OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 4:39 pm Also your note on sourcing proves my point: The Wall Street Journal is a big-business paper, right? It should be making Mamadani out to be some raving communist lunatic—hating his guts, calling him dangerous, etc. Instead, it seems to think he has a reasonable plan on real-estate development and is sweetening his stance. The mainstream media fucking loves this guy, for the most part! He makes for great headlines.

OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 4:39 pm Also, the fact checking and standards of reporting in the nonmainstream media (social media, especially) are usually nonexistent or garbage. It's easy enough to read "real" news and draw one's own conclusions from it. Typically, I prefer wire services and (for think pieces) Harper's. I don't have to love the editorial stance or lack of it. Much prefer it to fringe stuff that peddles more in conspiracies, outrage, and clicks. That's how, all those years ago, we got shit like people buying into Breitbart and Limbaugh on the right.

hbiden@onlyfans.com wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 3:46 pm

Lu Zwei wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 1:35 pm you need to stop reading stuff like NYT and WaPo, Politico,, Yahoo, or whichever outlet you think is doing the lords work of advocating for the working class.

nobody reads stuff like those newspapers for their advocacy. that's how echo chambers get started.
just report the facts and i'll decide.
and i'm not saying NYT and WAPO are unbiased in what they choose to cover. i'm saying if you cannot possibly read a newspaper because you're afraid of that, then you will be uninformed.
at the very least, you want to know your enemy.

hbiden@onlyfans.com wrote: Mon Dec 01, 2025 1:32 am

enframed wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 9:22 pm https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/?cst

david french wrote:I had a different issue with the lawmakers’ message, though. While there is certainly some value in assuring service members that members of the House and Senate would support them in the event that they properly defied unlawful orders, the video didn’t provide any clarity. Soldiers already know that they must not obey illegal orders. But the video doesn’t shed light on a separate and equally important question: Which orders are illegal?
...
You can’t fight a war — especially a counterinsurgency like the one we faced in Iraq — if every soldier acts as an independent legal check on every order he or she receives. Individual service members don’t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you’re told.
...
the Court of Military Review said, “The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.”

As Maj. Keith Petty, then an Army judge advocate, explained in an excellent summary of the law in a 2016 piece in Just Security, this is called the “manifestly unlawful” test, and — as Petty described it — the rule means that “the legal duty to disobey is strongest when the superior’s order is unlawful on its face.”

Shooting a prisoner, for example, is unambiguously illegal. Bombing a home that is thought to contain insurgents is not.

When I was in Iraq, though, we were fighting under a clear congressional authorization in a combat environment in which individual airstrikes and other uses of deadly force were routinely subject to legal review.

What if you’re a service member ordered to strike a suspected drug boat off the coast of Venezuela or Colombia, and you know that Congress has not been consulted and has not authorized your mission?

As Petty writes, the answer comes from the Nuremberg Trials — the trials of Nazi leaders after World War II. In the High Command Trial, the court put it well, “Somewhere between the dictator and supreme commander of the military forces of the nation and the common soldier is the boundary between the criminal and the excusable participation in the waging of an aggressive war by an individual engaged in it.”

Affirming this principle, the International Criminal Court has said that the crime of aggression applies to a “person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State.”

This means that when it comes to the decision to initiate hostilities, the responsibility rests with the senior leaders of the nation (in this case, ultimately, with President Trump). At the same time, however, members of the military bear responsibility for how they conduct those operations.

These distinctions make a lot of sense. A military can’t function if individual members get to decide — according to their own legal analyses — if the war they’re fighting is legal. We can’t reasonably share with all members of the military the often highly classified intelligence that presidents and senior leaders review when they issue orders to strike.

Even if the facts are clear, the law is often complex. Do we really expect individual pilots or sailors to know that the statutes Trump is relying on to designate various narcotics gangs as international terrorist organizations do not also contain an authorization to use military force?

Do we expect them to know the differences between these strikes and strikes in other conflicts where Congress didn’t authorize military action? (Such as the Korean War, for example, or President Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Balkan States, or President Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya.)

Do we expect individual pilots and sailors to know when criminal activity rises to the level of a true military threat under international law?

No, we do not. In reality, junior officers and enlisted soldiers are often like the proverbial blind man feeling the elephant. We are given only partial information when we’re ordered to war. Our military couldn’t function if individual members adjudicated these questions themselves based on information gleaned from news reports or from their own incomplete review of the relevant intelligence.

But we do expect our most senior leaders to know these distinctions. And it is quite telling that the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, decided to step down in October, shortly after the administration started targeting suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. Holsey had reportedly raised concerns about the strikes.

It is also telling that the most senior military lawyer in the Southern Command, which is responsible for military operations in South America, apparently disapproved of the strikes but was “ultimately overruled by more senior government officials, including officials at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.”

Trump’s Justice Department has drafted a classified legal memorandum justifying its strikes. As a practical matter, this memo — as Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former senior Justice Department official, explained last month — acts as a “golden shield” from legal prosecution for subordinates who operate within the scope of the legal guidance.

The memo, however, cannot repeal the laws of armed conflict, which are binding on members of the military through the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Presidents have no power to repeal statutes. Pilots and sailors still can’t kill prisoners, for example, or open fire on known civilians when there is no conceivable military justification.

That means if the evidence of their eyes contradicts the intelligence from above (for example, if they see a clear indication that the boat they’re targeting isn’t carrying drugs or they see children on board), there may be an obligation to hold their fire. And even if the command to open fire is binding, no legal opinion can remove the moral discomfort from service members who are under orders to fight in a war that is almost certainly illegal.

Trump has put the military in an impossible situation. He’s making its most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts, and he’s burdening the consciences of soldiers who serve under his command. One of the great moral values of congressional declarations of war is that they provide soldiers with the assurance that the conflict has been debated and that their deployment is a matter of national will.

When the decision rests with the president alone, it puts members of the military in the position of trusting the judgment of a person who may not deserve that trust. I have heard from several anguished members of the active duty military. They feel real moral doubt and are experiencing profound legal confusion.

So here’s the bottom line: No legal opinion can compel any member of the military to commit “manifestly unlawful” acts during a war. But when it comes to the decision to begin an armed conflict, the responsibility doesn’t rest with individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines; it rests with Trump and his most senior military and political advisers — the men and women who ordered them to fight.

Lu Zwei wrote: I am not really proving any of your points. And they would not make him a communist because that would look, for a mainstream paper, really "bad!?" on paper. They know their audience. But they also know their owners, hence the real estate stance. See, it's a fine peddle, not an aggressive one. And he's not really sweetening his stance as I've heard him talk about the need for new housing to be built. It's just the noise around the jihadism has cooled down and now people are "willing" to, first listen, then talk shop with him.

New York Post wrote:Mayor-elect Mamdani reeks of Lenin — but NYC's wise ...
Nov 8, 2025

NYC.gov wrote:What is Affordable Housing? NYC.gov: Affordable housing is not: Public housing, although public housing is a source of affordable housing.

Spectrum News NY1 wrote:What is affordable housing?
The term “affordable” is as fraught as the perpetual struggle to find enough housing for the Big Apple’s residents. It broadly refers to units that were built with some form of government subsidy, and which are limited to households making below certain income thresholds. The city’s public housing is often considered “affordable,” since it receives federal subsidies.

Yet just because a unit is deemed “affordable” doesn’t mean that it will be so for all families."

Lu Zwei wrote: I have two words for you: SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS BEHIND RADICALIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM XYZ

Wood Goblin wrote: A few general notes:

* I was thrilled by Mamdani’s win and would’ve voted for him.

*Some of OE’s skepticism is warranted. Go back several hundred pages on this thread and marvel at all of the excitement for Brandon Johnson, who has been a complete dud. (Lori Lightfoot was absolutely a better mayor—perhaps the best one of my lifetime.)

*But I part ways with OE when it comes to property development. Housing prices (especially for rentals) are incredibly sensitive to supply and demand, and it doesn’t even matter a whole lot what the new supply looks like—luxury, “workforce”/affordable, whatever. If you want to see this in action, take a look at data on housing starts over the last several decades. We’re basically building new housing at the same rate that we were in the 1990s, even though the population has grown. There are major, major trade offs (of course), but cities with high barriers to new, dense construction tend to be a lot less affordable than those with low barriers.

Wood Goblin wrote: Mon Dec 01, 2025 12:27 pm Go back several hundred pages on this thread

Wood Goblin wrote: Mon Dec 01, 2025 12:27 pm and marvel at all of the excitement for Brandon Johnson, who has been a complete dud. (Lori Lightfoot was absolutely a better mayor—perhaps the best one of my lifetime.)

jfv wrote: Mon Dec 01, 2025 2:47 pm
Yep, though still not as bad as Paul Vallas would have been. He might have welcomed ICE.