Yeah, the U.S. has been routinely undercutting them. I think it escalated to true bipartisan normalization that we don’t GAF with the Iraq War. And in both Russia and Israel that voice could have been helpful, because it’s too easy to dismiss the U.S. for its (well earned) lack of moral authority.

But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence

Wait, who said anything about twice? I think you’re dead on about the second term, I think it was intentional. Just the first term was the dog that caught the car.

I use Firefox with DuckDuckGo. But I do agree that Google is so pervasive in the browser space that pasting text to the URL bar without further context can be reasonably understood in most instances, as sending data to Google.

Outlook intercepts and disables it because of course it does and instead pastes it with the formatting but with a little drop down box at the end of your text pass address you can click to remove the formatting like you tried to do with you with hotkeys.

I have to use Outlook for work, but never intentionally do so if I choice. Truly amazing. If there’s anything that can be messed up, it will be.

It does AI autocorrect to text though, which I’m not sure how I feel. It hasn’t ruined anything for me just yet, but they’re starting to try and make it automagical, which is exactly what I needed not to be.

I think that credits them with a little bit too much conscious attention. I think they were surprised to even win and kind of bumbled through and were able to retrospect with the look back at that experience and think about what to do once they had a second chance. So I did set up a second term, but I don’t regard that as having been part of a singular intentional plan. Like another commenter in this thread said the dog caught the car in the first term.

Laws do not need to be moral, logical, rational, or even reasonable

They do to be legitimate, which is what I thought this conversation is about. The flexing of power is many things, but not something that testifies to legal legitimacy in ways that motivate the creation of laws as distinguished from the ordinary structures that arise from blind power in the first place. This is actually something I remember from Philosophy 101, where Socrates talked to the rage filled Thrasymachus who said what’s “right” is the same as “the advantage of the stronger” and the whole point of the conversation is that there was more to it than that.

Or, perhaps more to the point, I recall one of the mini-skits in a play called Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, which had a lion talking about power to a monkey talking about intelligence. The point of the skit is that they were talking past each other, with the lion thinking that drawing a distinction between power and intelligence meant they were missing the lion’s point about power.

Thank you for the complement! But I haven’t read anything, and I don’t think being the face that the boot stomps on would make me agree that “laws” enforced in that manner have anything to do with legitimacy. Legitimacy has to do with adherence to principles, consent of the governed.

Something is certainly being enforced in the scenario you have described, but certainly not legitimate laws.

This whole comment simply doubles down on might makes right and has nothing to do with legitimacy.

It sounds like for you the signature of legitimacy is not the soundness of legal judgments as developed within consensus and consent and principle based deliberation, but their enforceability with weapons. And so I think we probably have diametrically opposite ideas of what renders laws legitimate.

but a set of agreements that don’t have the power of law.

Rule of law is about having a culture of respect for law as a legitimate product of democratic institutions. If law is only real to you because it’s “real” in the sense of boots, batons and assault rifles, the ‘power’ you are interested in is not the power of law.

Aren’t the ICJ, ICC and UNSC institutions of international law? And haven’t they ruled over and over again that the settlements, occupations, blockades, and blocking of humanitarian aid to Palestine have been violations of international law?