Comrade, this is peak level cynicism and reserved for the status quo assholes. I hold you in higher regards.OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:13 am But signs are pointing to just another politician making promises he either can't or never intended to keep. Or, more charitably, getting molded by the system.
I will head there immediately, sir.Lu Zwei wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 2:37 am Meant to post something in regards to what my Finnish comrade is trying to draw, but I will post my amp in the small projects thread on other sub instead.
This fight is really lost in the USA.
You're not skeptical of overly charismatic but inexperienced politicians who—in the kind of language usually reserved for televangeleists—tell you exactly what you want to hear? But, when pressed, typically only offer vague ideas of how they might accomplish these things?Lu Zwei wrote:Comrade, this is peak level cynicism and reserved for the status quo assholes. I hold you in higher regards.OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:13 am But signs are pointing to just another politician making promises he either can't or never intended to keep. Or, more charitably, getting molded by the system.
That NYT piece made some valid points. The guy was charming Trump (!?) and they found some common ground over real-estate development in NYC and the cops. And Trump apparently liked the fact that Mamdani flew instead of taking the train. You could even say it looked a little like they bonded over that stuff. Mamdani has been trying to distance himself from it now, but...llllllllllllllllllll wrote: I don’t know, it seems like you spun out and made a few posts over an article.
What developers think Mamdami is going to be good for them? I’ve looked around a couple times now and it seems like the only real estate guys happy about that election are smug chuds in Florida.
I was an Obama-bro excited about his new presidency after eight years of George Bush, two wars, and a financial crisis, yes. I was also radicalized against liberals by the end of his first term. I should stop voting for them actually.
What Mamdani is endorsing means the developers now don't even have the pesky City Council (who, way more than the mayor's office and developers, tend to be more focused on their community's needs) standing in the way. It's a system that gives more power to the mayor and developers, and less to the City Council and community groups.New York Times wrote: Mr. Trump said he was surprised to learn that Mr. Mamdani wanted more buildings to be developed in New York. “If I read the newspapers and the stories, I don’t hear that,” he said.
WSJ wrote: New York City housing developers were downbeat Tuesday after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani became their next mayor. But election night also delivered the industry a major victory with the passage of three ballot measures that should ease city approval for new developments.
Voters approved a measure that would make it much harder for a single city-council member to block new housing projects. That process has caused many housing developments to be long delayed or even shut down.
New York voters also passed two proposals to speed up the approval process for affordable housing and modest projects. These measures streamline the public review period and, in some cases, bypass the City Council’s vote....
For real-estate executives, the new measures take some of the sting out of Mamdani’s mayoral win. They opposed his plans to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy, and to freeze rents on the city’s rent-stabilized apartments. Developers say that would discourage any new investment or spending on maintaining existing units.
“I disagree with Assemblymember Mamdani’s approach to growth and housing economics,” said Jared Epstein, president of real-estate investment and development firm Aurora Capital Associates. But the pro-housing measures, he added, could provide “guardrails that keep much of the affordable pipeline moving.”
Mamdani didn’t initially endorse these ballot measures but said on Tuesday that he voted for each of them.
Some of his campaign proposals would complement the changes and boost their impact, like his plan to open up more city-owned land for housing...
The most contentious of the three measures will remove a City Council member’s ability to single-handedly block a new housing project in their district, an unofficial practice called “member deference.”
So we're doing a prey on scammers comparisons now!?OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 12:43 pm You're not skeptical of overly charismatic but inexperienced politicians who—in the kind of language usually reserved for televangeleists—tell you exactly what you want to hear? But, when pressed, typically only offer vague ideas of how they might accomplish these things?
nobody reads stuff like those newspapers for their advocacy. that's how echo chambers get started.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.
"Prey on scammers?" Not sure what you mean. Seems like he's just a politician acting and talking like a politician.Lu Zwei wrote:So we're doing a prey on scammers comparisons now!?OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sun Nov 30, 2025 12:43 pm You're not skeptical of overly charismatic but inexperienced politicians who—in the kind of language usually reserved for televangeleists—tell you exactly what you want to hear? But, when pressed, typically only offer vague ideas of how they might accomplish these things?
I have no idea how this nation got so broken that anything having a relation to improving quality of life is considered a scamming operation on the naive voters...
I live in Zagreb. We have free childcare. Also, our schools and books are free. We live in a single payer HC system. Zagreb is in Croatia. We are probably in the lower part of the per capita what ever P in which way you track a wealth of the nation.
Your way of thinking is hella broken and 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.
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.
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