Clearly, you Americans lost your minds when Biden did it too
Perhaps you can enlighten us as to when Biden did anything remotely similar.
I’ll wait.
Clearly, you Americans lost your minds when Biden did it too
Perhaps you can enlighten us as to when Biden did anything remotely similar.
I’ll wait.
Of course, "he will be involved in approval"
Just another example of unprecedented actions to which if any other president has done it the entire political world (especially republicans) would have lost their f-ing minds over. But it’s Trump, so no one cares and to the extent anyone does we have so many other scandals and absurdities to worry about. Next.
I'm not sure if you are not paying attention or you are simply dodging my arguments in order to "win".
I responded directly to the central question of your OP, you have ignored every substantive point I’ve made since.
Yet another example of your projection.
This is the main argument that Trump uses to consider those muthafuckers as terrorists.
Baseless conspiracy theories are not arguments. Provide evidence to support it, then we can have a rational dialog.
As I said, this is a forum, and what we do here is to interchange ideas in order to find the truth.
The way we go about discovering the truth is to begin with facts and then apply logic to see where those facts lead. The opposite of that, such as hand waiving arguments away on the basis of “you just hate Trump” is all you’ve done in this conversion.
my commonsense tells me that a president of the most powerful nation in the world might have a lot of legal advisers behind that tell him what he can do or not.
So in other words, you have no thoughts of your own and instead just believe whatever the administration tells you, because they “must” have lawyers keeping everything in order.
Never mind that Trump is systemically staffing his administration with sycophants whose only qualification for the job is their willingness to kiss Trump’s ass.
Never mind the pathological lying that comes out of this administration every single day.
Never mind the utter contempt for the rule of law and for checks and balances this president has demonstrated every day in office (not to forget of course January 6th).
Never mind the common sense test that tells anyone with an IQ above room temperature that these strikes are blatantly illegal. No, smuggling drugs does not make you an enemy combatant. You do not need to be a lawyer to know that.
But tell me more about my own bias and how that clouds my ability to see straight here.
So, for you those who help drug traffickers are not drug traffickers but humble poor sailors. Right?
No genius. what I just explained is that those who help drug traffickers are criminals, and criminals are subject to law enforcement, not a military strike.
Do you understand the difference between how we deal with criminals vs how we deal with enemy combatants? Yes or No?
We can't take your arguments seriously because you already have a bias against Trump. You loathe the orange man.
Arguments have nothing to do with the individual. They’re made up of premises and logic, and from those things two a conclusion is derived. Your inability to see that and instead think the validity of someone’s argument depends on whose fingers are typing them is yet another perfect demonstration of the projection at play here. You can’t assess arguments for their soundness, so you think others cannot either.
Have you never heard of a devils advocate debate? Pretend that’s what this is. Pretend I am a Trump nut licker who is testing you to see if you can refute dumb left wing talking points. Go on, show us what you got.
Do you think that what you've just typed is true only because you say it?
I think it’s true because I have eyes and can read. If what I just said was not true all you have to do is provide one example of a rational refutation you have provided of anything I’ve said. And no, calling me bald man is not a refutation.
I repeat once again because you seem to be a bit slow to understand. The Secretary of War didn't order any attack on the survivors, let alone Trump.
I’m clearly not the slow one here. Let me repeat once again; the criticism isn’t that the secretary of defense ordered the strike, it’s that the administration’s account is not trustworthy due to being a silly explanation in its own, being one of multiple different accounts offered, and coming from the most pathological lying administration we’ve ever seen.
Do you understand the difference between “X didn’t happen” and “X is highly suspicious”?
don't judge beforehand when you don't know all the facts.
Coming from the guy proclaiming to know what happened and pushing back against me for saying we don’t. Wow.
Though, what is important to know so far is that Trump didn't order the second attack
This isn’t what we’re talking about, no one is even accusing him of that. Once again, you cannot stay focused on the conversation because you’re so busy focusing on Trump when no one else is, only to then accuse me of being biased to the point I can’t see straight.
Seriously bro, look in the mirror.
It's the same sht
No, it’s not, but thank you for clarifying the issue. You do not know the difference between the purpose of military vs law enforcement, or between a criminal vs a terrorist. You might want to try Google or ChatGPT. They can help you with that.
The general in charge already explained what happened
Ever since this saga began they have provided multiple evolving and even conflicting accounts of what happened, so I don’t know why you think them providing an explanation means case closed. So far Pete Hegseth has both said he wasn’t in the room, and that he was. He said he left the room after the first strike because the boat was clearly down, and that he witnessed it first hand and those survivors were definitely a threat. They’ve told us the survivors were a threat because they were radioing backup, and also that the strike was purely to finish destroying the drugs. So sorry, no, this isn’t case closed just because NewsMax told you so.
you only complain when Trump is in the government, but if a Democrat were the president, you'd be full of praise for him.
Baseless and therefore meaningless. But you typed words, so congrats.
I has a lot to do with the conversation because your hatred against Trump make you biased.
You haven’t made a single rational argument this entire conversation, all you’ve done is dismissed every argument I’ve made as the product of bias without even an attempt to explain how or why.
You really need to look in the mirror, the projection is astounding.
I said that the general in charge of the military operations confirmed there was no order to kill the survivors.
Right, the latest story is that the cocaine floating in the water was the threat they were trying to eliminate, and those pesky survivors tragically got in the way of it.
Ok.
So, your wet dream of seeing Trump behind bars will never become real.
Was never part of this conversation. Stay with me.
from a prosaic point of view I can say that those who help criminals ARE ALSO CRIMINALS.
Correct, and that’s why we have law enforcement agencies… to enforce laws, aka to address criminality. The military exists to protect us from enemy combatants, to which criminality does not cover.
This is really basic stuff.
At least one of us is making an argument.
He will try to be a mind reader, and his “case” to prove it is equally applicable to his side.
In the Trump era the right loves to hide behind the “we’re not mind readers” defense even though determining the intent of others is one of the most basic skills we acquire in life and is used all throughout law, business and politics.
It’s not a serious rebuttal, it’s an excuse to hide behind the egregious double standards the right applies to Trump vs anyone else.
When his side’s authoritarianism is mentioned, it’s justifiable… and then he’ll have the audacity to say you give the right passes you won’t give the left.
The left isn’t authoritarian, that’s the difference. So I don’t have to justify it, only educate you on what authoritarianism is and how we identify it. There is no comparison there between this administration and anything we see on the mainstream left.
You have no opinion, you just act like a parrot repeating what the democrat politicians say about it.
In this thread I have explained why this administration’s story should not be trusted, why their actions are deeply unethical at best and war crimes at worst, what they should be doing given the circumstances, and the likely reality of the people they are killing.
You have responded to not a single word of any of that, opting to instead vapidly tell me I’m just repeating what I’m told.
Seems to me like the person who cannot respond to a rational argument is the one just believing whatever they are told. The projection is staggering.
What drew my attention is that the Democrat senators refered to the survivors of the attacks as "sailors", while the Republican senators refered to them as narco terrorists. So, who should I take seriously?
Take seriously the side that knows what the words they are using mean.
Trafficking drugs to the US does not meet any reasonable definition of the word terrorist. That’s a heavy label that requires evidentiary support, this administration has yet to offer a drop of it.
They use that term because it’s emotionally loaded, which is useful for manipulating gullible people into accepting their narrative without critical thought. Case and point ^^^
Well, I've got to take your opinion as the Trump hater that you are.
No, what you should do is take my opinions for what they are worth, which you can assess by looking at the facts and logic of my argument. What you do instead is come up with excuses to not have to address them. By branding me as a Trump hater, you’re just giving yourself the intellectually lazy out to not have to face reality wherever you find it inconvenient (like here apparently).
What amazes me, though, is that in order to bash Trump you are very capable of defending these "poor people" who smuggle drugs on boats as if they didn't know what they are doing.
I explained my reasoning in detail.
I explained why no reasonable person should accept the administration’s story here without strong evidentiary support, which the administration hasn’t even pretended to feel obligated to do.
I never defended these individuals. I explained why even in a worst case scenario, killing the people on board is a war crime at worst, and at best deeply unethical.
I explained that the emotional escape Trump supporters cling to here (these are terrible human beings) has little alignment with known reality.
Telling yourself that the amazing thing here is my ability to defend these people is cognitive dissonance on full display. The sense of amazement you are experiencing is bewilderment at how much there is here which you have failed to consider, willfully or not.
Americans should know that the US has a lot to gain defeating Venezuela's socialist narco government.
And now we pivot to “defeating socialism” which has nothing to do with this conversation.
Every time I hear a right winger rail against Venezuela for its socialism all it makes me think about is how brainwashed you all are. You focus on Venezuela cause you think it makes a great case for your side, but in reality it’s totally disconnected.
What the left in America largely wants is first of all, not even socialism, so you guys can’t even get the terminology right. What we’re talking about is a highly regulated form of capitalism, which is totally different.
Second, Venezuela’s downfall was only partly because of “socialism”, but more so because of corruption under authoritarianism, which far more resembles what this administration is bringing on.
Venezuela is the bogeyman they teach you to be scared of, at some point you’ll need to realize there’s no monster under that bed.
there are Americans who declare they oppose any war, but are at war with Trump. They just cannot ignore the guy, which ought to be easy to do
Is that what you guys did during Biden’s 4 years in office… ignored him?
This is such a shamelessly stupid argument. He’s the president of the United States (so we can pause right there) who just two nights ago posted to truth social like 160 times. In his cabinet meeting this week he called Somalians living here garbage and says he doesn’t want them in our country. This was the same cabinet meeting where he fell asleep multiple times in front of the cameras, literally while people next to him were talking about him.
And that’s just this week, if I went back through the entire year we’d be here till 2026. The man is a total national embarrassment, that is not something any reasonable person would ignore.
but on the other hand, Americans oppose a military intervention in Venezuela.
The opposition is far less about the vague notion of military intervention in Venezuela and more so about the way they’re going about it. If a boat is suspected of carrying drugs on its way to the US, the remedy is to cease the boat and try the people on it, not to just kill everyone on board. That’s the literal definition of an extra judicial killing.
Moreover, we know nothing about who is on these boats or if there are any drugs on this boat at all. This administration’s evidence has literally been “trust me bro”, which is especially hilarious given this is the most pathologically lying administration we’ve ever seen. Just look at the evolution over the past few days about the double strike. It went from no that didn’t happen, to it did happen, to it happened and we’re damn proud of it. Their shamelessness is their superpower.
Last point, it’s hard to express how tragic these strikes most likely are. Drug organizations like this rarely put their most dedicated men on the frontlines. Normally what they do is force people who in many cases had nothing to do with this stuff to take part through threats on their lives and the lives of their family. So even best case scenario where the administration is spot on that these were all drug boats heading to the US, at least some portion of the people they’re killing are almost certainly innocent.
Fantasy predictions? Consoling military families? Who’s talking about any of this?
Are you feeling ok?
the political incentives in your country reward performance arts over reality.
No shit, look at who’s holding our nuclear codes.
Which is something that is typically useful when you want to win elections. Also, the left absolutely does try to do this. They absolutely have talking points, those talking points just fail to stick.
I wasn’t talking about “the left” and what it does or doesn’t do well to win elections, I was talking about where the word was being used and what they were using it for.
This is the problem, you continue to conflate everyone with viewpoints on the political left as if they’re a hive mind playing the same game with the same ends. That’s not how reality works.
What's embarrassing is that the right is able to use the left's own buzzwords against them.
Again, the right excels at buzzwords because that’s what their constituency has the capacity to understand. I find that embarrassing as well, but for very different reasons.
The people who were using the term “woke” were doing so because it was a way to signal/convey their values and priorities to others, not because they thought it was a great way to get ignorant people to vote for candidates of their persuasion.
The latter is what the right is all about, which is why they were able to commandeer that word along with a host of others to get people out to the voting booths in support of the non existent bogeymen they created.
This generally doesn’t work on the left because left wing politics is about improving people’s lives, so left wing voters aren’t so easily manipulable.
but they failed with "woke" even though they had a head start.
What does this even mean? You keep acting like it was the job of “the left” to maintain “woke” as a positive phrase, why? It’s just a word.
but for whatever reason, they are able to spin buzzwords more than you'd expect from their numbers alone.
The right is much better at buzz words because their politics is all emotionally based. The right isn’t about ideas to improve people’s lives, it’s about grievances and culture war BS, so it’s built for catch all phrases used in ways that are effective even while meaningless.
Congress have a PSA-type "ad" claiming Trump is committing unconstitutional crime
Nonsense. All the video said was that they don’t have to obey illegal orders, which every service member learns in basic training.
but none will cite the crime, as if breathing is criminal
Because they aren’t necessarily alleging that Trump has given illegal orders, they’re warning service members because Trump has demonstrated many times over that he does not care about the rule of law and absolutely would give illegal orders. This is the same guy who told his former secretary of defense to shoot protesters in the leg, his former DOJ to seize voting machines, and tried to steal the last election with a fake electors scheme. To say he wouldn’t give illegal orders is just stupid.
Maybe because the allegation is a myth, like Russia, Russia, Russia?
Setting aside the absurdity that you guys are still using an investigation performed by his own DOJ as evidence of a democratic conspiracy against him… what I find hilarious about this latest fake outrage story on the right is that the representatives in the video very clearly stated nothing more than “do not obey illegal orders”, and yet you guys managed to take so much more out of it.
After years of pretending Trump couldn’t have incited the January 6th attack on the capitol because “he said be peaceful”… all of a sudden, now, you guys finally understand the concept of inferred messaging.
They stopped using woke as a badge of honor or saying "stay woke."
But who is “they”? Stay woke was a phrase that before republicans caught onto it was only uttered by a fraction of a fraction of the left. Specifically, it was mostly signifier of political activism within the black community. That’s a very small group and cannot compete with the political machine on the right. The idea that they were supposed to “fight back” to preserve the word is just silly. Once Arkansas rednecks start using it at school board meetings and then you have politicians all over the map rallying up their base with it, the connotation changes and nothing is going to be done about that.
That was a fundamentally flawed conclusion you drew, and it's evidence of why you struggle to carry on a basic conversation.
The irony
Who you want never amounts to the bestowing of magical powers under any fictitious premise pulled out of the ether. It's simply a matter of your preference
You didn’t ask who I wanted, you asked who I “intended to use”. In English, that’s a question about real world actions, not hypothetical desires.
No, the question you asked me was “who you intend to use to replace your elected president?”. I didn’t answer this question as it was asked because it’s incredibly stupid, for it as written is premised on the idea that I get to decide who replaces Trump. So I presumed that you are smarter than that and gave you the benefit of the doubt by steelmanning your question into “what do you think will happen if Trump needs to be replaced”, and continued from there.
If I was giving you too much credit let me know.
lol
”Hey, what happens if the president cannot continue”
”It’s in the constitution, read it”
”Well clearly you don’t understand how this works, you’re terrible at communication!”
Ok bro.
It’s a silly point. The left didn’t “allow” anything, it’s not up to them how the right uses words.
What is unserious is being asked something that is spelled out clearly in the constitution, then when responding with the instruction to read the constitution being told I’m the unserious one.
The term "woke" is probably the most obvious example, where it arose in social liberal circles as a badge of honor, and then as soon as conservatives started using it as an insult, the people describing themselves as "woke" allowed it to become an insult and started complaining that so many things were being called woke.
Any word can become an insult. The emotional connotation of a word comes not from its definition but from how the word is historically used. Woke is a perfect example. When its usage first entered mainstream, it was used to mean someone who was aware of social injustices in our society (contrasting with those who weren’t, which self identifiers basically thought was mostly everyone). But since, the political right did what it does so well - ignore what it actually meant and use it as a stand in for “any viewpoint about race that makes me feel uncomfortable”.
They also did this with critical race theory, a college course that they turned into “any conversation about race I don’t like”.
And let’s not forgets about DEI, a set of ideas and principals designed to educate the people within organizations as to the social plights and proceeding obstacles faced by minority groups, mostly in the workplace - to which the right turned into “any black person who’s taking the job of a more qualified white person”.
It’s not the left’s usage of the word liberals are reacting to, it’s the absurd ways the right is dishonestly using them as a shield for their bigotry.
What crypto does the Trump family own?
Trump promoted his own cryptocurrency meme coin, $Trump, and maintained significant investments in crypto with his family company World Liberty Financial, all of which raised significant conflict of interest concerns.
Why ask me a question that is not relevant to anything I’ve said and for which you already know the answer?
How about a committal answer instead.
How about you read the constitution? It’s right there.
A poll revealed Trump Jr. has strong support in the 18-to-29 and 30-to-44-year-old demographic ranges. Over a quarter of Republicans and right-leaning independents under 30 years old pegged Trump Jr. as their "ideal" choice to lead the GOP ticket in 2028.
Trumpism will die a painful death once the Donald is not leading the way any more. His cult like base will not transfer over to anyone else, not even his children, and his ability to win nationally has been contingent on middle of the road voters looking at him an and believing that because he was some genius real estate investor, would bring that to the Oval Office. The kids do not have that propaganda created aura either, swing voters would see that for what it is plainly and clearly.
Setting aside your habit of grabbing one tiny aspect you do not like from someone and craftily molding that into a hollow, full-blown monster
Not my fault if you look at a mouse and an elephant and can’t tell which one is bigger
I really want to know what or who you intend to use to replace your elected president?
Read the constitution, it explains this.
He was literally our last chance to save America
He was never going to save America, and the party deserved to die the second they elected him. The man is a complete and total buffoon masquerading as a genius, with his only real skill being the ability to con gullible people. He was always a fraud and anyone paying attention knew that.
I wrote a whole detailed response but it got erased, so that’s all I got on this post.