Who would have thought?
Obama is suddenly interested in limiting the sweeping presidential powers he spent 8 years expanding
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I’ve been reading Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, and reliving all the old revelations about the NSA’s spying program. You know what?
Fuck Obama.
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Wait, wouldn’t you be in more danger of drone strikes in Canada? Are they even allowed to use them in the US? I thought it was only reserved for foreign nation use. Though maybe that isn’t how the powers/laws are written.
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I think his wanting to not was deemed of less value than some other goal. Trumped by it, if you will.
Would be great if we had a Prime Directive that said ‘don’t treat people who have nothing to do with your goals like objects in your way’
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Yes, being abroad is a far greater risk. Still, I’ve always wanted an excuse to move to Canada, even if it’s a bad one.
So far as interesting people to drone go, while I doubt Trump would have any moral reservation over vaporizing me, I don’t think I’d be worth the time/cost for the civilian-eliminating apparatus. Plus there’d be thousands of hedgehog fans around the world who’d be angered.
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I assume you’d be bringing the Princess with you. Canada has a reputation for taking in foreign Princesses in time of need.
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Like @nungesser, I don’t disagree with noble goals. The problem is that they rarely play out perfectly in the real world. This is classic grist for the fiction mill and hence something I’d expect Corey to understand.
One can imagine a magical solution to the Trolley Problem in which one uses superior moral powers to levitate the train and save everyone… but that’s not actually how it works.
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Our government has gotten so fucked up that nothing seems to get done except things that hurt people, and that will only continue to get worse. The system was designed two hundred and forty years ago, in an era that was so different it might as well have been in a different galaxy. Nothing works, lies have never been so easy to disseminate, and people are more afraid than ever. Ignorance, arrogance, greed, and xenophobia rule the country like it never did before.
Obama tried to deal with some of the crap he was dealt by the slime-ball republicans in Congress by doing stuff by his own self. I can’t blame him for that. I can see why he doesn’t want Trump to have the same power. But it won’t matter, because Trump will have the both houses of Congress and a firmly conservative Supreme Court behind him. They’ll be drooling to reverse every advancement in human freedom and standard of living we’ve achieved in the last 100 years (that is, the ones that haven’t already been grabbed back).
The coming New Dark Ages may set Obama’s use of drones in perspective.
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I surely do hope that Trump was lying about getting rid of NATO. I feel safe here in .be at the moment. That could change… I spent much of the '80s waiting for 20,000 Soviet tanks to come rolling through the Fulda Gap. It’d be pretty ironic if that happened and nobody was looking. Is it politically correct to call Putin’s forces the Red Army again?
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As with most truisms, I think that is true to a point, and a cop out past that point.
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Is it OK to say he did a lot of really good things by going around a criminally intransigent congress, and some really bad things, too? Pretty please? /snark
I’m going to assume you’re not being serious. Trump might let Putin get away with a lot*, but invading Poland, Czech, and then Germany (even if they made it that far)? Nuh uh.
*ETA: I do worry about the Baltics though.
It is so impossible to believe that someone would actually care about people being killed that the only fair conclusion is that they are “metaphorically indignant”. It’s just so gosh-darn easy to think that murder is wrong when you aren’t the person who is given the task of choosing whether to murder people or not.
I’m sure they are a quick legal memo away from being used on US soil if the president wanted to. But in general I do think that Americans are safer from drone strikes than the rest of us.
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‘It is so impossible to believe that someone would actually care about people being killed that the only fair conclusion is that they are “metaphorically indignant”’
No, and not what I wrote. But if your point is to reinforce my perception that impotent righteous indignation is the goal… mission accomplished. What’s your answer to the Trolley Problem?
My apologies, I seriously misread the first sentence of your closing paragraph. Still, you are presenting “righteous indignation” as a motivation when “empathy” is an equally probable one. I don’t feel good about feeling bad about people getting killed, I just feel bad about it. But this isn’t about indignation at all. I think it’s pretty transparent why giving the president of the United States (an office, not a person) the power to kill arbitrarily is a terrible mistake from any perspective: legal, moral, consequentialist, whatever; and I think the person who is about to occupy that office is a very good argument to show that.
My answer to the trolley problem is that hypothetical moral problems thought up by philosophers try to box people into making choices outside of the context they would require to make a real moral choice. Real moral choices have uncertainty, and constructing choices without uncertainty isn’t helpful. People who say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette manage to break fantastic numbers of eggs and produce no omelettes.
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if you imagine that is someones goal, that says a ton about who?
if i read that one way, you;re impugning the leaders, but another way it might be the powerless folks who would rather not pay for such behavior in their name and share ineffective (but not meaningless) social medial posts etc…
I think I agree with a lot of your points, I’m maybe not clear on who you’re pointing at and who you aren’t.
ETA: and my own solution to the trolley problem is to educate people to stay off the tracks. I mean, really, what kind of developed world has a nation where people have to face getting run over by trolleys on systems where onlookers have influence on the conducting, remotely!??!? Where is OSHA?!??!?
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So the buried lede appears to be that the drone murder program currently has no controls or oversight.
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Especially as knowing anything beyond the first verse will give you away as an outsider right away.
Only immigrants from the States would think that they are expected to know the words to the anthem.
Obama’s alleged “inability” to close Guantanamo can also be interpreted as an unwillingness to pay the price for the Bush administration’s crimes.
The “price” being - if you abduct people from a foreign country and imprison them without trial, you might have to set them free without trial, even if no other country will take them back. If a president, using his executive powers alone, can order people imprisoned and tortured, then the next president can order them set free on US soil. Obama did not want to pay that price for his predecessor’s crimes, so he did not want to close Guantanamo.
It’s always scary how casually perfectly decent people imply that citizens of other nations have no rights.
Now, spying on other countries (governments, important industries) is tradition, completely destroying the privacy of other countries’ citiizens is new. The power to arbitrarily declare foreign citizens to be an enemy actors and murder them even though they’re not even in a country you’ve declared war with is as evil as the power to murder your own citizens.
In the case of spying, there’s also the problem of governments collaborating: The NSA spies on the world minus the USA, GCHQ spies on the world minus britain, the BND spies on the world minus Germany - and then they exchange information.
Just imagine the same thing for assassinations: (“I’ll kill your enemies if you kill mine”). Also, the world is getting smaller, and many politically active people go abroad to meet with like-minded people from different countries. Will they end up as collateral damage, or will the president just threaten to kill their foreign friends if they refuse to cooperate?
So, not only is the power to assassinate foreign nationals as evil as the power to assassinate your own citizens, it should also be considered to be equally scary.
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I think this is a fair interpretation. I just have a hard time blaming Obama for this when I’m sitting in a nation that voted in a government that steadfastly refused to take our own citizen back (despite the fact that we were obligated to do so under our own and international law). So I don’t disagree with you, I think Obama could have had it closed if that was his top priority and he was willing to pay the price, I just feel that since Canada was adding substantially to that price, I’m living in a glass house on the issue.
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No, no, no.
Not switching from English to French after the first eight bars will give you away as an outsider.
