The United States has used drones to assassinate political opponents overseas all around the world, including, most recently, alleged drug traffickers from Venezuela in the southern Caribbean.We get away with it now because we are a superpower. But what if, as will almost certainly happen someday, the situation is reversed?
A century ago, workingmen often returned to their long-suffering wives to confess that they’d blown their entire paychecks on demon rum. Now that good organic food is so extravagantly expensive — not to mention groceries in general — spending everything on booze seems like the responsible choice.
Republican leaders casually admit they undemocratically wield power by acting illegally and ensuring any court challenges come too late, while deliberately keeping voters in the dark through the collapse of the media and information suppression.
The U.S. Department of Defense has assassinated at least 87 Venezuelan nationals, alleging that they were drug traffickers, by blowing up their vessels on the high seas. In one incident, two out of eleven crew members survived the initial attack. Forty-one minutes later, U.S. forces decided to kill the survivors. The Trump administration claimed that, even though the two men were in the middle of the ocean clinging to debris and not even wearing shirts, they still posed a threat to the United States and its national security interests.
As we’ve seen in other examples of mass disruption, there’s a general assumption by employers who fire workers en masse to replace them with automation that somehow it’ll all work out because someone else will hire the discarded workers. In a consumer-based economy, this is a dangerous assumption.
Trump’s deployment of ICE goons into American cities feels a lot like the lore about the Bermuda Triangle, in which lost planes are searched for by more planes that also get lost, which then prompts another round of planes to look for them.
What if they gave a war and nobody ever heard about it? That’s what the Trump administration is trying to pull off in its military campaign against Venezuela. Trump has made no effort to convince the American people to support regime change. And he’s inventing a fake non-organization, like SPECTRE from the Bond films, to declare as evil terrorists.
Especially on the Internet—but also in the real world of politics—whataboutism has become the standard approach to denigrating a valid argument or criticism. Rather than address the point head-on, people simply accuse the other side of failing to care about something the accuser claims they should have cared about but didn’t. Or, if the other side did care, the accuser just pretends they didn’t in order to prove that they’re hypocrites.
President Trump laid the legal groundwork for war and/or covert action against Venezuela on the basis that the Maduro regime is part of the “Cartel de los Soles.” As the New York Times reports, however, no such organization exists. It’s a derisive term invented by Venezuelan journalists to describe the corrupt generals—those with stars on their uniforms—who traffic drugs.
After decrying each other as enemies of all that is good and decent, Donald Trump and NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani make nice. On the one hand, it’s good to see some civility. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself if—and when—these politicians ever really mean anything they say.
