Yeah, the U.S. has been routinely undercutting them. I think it escalated to true bipartisan normalization that we don’t GAF with the Iraq War. And in both Russia and Israel that voice could have been helpful, because it’s too easy to dismiss the U.S. for its (well earned) lack of moral authority.

It does AI autocorrect to text though, which I’m not sure how I feel. It hasn’t ruined anything for me just yet, but they’re starting to try and make it automagical, which is exactly what I needed not to be.

Laws do not need to be moral, logical, rational, or even reasonable

They do to be legitimate, which is what I thought this conversation is about. The flexing of power is many things, but not something that testifies to legal legitimacy in ways that motivate the creation of laws as distinguished from the ordinary structures that arise from blind power in the first place. This is actually something I remember from Philosophy 101, where Socrates talked to the rage filled Thrasymachus who said what’s “right” is the same as “the advantage of the stronger” and the whole point of the conversation is that there was more to it than that.

Or, perhaps more to the point, I recall one of the mini-skits in a play called Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, which had a lion talking about power to a monkey talking about intelligence. The point of the skit is that they were talking past each other, with the lion thinking that drawing a distinction between power and intelligence meant they were missing the lion’s point about power.

This whole comment simply doubles down on might makes right and has nothing to do with legitimacy.

It sounds like for you the signature of legitimacy is not the soundness of legal judgments as developed within consensus and consent and principle based deliberation, but their enforceability with weapons. And so I think we probably have diametrically opposite ideas of what renders laws legitimate.

Aren’t the ICJ, ICC and UNSC institutions of international law? And haven’t they ruled over and over again that the settlements, occupations, blockades, and blocking of humanitarian aid to Palestine have been violations of international law?

Also the obviously reactionary and self-interested history of right wing reaction to FAANG, which largely has been fueled by a backlash to restraints on misinformation, and is riddled with special case exceptions (e.g. Palestine).