But let's not pretend that Silk Road is some panacea saying "Hey, violence-free drugs!"
I tend to be on the legalization side of the spectrum but the notion of Silk Road as some humanity-improving place, versus a method of making Ross rich is definitely in need of citation.
Not only am I not a court of law, but I specifically said that it's up to a court to make a decision of legal guilt here.
In the mean time, yes: the government is allowed to halt activities that it believes are part of an active criminal scheme. Every country with a functioning legal system proscribes this, and establishes a broad swath of controls to ensure that the government can't indefinitely tie up resources.
FWIW, the money sanctioned under OFAC is still that of the owner so there is a process in place that has a semblance of the rules of law. However, getting that money released by the bank is nothing short of a herculean effort based on cases I have seen over the years.
That’s a big ask. How disproportionate do you think the US response would be to people launching rockets into our country? My guess is that we would kill the majority of them. I don’t think it’s fair to ask Israel to sit on their hands while they are attacked.
If Native Americans being put into reservations against their will, being evicted from their homes, being treated as second class people, were launching rockets at US civilians, the US would retaliate, sure. But both parties would be in the wrong, same as Israel/Palestine.
> Just stop landgrabbing and/or killing each other jeez.
Both sides think the land belongs to them as both sides inhabited the same land for hundreds* of years. Which side is doing the grabbing then turns into a judgement call.
* - Going by Wikipedia, Muslims Arabs since ~600CE and some form of Israelis since ~1200BCE.
Both sides inhabited the land for hundreds of years is a nice principle.
The reality is that before the EXPLICITLY colonialist movement of Zionism, there was a small Jewish community there. A small amount of people compared to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.
The waste majority of current population has immigrated from Europe and the Soviet Union.
And of course because the Zionists know that they enacted a law that states that basically everybody who is even vaguely Jewish is free to live there and a lot of them are then settled in the West Bank.
At the same time the countless Muslims who actually lived there, in 1948 and their kids have no rights to return at all.
So according to the current Israeli law, a person who has hasn't grown up Jewish but has Jewish grand parent has a right to live their, but the children of the people displaced in 1948 don't.
Can you show some data on that? Because a huge amount of the people there are from Western and Central Europe or the former Soviet Union. Those people might have some traces ethnically with people who were still there, but they lived away from there for almost 2000 years.
The best example are the Mizrahi, who never left Palestine.
The Israelites go back to the Bronze Age. They are from a couple of Semitic cities in the Canaanite levant. The same group that spawned phonecians and a bunch of other Mediterranean peoples who colonized much of northern africa and Southern Europe in addition to Anatolia
Then are you saying that if Israel displaces all of the currently present Palestinians and then holds on to the land for 1400-2000 years, they become the rightful owners of that land?
Yes. If in 4000 a bunch of Palestinians show up that used to live in China and start murdering and oppressing people because of what happened to their ancestors I would be against it.
Specially when essentially all of these Palestinians that lived in China had no intention or interest in ever going back to Palestine.
And then one day a dude shows up, and says, "Hey one could argue based on some not very historical evidence that X place is our homeland, so lets just go there and steal that land".
Just as if a bunch of British people had colonized East Africa with the idea of reconquering their homeland.
The NYT is… not great in its European coverage. Often pushing a narrative along the lines of “look how much it sucks compared to here”. I don’t follow CNN or Fox News, and definitely not the White House’s press releases.
If you want decent coverage in English, the BBC and the Guardian are better, though not without blind spots.
The NYT has a pretty strong anti-EU bias. I suspect it has a lot to do with American interests and the ownership of the paper. Just about every article about EU affairs has a very negative and skeptical stance. They REALLY hate the EU certification of PDO for food labeling, which in itself I think is a big clue about who’s interests it represents.
>Often pushing a narrative along the lines of “look how much it sucks compared to here”.
Which seems nonsensical considering their readership is strongly correlated with the subset of Americans who think we should do things like Western Europe. I'm sure they have metrics and have A/B tested it but still, seems weird...
> Which seems nonsensical considering their readership is strongly correlated with the subset of Americans who think we should do things like Western Europe.
In a somewhat myopic way. Social security is great, but laïcité is bad. Scandinavians can do nothing bad, but the rest of Europe is a big mess. Free speech (as it is seen in the US) is a fundamental right, but not for those who criticise organised religion (like those European blasphemers).
Reports of anything in places like Germany, France, Spain, or Italy is always ambivalent.
From my experience this reflects the majority point of view in American liberals.
These people are just sad man, something lacking in their lives whether it's power sex love or money they are lacking in it and the left just scoops them up into their crusade preying into their shit.
Just go into the frigging villages and arrest the cartel leaders oh wait they are in cohort with the governments of those countries...