreme, this reasoning leads anarcho-capitalists to defend the exact opposite of libertarianism, when the entire world is run by a single corporation. Congratulations, the world converged to your ideal utopia, according to your model of the world where externalities can only be solved by turning everything into the property of some Randian hero. It's too bad that you didn't think about this more before you implemented it in practice, but meanwhile such and such billionaires seem to have done pretty well by letting you trick yourself long enough for them to make bank.)

Yes to all... tentatively. There's good reason for suspicion, but it's far from certain.

Do you think Assange is a Russian agent?

I'd be curious though if you had an argument for why you think what you said in this post.

Americans tend to believe we are morally superior in a transcendental way, when we aren't.

The more I read about Russia, the more it seems like Putin (and Medeved) should be taken at their word. They both say that Russia was humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they want to restore it as a great power. That is their country's raison d'etre, its great driving purpose.

When it's America, it's "sometimes we **** up, but we are intrinsically okay", when it's Russia, it's "Putin is inherently evil". Nobody will put it in those words but if you pay attention the rhetoric communicates exactly this.

And that's American moral hypocrisy?

I don't see how this is any different than "sometime's I'm a bad driver too, but the guy who just cut me off is inherently evil".

When Putin invades Ukraine, he's an brutal vicious dictator trying to control the world, when the U.S. invades Iraq it's a noble mistake.

Intentions matter