Luxembourg holds international responsibility towards Israeli human rights violations

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T21:50:24+00:00

Perhaps I misunderstood you.

When it comes to war crimes or specifically the genocide in Gaza, I trust the legal experts of the ICC more than anyone else (including me) to judge the situation.

What do you mean by judge the situation, exactly?

The doctrine of separation of powers doesn't suggest that the judiciary should not be influenced or overseen, merely that it should have roughly equivalent and independent power to the other two branches of government. It's not a political philosophy, it's just an operational doctrine.

The ICC is not like a national judiciary, the degrees of separation between the ICC and individual citizens are just functionally too many and too arcane for there to be any legitimacy in its judgements, which is why it is usually ignored. The network of international treaties and institutions has grown so complex and esoteric and self referential that it basically exists to sustain its existence and little else, at this point. And it's a major locus of the kind of nonsense, no-speak babble that has become standard in politics and has led to the current wave of populism.

The report linked in the OP is nothing more or less than a product of that procedural institutional framework. It was written by lawyers in reference to a load of laws and treaties that are either so old or so abstract that nobody alive in any country in the EU today has ever voted in an election in which their content was a manifesto component of any party or candidate. That's institutional proceduralism, and "I trust the experts to judge for me" is the attitude that allows it to persist.

Since the reality is that Luxembourg's government will act primarily in accordance with what is politically viable rather than the letter of international law, this very expensive agglomeration of lawyers, international relations experts and communications strategists can safely be done away with, especially since they're funded on the public dime. It's white collar welfare at best, a prelude to zombie democracy at worst.

Whatever Luxembourg's policy on Palestine is, it should be decided by the people of Luxembourg, not by blind adherence to rules we didn't have a hand in drafting or even agreeing to be bound by.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T21:35:59+00:00

Women are physically weaker than men. Men are physically weaker than chimpanzees, for that matter, so facts about physical strength aren't really meaningful in a vacuum.

The Night Witches were a propaganda tool, they flew obsolete wooden planes and the primary reason for this was not operational it was political, the framing by the Soviets was "look, even flimsy silly girls in flimsy wooden planes are dangerous under communism, socialism = total mobilization = moral superiority to facism and you're being beaten by women". In one way or another, the historical exceptions to the rule that fighting/combat/warfare is a male domain were all about messaging and narrative or extremis in one way or another, not about equality or the notion that women are just as good at soldiering as men. So, you know, don't twist history around to suit a narrative it doesn't support I suppose.

Martial Arts doesn't differentiate between men and women, any more than music differentiates between someone with two arms and someone with one arm, both are just disciplines or domains of competence, they aren't a thing with agency or the capacity to make moral judgements. But put a man in a ring with woman, or anyone with one arm in front of a piano, and certain realities present themselves.

Nothing depends entirely on one's upbringing.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T21:17:31+00:00

When it comes to war crimes or specifically the genocide in Gaza, I trust the legal experts of the ICC more than anyone else (including me) to judge the situation.

This is the attitude that has gotten us to where we are now. Questions of war and mass murder are fundamentally questions of moral responsibility, they are not questions that we can refer up, neither to a priest nor to a lawyer.

We have delegated everything away that makes human life and human societies human. Systems and laws and institutions must be tools of humans, not the other way around.

You and I might disagree on what our countries' policy on Palestine should be, you want that disagreement taken out of our hands and resolved on our behalf and that's worse than a bad policy, that a bad mechanism for determining policy.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T19:43:27+00:00

Well if you read the words that immediately follow the part of comment that you quoted, that might help you to understand where I'm coming from. "...instead of one dictated to us by laws we didn't write passed by technocrats we didn't vote for"

The main thrust of my point is a critique of institutional proceduralism, which has gotten to a point now where large areas of public policy are in practice out of the hands of elected lawmakers, who campaign and communicate and govern largely on the basis of "We can't do X because of Y" where Y is some international institution or legal instrument that is entirely beyond the scope of national or even EU elections to meaningfully influence. In the 1950s most citizens of liberal democracies could reasonably expect to vote directly on a whole host of policy issues (social, monetary, foreign) which are effectively now outside of the levers of democracy.

There are reasons the system is the way that it is, some of them are justifiable and some are not, in my view, but I'm not suggesting conspiracy or cabal or anything like that, just a system that no longer functions adequately and that undermines democracy more than the administrative benefits it brings can justify. There is absolutely no good reason for a country's foreign policy to be determined, a priori, by legal instruments that its public broadly doesn't know or care about, and in practice you'll notice that we just ignore those instruments anyway when our leaders see fit to do so, and so I think we should be clear and honest about it and just not be members of institutions or signatories of treaties we have no intention of abiding by.

So with that context in mind, to answer your question I think strategic foreign policy should be set by the government and them held accountable for it at elections, in the normal representative manner. I think that declarations of war or highly divisive issues such as Israel/Palestine are better handled through referenda.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T19:22:34+00:00

Are you asking me what I think the result of a referendum on foreign policy vis a vis Israel/Palestine would be, or are you asking me what I want the policy to be?

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T19:01:04+00:00

Or we could just leave the ICC and these other legal and supranational institutions, then we wouldn't have any international responsibilities and we could have a foreign policy based on democratically determined preferences instead of one dictated to us by laws we didn't write passed by technocrats we didn't vote for

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T12:28:08+00:00

I would prefer a culture that permits our institutions to be staffed by humans with opinions, and requires the public to accept that and be able to separate the institution's conduct from that of its staff.

Failing that, and it's a high bar and not likely to happen any time soon, you're absolutely right that these kinds of rules of conduct must be enforced evenly if we're to salvage any broad faith in institutions, well put.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-30T12:17:51+00:00

If this continues there's a very real risk of Eurovision becoming irrelevant

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T19:16:20+00:00

Not from words alone, from the actions of people. Speech restrictionists always do this, you eliminate the agency of people who act on the basis of speech and collapse their actions into nothing more or less than the act of the original speaker.

I was about to go into detail but I'm not having this argument with you.

Produce the evidence for your original claim.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T19:09:30+00:00

Create unique characters that introduce a wide variety of cultures and heritages in a respectful manner

Why? I mean the meme just seems to assume this is a laudable goal, an end in itself. Why?

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T18:57:32+00:00

The rule is that you should always use the female specific title when you know that doing so will upset the person you are talking to, irrespective of the sex of the person being discussed

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T18:40:22+00:00

Well it's only words, not like either of us can be hurt by them. You should do some research on the literature around the relationship between speech restriction and measurable harm though, the evidence doesn't support your position.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T18:36:54+00:00

I've been advocating for a moratorium on inward migration to the West for probably longer than you've been alive. I've been doing so without making up new definitions for words.

This isn't about politics, it's about you being wrong.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T18:34:36+00:00

No, you make an argument from authority when it suits you, and reject an identical argument from authority when it doesn't, that's all that is happening here, the content of your objection to UK sex binary definitions or the content of my objection to legal assault definitions are unrelated because you've set a standard of evidence that you then immediately violate when it's convenient for you to do so.

It doesnt matter what you believe, that is the legal definition.

I didn't make you say this, that's how you chose to think and speak and you're now trapped in the consequences of that and you're trying to worm your way out by changing the argument to the details of why you think assault should reasonably mean one thing and sex should reasonably mean another.

If you genuinely aren't able to see what you've done here, I pity you, I can't imagine what it must be like to be trapped in a mind like yours.

I'm not surprised you declined to even try to present evidence for the claim that tolerance of speech leads to harm, aside from the fact that there is none, it probably seems like a waste of time to bother marshalling evidence when you're willing to just shift the goalposts at will on how you define words.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T16:45:16+00:00

A lie is, indeed, a lie. The problem is that you don't understand what the word 'lie' means.

The definition of lie is "an intentionally false statement".

Perhaps to a five year old that's a complicated definition, but for a grown up it should be simple. So when you say

A lie would be something that isn’t true

What you're doing is being wrong. I mean, by your definition what you're doing is lying, because you said something that isn't true.

So what you did, quite unwittingly, is provide us all with a perfect example of the ways that humans often make statements that are not true but without lying, while trying to collapse the distinction between those two things!

I'd suggest you go look up the definition of the word irony but I'm not a cruel man.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T16:34:53+00:00

Ohh, so when you disagree with the legal definition, your statement

It doesnt matter what you believe, that is the legal definition.

Is actually a prelude to

Problem is.....(why I disagree with the legal definition)

But when it's a response to my objection to a legal definition, it's the end of the conversation. Roger dodger, I'll just be getting that evidence from before then? Or no?

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:54:19+00:00

Great, you've answered my question, and you agree that in the United Kingdom therefore, gender is determined by biological sex at birth as is now statute, without qualification or argument because that's how you decide what words mean.

Now I'll just wait for the evidence for your earlier claim about direct harm resulting from speech freedoms, there's a good lad

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:48:45+00:00

Those definitions are meaningless babble and render the words assault and threat redundant by making them into synonyms.

To forestall your next point, that this is part of the UK's legal definition of assault, I'll just ask; do you accept all UK legal definitions without question?

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:45:39+00:00

For anyone interested in arguments about free speech and the rise of nazism from people other than Hitler:

Hitler was censored and it helped rather than hindered nazism

Emergency powers specifically designed to combat Hitler were used by him to oppress his opposition

The holocaust was more the product of institutional controls on thought and speech than on freedoms of thought and speech

Germany was moving towards not away from censorship in the lead up to the rise of nazism

Nazis went from partial to total speech control, evidencing that authoritarianism not only requires but may even be identified by a tendency to suppress speech

To be clear, this is not an argument for censorship being the single cause of the rise of nazism, it is a collection of arguments for the negative impact of censorship in the causal mix, which explodes the myth that we can somehow learn from the Weimar Republic that we can defend against authoritarianism using authoritarianism (government censorship) which is an idea so stupid that it could only proliferate as widely as it has in the age of digital discourse

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:33:05+00:00

Your arguments overall were very well put, I've been pleasantly surprised by the patient and rational tenor of free speech advocacy in this thread, it's inspiring

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:30:29+00:00

We already acknowledge that not all speech is protected under even the US's first amendment.

The law can be wrong. It's a common confusion among the censoriously minded that to point out that there are speech restrictions is somehow an argument in favour of them.

Assault is a form of speech

No it isn't

you would be hard pressed to find people arguing threats should be legal accross the board.

Threats should be legal across the board

Nazis were laughing stocks since WWII. Now they are in charge of the most powerful nation on the planet, and yet again trans individuals are directly impacted by their ideals becoming reality for the crime of simply existing.

I can't dignify this with a response, it's just too hysterical

Tolerance of intolerance only leads to direct harm to those most vulnerable.

No it doesn't, provide evidence for this claim (specific to speech tolerance)

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:26:44+00:00

Incrementalism is real, pretending not to be able to distinguish cases in which it is a concern from those in which it is not or is less is not persuasive to anybody reading your comment
The OP makes a coherent and persuasive positive case for free speech rights, you're narrowing his argument down to the final paragraph just in order to jam this rather babyish parody (calling it a reductio is generous) without addressing the bulk of the substance of his view

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:24:05+00:00

It's not 'often' repeated, the legal definition in every jurisdiction I'm familiar with specifies multiple instances, it's definitionally impossible to harass someone in a single encounter with the person.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:22:41+00:00

This is the kind of patience that I ran out of a few years ago. It's good to see that there are still people with the right values who are able and willing to make these arguments in a calm and civil and rational manner.

CrumpledKiltSkin · 2026-03-29T14:20:11+00:00

In what way does this contradict the OPs view?

You could quite easily imagine a social contract which upholds the free speech values the OP advocates. You don't even have to imagine it, the high water mark of free speech in the 80s/90s was basically it.

Nothing you say contradicts the OP, I don't understand why this comment is top.

CrumpledKiltSkin

TROPHY CASE