Trump Says Venezuela’s Maduro Captured After Strikes

No, not actually. But the mods do remove political content, so this whole thread will be gone soon.

It doesn’t make him look stupid, it makes him look like a criminal.

Like Reagan. But they’ll find some guy, I don’t know, Bob South, who will take the fall.

If any other country ran what they called a “special military operation” like this in the US, we’d call it an invasion.

Which is just a euphemism for a certain kind of invasion

First US need to lose 220,000+ of military personnel dead there and then you can call it that. Otherwise comparison with Russia is kind a dull.

I think the term is “humanitarian aid”

A Superb Military Operation, some even say it's Super, one of the best military operations they've ever seen!

When did we stop calling them “police actions” when side-stepping Congressional approval?

If you think he cares about Americans? Let alone optics. I've got a bridge to sell you.

> Trump ran on "no more wars". Manufacturing consent means admitting that he's entering a conflict. His more effective play is to pretend it's not happening and attack anyone who criticizes him.

Or, he could acknowledge that their is a conflict, and pretend he didn't start it but Venezuela did. Like he could claim that Venezuela invaded the US first (oh, wait, he actually did that last March, using it as the pretext for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.)

MAGA: It's not really a war if they can't retaliate.

No doubt the regime will come up with a "special military operation" equivalent to avoid calling it what it is.

Protest has never stopped a government from doing what it wanted. Not a single time in history.

When it's appeared to work, that has one of two causes: either the government didn't really care very much to begin with, or it was the other extremely violent group that made the government choose to appear to back the protest group in order to give into the violent group's demands while saving face. (See civil rights)

> Even the ballot box isn't enough. We don't have an anti-war party in the US

This is lazy and wrong. Simple answer is leadership is betting this won't lose them the Congress in the midterms because enough Americans won't care. Conceding ex ante the ballot box is literally proving that hypothesis.

> We don't need to manufacture consent anymore.

You can see it on every popular internet thread

I mean they did it in US media, even used the same wording as they did for the Iraq war.

Most of Manufacturing Consent is about ideological alignment in media and government being an emergent property, not the product of deliberate conspiring. People seek out jobs with people/organizations they already agree with. People hire people they already agree with. People are more likely to get promoted if their boss thinks they have good opinions, etc. It's not a conspiracy, at least there doesn't need to be a conspiracy, because Manufacturing Consent describes an anti-conspiracy. All of this obviously still happens today, there hasn't been any fundamental change in human behavior, people still have special affinity for people they agree with. Always have, and always will.

Chomsky, as a linguist, was probably better equipped to understand the implications of emergent behavior than more mainstream political scientists.

Of course Trump is very much against election fraud in other country unless it's his buddy Putin:

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595299071/president-trump-con...

Presumably also the ones who invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan, carried out extrajudicial executions, droned weddings, deposed Libya's leader and laid ruin to the country, trafficked arms and money to cartels in South America and ISIS / "JV team" terrorist groups to destroy the Levant Or was that "rules based order"?

I think you've been had with the whole "rules based order thing". You can keep winding the clock back and it's the same thing. Iraq 1, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia. When exactly would you say this alleged "rules based order" was great?

It sadly never happened for the perpetrators of the Iraq/Ukraine/Libya/Afghan/Syria/Yugoslav/... wars. Remember Collateral Murder? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Also, no one really cared about all the veterans back home, many of whom suffered and still suffer from PTSD. The U.S. truly is the biggest sh*thole on earth.

> I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague

Simpler: send them to prison at home. There is no world in which the Hague can enforce its law in America without the U.S. government's consent. At that point, skip the extra step and make war crimes actually illegal.

you assume war crimes, but which war crimes?

In general international law is much more lenient than people are willing to believe. e.g. it's legal to kill civilians if you are attacking a military target which is important enough

I think the notion of the comment about westerners is to highlight that as a common person you can believe in rules based order, or you are made to believe in that and live your life by that, however the leaders don't really care about it all that much. They are happy the masses are "ruled" and controlled, but as for their decisions - rules don't always apply.

And in many cases western societies tend to express the idea that inn other, dictatorship countries, people sort of "let the dictators dictate", while "westerners" not.

But I think this current case (and Trump's presidency at large) is an example of how little we can decide or influence. Even in the supposed "democracy".

I wish to believe that voting matters, but Trump showed that you can make people vote for anything if you put massive upfront effort into managing information/missinformation and controlling the minds through populism, etc. Then voting becomes... Powerless. As it has no objective judgement.

And despite possible disagreements some might voice - revolutions don't happen anymore. People can't anymore fight the leaders as leaders hold a monopoly on violence through making sure the army is with them.

Well... We as people lost and losing the means to "control" our leaders. Westerners, easterners - doesn't matter.

To be fair that applies to Maduro to if you count crimes against humanity in general. Certainly applied to Sadam.

So now the question is how to do you capture this leadership without foreign intervention while they are still in power?

Talk is nice... but there is no real mechanism to impose what you are proposing besides this.

On the other hand, in an alternate reality, this could be preventing a North Korea style dictatorship. Or to flip it, had the USA stayed in South Korea and carried on fighting, it might have prevented North Korea and the Kims and saved literally millions of deaths of North Koreans at the hands of their own government.

What do the Venezuelans actually think about this, given that Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?

This is a bit confused-if you send them to the Hague, they can’t be executed-because neither the ICC nor any ad hoc tribunals located in that city have the death penalty. As an abolitionist state, I doubt the Dutch government would ever consent to a capital trial taking place on their territory.

His defenders kept, and keep, using it as an excuse.

The UK, for example, stopped intelligence sharing in the Caribbean so as to not be party to war crimes.

They have the same respect for domestic laws as they do for international ones

MAGA at its core is a rejection of the lower classes having wealth.

matched by the hegsdeth signal chat that the US bombed the houthis on europe's behalf