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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
If we repeal our sanctions whenever the countries they're issued against start holding their own citizens hostage, then countries we issue sanctions against will always do it. Sanctions will become functionally worthless and the world will move one step closer to the old ways of open war.
- The leader of Syria just legalized rape.
- Sanctions are issued against Syria for this terrible crime.
- The leader of Syria just started gassing his own citizens and says that 50 people will die every week until the sanctions are lifted!
- We've repealed all sanctions! Whew! Good thing we put a stop to that, right, guys? Now everyone in Syria can live safely with their rape legalization and nobody has to gas anybody.
This is not a world you want to live in.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
I see. So basically while my idea of exiling the oligarchs' families might punish the oligarchy by virtue of them being Persona Non Grata from any western nation deemed luxurious enough to travel there, but is also likely gives their back the privilege to spend their ill-gotten assets. Is that right?
edited 3rd Jun '18 4:44:34 PM by MorningStar1337
@Morning Star; keep in mind that a lot of Russian nationals in the US are dissidents, effectively exiles.
Besides, the relatives of corrupt Russians still have human rights, tossing that aside is not the solution,
edited 3rd Jun '18 5:22:24 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Apparently I miss read the article on the thing due to bad English, first read through made it seem like the Magnitsky Act was what banned the adoption of Russian Children, not Russia doing it as retaliation, which changes things.
If the ban was on the US Side, it doesn't really mater what the rest of the law is, because that part is bad, it would be to use Tobias Own example "Well we sanctioned Syria, but legalized rape in the progress" it just isnt worth it.
But no, it was on the Russian end, shifting the blame to them
edited 3rd Jun '18 4:51:03 PM by Imca
Punishing their own people. Haven't they done that enough already?
Here's a bit more about why the Magnitsky Act is so important, from Bill Browder himself.
Bill Browder: The original spin out of the Trump camp was that the meeting was about adoptions. It had nothing to do with adoptions; it was exclusively about repealing the Magnitsky Act, which is something very near and dear to my heart.
My second reaction was that it wasn’t unexpected. Vladimir Putin has made it his single largest foreign policy priority to get rid of the Magnitsky Act. It is not a surprise at all given how much money has been spent and how many lobbyists and intermediaries are involved that they somehow found their way to Donald Trump, who at the time was the Republican nominee.
Why is this bill such a priority for Putin?
Putin has amassed an enormous fortune over the 17 years that he’s been at the top of the heap in Russia, and the Magnitsky Act very specifically would target him. We have been able to track down information and evidence that shows that some of the proceeds from the crime—the $230 million fraud that Sergei Magnitsky uncovered, exposed, and was killed over—went to a man named Sergei Roldugin. (For those of you who remember the Panama Papers, he was the famous $2 billion cellist from Russia who got all this largesse from various oligarchs in Russian companies.) Roldugin received some of the money from the Magnitsky crime, and it’s well-known that he is a nominee trustee for Putin. When Putin reacts to the Magnitsky Act with such personal venom, he’s reacting because he feels like the entire purpose in life, which was to steal money from the Russian state and keep it offshore, is at risk. That’s why they’re ready to ruin relations with America over the Magnitsky Act by banning adoptions and doing other things, and that’s why so much money has been spent fighting the act and fighting me, the person behind the campaign to get Magnitsky Act in the United States and around the world.
This $230 million wasn’t stolen from you; it was stolen from Russian taxpayers. Your company was hijacked in order to claim this phony tax refund, so it was actually Russian public funds.
Putin and his cronies were stealing money from the state, as they do in many other instances. A lot of people look at this number and say, Well, $230 million is not even a pimple on the whole corruption proceeds. But this particular pimple was exposed by Magnitsky, and once you start pulling on this string, it leads to other strings. Just for example, the tax office No. 28 in Moscow, which was the tax office that authorized this illegal $230 million tax refund, it was investigated by Novaya Gazeta, which is one of the last remaining independent newspapers in Russia, and Novaya Gazeta found that this tax office had stolen or authorized $1 billion of fraudulent tax refunds. That’s just one little tax office. Imagine all the different scams going on, building the Olympic village, building railroads, building pipelines. It adds up to some seriously, seriously large amounts of money.
You make it sound a little bit like it’s just about Putin himself and whatever resources he’s securing abroad.
Putin is the sort of the big boss, but I would guess that there’s like 10,000 people who surround him that are big recipients of these crimes. I would guess that a trillion dollars has been stolen from the state by Putin and these 10,000 people since he came to power. This is just such an extraordinary amount of money, and it’s so important for them not to have this game called over. Part of the problem with the Magnitsky Act is it does just that. I should point out that it doesn’t just seize the assets in the United States. It puts people’s names on the U.S. Treasury sanctions list. Once your name is on a Treasury sanctions list, you cannot open a bank account anywhere in the world. You can’t open a bank account in Peru; you can’t open one in Dubai. You can’t even open one in China because there’s no bank in the world that wants to be in violation of U.S. Treasury sanctions. You’re effectively a financial pariah from that moment forward, and no international bank, no international company, just about nobody will touch you as a legitimate person to do business with.
If you’d say there are 10,000 people in Russia maybe who’ve been beneficiaries of this enormous act of confiscation and thievery, how many of them are affected by the Magnitsky Act?
Everybody is kind of affected by the Magnitsky Act. At the moment, there’s only 44 people on the Magnitsky list, but nobody knows who’s next. They’ve all got this plan, which is to do terrible things in Russia, and then if ever the Putin regime were to end, they could then travel abroad, live in the houses that they bought, spend the money in the banks that they’ve squirreled away, and live a quiet life. It’s almost like it terrorizes the criminals because nobody knows who’s next.
edited 3rd Jun '18 6:17:22 PM by megaeliz
Rudy Giuliani said to Huff Po that Trump could have shot Comey as an alternative to firing him, and would only have been impeached rather than charged (though he could be freely charged after that). Does POTUS really have that level of legal immunity? Imagine if enough Republicans rejected impeachment after something so blatant (okay, a little less blatant than murder, but still a severe and clear crime)....
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/03/politics/rudy-giuliani-trump-shoot-comey-impeachment/index.html
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: It's less that reality is stranger than fiction and more that reality doesn't conform to any narrative. Fiction has a point. Whether it's to impart an aesop, to make people laugh or cry, to spread propaganda, etc. it has a point. Things happen for a reason in stories.
In real life, that's not the case. As Alan Moore once said, the world is rudderless.
There's a quote from BoJack Horseman that sums it up nicely:
edited 4th Jun '18 12:10:54 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedSo, it seems likely that the real reason Eric Greitens resigned as Governor of Missouri was because of his ties to dark money (political cash from an a concealed source) and the threat that his financial backers might be exposed. After months of fighting tooth and nail and punching back every time something bad was said about him, after swearing to never resign and fight to the end, Greitens resigned mere hours after a judge ruled that he would have to turn over documents regarding his campaign's finances
. This is apparently a longtime problem is Missouri
, where limits on political donations are avoided by giving millions of dollars to PACs, who turn around an give it to another committee and then another until it's impossible to tell where the money came from by the time it reaches a politician or candidate. It's not immediately clear if the investigation into Greitens' dark money will continue now that he resigned.
Iowa
and New Jersey
are among the states having primaries tomorrow, and both are prime targets for Democrats. The links give a run down on some of those races. Pushing out more of California's Republicans is also key for Democrats, although Democrats fear that they've blown their chance to push out Dana Rohrabacher
, AKA Putin's favorite Congressman, and someone who Boehner (IIRC) said was one of the very few people in Congress he could believe was on the payroll of the the Kremlin.
Lastly is a bizarre story from Stanford University, where a right-wing professor was caught conspiring with right-wing students to "dig up dirt" on a left-wing student of his. Said professor and students also conspired in cartoon villain speak about their plans to invite right-wing provacatuers to campus to speak. They viewed such situations as a win-win; if the speakers were protested, they could play up the free speech card and talk about left-wing censorship, if the speakers weren't protested, it gave them a greater chance to proselytize undecided students and reinforce the right-wing groupthink among those already leaning conservative. Full story from Vox
. Remember, there is no such thing as a safe place from American right-wing attacks, and yes, they really do look at this as a war between left and right.
The controversy took place at Stanford University and involves Niall Ferguson, a controversial historian known for his defenses of British colonialism. Ferguson was one of the faculty leaders of Cardinal Conversations, a Stanford program run by the conservative Hoover Institution that aims to bring speakers to the university who would “air contested issues on our campus.” The program’s speaker slate leaned right; recent events featured race-and-IQ theorist Charles Murray, tech mogul Peter Thiel, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent critic of modern feminism.
Ferguson seemed to view Michael Ocon, a left-wing student activist slated to graduate in 2020, as a threat to the program. In an email to two members of the Stanford Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that “some opposition research on Mr. O [Ferguson’s name for Ocon] might also be worthwhile.” Minshull, who works as Ferguson’s research associate, said he’d “get on” the dirt-digging.
Some of the emails had an overtly sinister tone. Rice-Cameron, who is, oddly enough, the son of Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, wrote in one email that “slowly, we will continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure.”
Ferguson wrote in another note, “now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” adding that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
The emails became public in a May 31 story in the Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, seemingly as a result of someone accidentally forwarding them to the wrong person. Given that it’s wildly inappropriate for professors to be snooping on undergraduates in an attempt to intimidate them politically, Ferguson has been forced to resign from his post running the Cardinal Conversations initiative (but he remains a senior fellow at Hoover).
...
Free speech, nominally, shouldn’t be either a right or left issue. A world in which all viewpoints can be respected should, in theory, benefit people from all perspectives.
In practice, many campus conservatives have hijacked the idea. The strategy is to invite someone with a history of making sexist or racist comments, like provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, with the express purpose of outraging campus liberals. When left-wing students protest, the right claims the mantle of defending free speech — when what they’re actually doing is opening the door to overtly offensive discourse.
It’s a kind of power game. The goal isn’t to vindicate the abstract right to free speech but to assert the right’s power and influence over campus discourse — to force the campus mainstream into a choice between allowing vile ideas to spread or looking hostile to free speech.
The Ferguson emails are an unusually clear admission that this is what’s going on. Digging up dirt on a student in an attempt to silence their activism isn’t about “free speech” — it’s about suppressing left-wing speech. The entire framing of the Cardinal Conversations in the emails positions the initiative, which Ferguson ran, as part of a broader war on “the Left” and “SJ Ws.”
In an email sent the day after Charles Murray’s Cardinal Conversation, Rice-Cameron calls “last night’s event” (presumably the Murray appearance) “a clear victory,” as “the event was not disrupted and leftists [sic] agitators were constrained to a small absurd demonstration outside.” Ferguson responded by saying that he agrees “100%” and that the event was a “famous victory.”
It’s not like Stanford is a university where there’s no room for right-leaning students. Hoover is a center-right think tank based at the university with a budget of more than $50 million and an endowment of more than $450 million. There is no left-wing equivalent — a large ideological think tank that closely connected to a university — at any school in the United States.
Yet campus conservatives are treating its events not as a well-established place for airing their views, but as part of a campaign to crush liberal opponents. The very decision to invite people like Murray and Hoff Sommers, who are most famous for making inflammatory claims about race and gender (respectively), suggests that the Cardinal Conversations themselves were designed to court controversy.
Ferguson told me in an emailed statement that he does “regret having written” the emails, and that they were motivated by his concern that “the Cardinal Conversations student steering committee was in danger of being taken over by elements that were fundamentally hostile to free speech.” But the text of the emails and his track record of controversial statements — such as attacking the work of liberal economic giant John Maynard Keynes on grounds that Keynes was gay — suggests that’s only part of the story.
That a professor was involved in such activities is part of a larger picture, btw. A lot of professors and intellectuals who used to enjoy a certain praise and status for "asking the hard, socially awkward questions in the name of science" (like if certain races are just biologically less intelligent) have been peeved about losing that status and privilege as time, science, and attitudes have marched on. Like many general Trump supporters, the threat of losing their status has driven many of these types into the arms of reactionary movements, so much so that it has titles. The tendency is part of what has been dubbed "the intellectual dark web
" and is becoming part of the larger neoreactionary movement that people like Bannon are pushing.
The thinkers profiled included the neuroscientist and prominent atheist writer Sam Harris, the podcaster Dave Rubin, and University of Toronto psychologist and Chaos Dragon maven Jordan Peterson.
The article provoked disbelieving guffaws from critics, who pointed out that cable news talking heads like Ben Shapiro have hardly been purged. Many words could be used to describe Harris, but ”silenced” is not plausibly one of them.
Some assertions in the piece deserved the ridicule. But Weiss accurately captured a genuine perception among the people she is writing about (and, perhaps, for). They do feel isolated and marginalized, and with some justification. However, the reasons are quite different from those suggested by Weiss. She asserts that they have been marginalized because of their willingness to take on all topics and their determination not to “[parrot] what’s politically convenient.”
The truth is rather that dark web intellectuals, like Donald Trump supporters and the online alt-right, have experienced a sharp decline in their relative status over time. This is leading them to frustration and resentment.
...
For decades, contrarianism on questions of race and gender — ranging from opposition to certain feminist projects or to affirmative action, to flirtation with the idea that black culture and even black brains were intrinsically inferior — was part of the intellectual mainstream of the center. Andrew Sullivan published an entire issue of the New Republic devoted to presenting, and debating, Charles Murray’s claim that black people were, on average, less intelligent than white people.
Leon Wieseltier, who ran the New Republic’s book section as an independent barony, sought to exercise a droit du seigneur over female employees, as we learned last year. Slate, famous for its contrarian #slatepitch pieces, published several essays by William Saletan on race and research, which credulously accepted the arguments of J. Philippe Rushton, a race-obsessed researcher linked to the racialist Pioneer Fund and white nationalist New Century Foundation.
Sullivan, Saletan, and others justified themselves by claiming that they were disinterested inquirers pursuing the scientific truth, even if it led them to deeply uncomfortable conclusions. Their enthusiasm for discomfort did not then extend, however, to examining the awkward politics beneath their own contrarianism. As Philip Kitcher, the famous philosopher of science, suggested back in 2001 in Science, Truth, and Democracy, there is an “epistemic bias” in favor of the sorts of arguments these thinkers embraced.
The repeated outbreaks of fascination with the question of whether women and racial minorities are inherently unequal were not quite the product of the disinterested pursuit of the truth, Kitcher argued; otherwise, the same unpleasant questions would not keep appearing in radically different pseudoscientific forms. Instead, the recurrent interest stems from public and elite eagerness to believe that discrimination against women and minorities was justified.
This was reinforced by individual intellectual incentives to cultivate contrarianism for the sake of fame, or, as Kitcher describes it, the “temptation to gain a large audience and to influence public opinion by defending ‘unpopular’ views” — views that, in truth, mirrored widespread societal prejudices.
Not only was it considered acceptable for pundits to speculate about the limitations of other races or women, or to engage with the nastier corners of the intellectual right, but it was often seen as a good thing — a sign that one was tough-minded and decidedly not beholden to 1960s-era leftism. Hence, intellectual centrists prided themselves on their political independence from both sides of the political spectrum but were often more at pains to distinguish themselves from the left than from the right.
Now, this has all changed radically. Centrist liberals still have many political blind spots. But writers who suggest that black people are relatively more likely to be stupid are likely to have a much rougher time of it than in the 1990s or the aughts. The same is true for men who call for women who have had abortions to be hanged by the neck until dead.
These changes explain why Weiss and her arm’s-length comrades in arms feel so embattled. What they all share is not a general commitment to intellectual free exchange but a specific political hostility to “multiculturalism” and all that it entails. In previous decades, their views were close to hegemonic in the intellectual center.
Arthur Schlesinger, for example, feared that multiculturalism might weaken America’s vital center (although he also acknowledged the cultural threat from the right). Structural arguments about the oppression of black people and women didn’t often make it into mainstream publications. Now, the hegemony has been overturned.
The traditional safe spaces for pseudoscientific speculation have been taken over, almost literally. The New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians. Slate has moved away from reflex contrarianism toward a more robust liberalism. And William Saletan, to his genuine credit, has written a serious mea culpa for his previous flirtations with race-IQ theorizing.
Today, contrarianism on race and gender is liable to get fierce pushback in the publications of mainstream liberalism. Intellectual ties to the right can win you toleration if you are David Frum, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks. You may be recognized as a member of a minority that needs to be acknowledged, and as a possibly unreliable ally against Donald Trump Republicanism. However, you are unlikely to enjoy real love or deep acceptance.
In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. But in relative terms, they have far lower status than their intellectual forebears of 20 or even 10 years ago. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. It’s hard for erstwhile hegemons to feel happy about their fall.
edited 4th Jun '18 6:58:47 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Well great, it was a 7-2 vote
. So that basically means any organization (with the possibly exception being Federal and State Governments) can discriminate on the basis of Religion. I know what's going to need to be amended in the very near future.

The story of Sergei Magnitsky is horrific, and I'm sure it's not the only one like it. This is the best way we have to punish them. It also is the ultimate thorn in Putin's side, and the best leverage we have against them.
After these raids I hired Sergei Magnitsky, then a 35-year-old tax lawyer, to investigate. Over the following months he helped us file criminal complaints against the police officers involved in the raids with a different branch of Russian law enforcement and was so brave that he even testified against them. In retaliation, he was arrested by two of the same Interior Ministry officers against whom he had testified.
He was held in custody for 358 days and tortured in an effort to get him to retract his testimony. He never did. When the officials involved finally understood he would never break, they had him chained him to a bed while eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him to death.
There was no plausible deniability to Sergei’s torture and murder. In his 358 days in detention, Sergei had written over 450 complaints documenting what had been done to him. We received copies of these complaints, and together they provided one of the most granular accounts of human rights abuse to come out of Russia in the last 35 years.
Because of all the evidence, I figured the Russian authorities, corrupt as they were, would have to prosecute the people involved. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, the Russian government exonerated everyone, and even gave some of the most complicit promotions and state honors.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/sergei-magnitsky-murder-114878
What the act does, is freeze the assets that are held by Oligarchs in the west, and restricts their ability to travel.
edited 3rd Jun '18 5:10:24 PM by megaeliz