I can be glad that the Union won the U.S. Civil War and and ended slavery yet still consider it to be war crimes that they deliberately attacked civilians as part of Sherman’s March; no logic had been violated there.

The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran’s policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.

No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.

I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).

I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government’s actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.

Repeating my other reply verbatim yet again as you keep copying and pasting the same exact comment:

First, to be clear, this isn’t so much “press” as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of “rust cultists” and “my rust” I can read in a blog before losing interest.

Repeating my other reply verbatim as you just did the same:

First, to be clear, this isn’t so much “press” as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of “rust cultists” and “my rust” I can read in a blog before losing interest.

First, to be clear, this isn’t so much “press” as a blog entry. Second, there are only so many mentions of “rust cultists” and “my rust” I can read in a blog before losing interest.

Yes, and that is my point: unless you wearing a seat belt somehow made the accident more likely to happen, it really doesn’t seem like manslaughter applies here.

According to this page, you could attempt to argue “lack of causation” if there was no connection between you not wearing a seat belt and your passenger getting killed.