NaibofTabr

Common law, right? Even if the resolution doesn’t have a practical impact now, it’s important to set a precedent (hopefully to prevent such things in the future).

This is essentially the crux of the issue. Congress can designate funds in the budget for aid to Israel and they can specify what the funds are for (military equipment, humanitarian aid, loans, etc), but they don’t have the authority to perform the actual transfer of the funds (or material paid for by the funds) to Israel, that falls under the authority of the executive branch. Congress can provide the money but they can’t actually force the spending of the money.

Praise be to the system of checks and balances.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvotes, I think you’ve got it right.

If we’re digging a hole to China, it will be literally through Chile.

And the solution to this is always to raise minimum wage, because skilled labor pay must be higher than unskilled labor pay. If minimum wage goes up, other wages must also go up in order to attract and keep workers in more demanding jobs. Raising minimum wage fixes wages across the board.

Frankly, I am actually at a loss at what else could be done and it’s heartbreaking.

Yeah, I don’t think any of the typical political or economic pressure tactics will have any effect on the Taliban. The only thing that will end the oppression of women in Afghanistan right now is a direct military intervention to remove the Taliban from authority, followed by a sustained presence long enough to substantially change the culture. A new generation would need to be born and grow up with a different value structure that treats women as equals (so like, 50 years minimum). And that means running the country’s public institutions, rewriting its laws, enforcing justice and re-educating/indoctrinating its population, which is morally ambiguous at best.

I don’t think there is enough united global will to support that, and it’s an ethical minefield of one culture imposing its beliefs on another (which has some nasty parallels with the imperialist/colonialist days). There’s no fix that doesnt involve violence that I can see.

Yes

Only if you can demonstrate that subsurface travel is possible given current technology, and therefore reasonable to account for.

If Democrats controlled the House the bill would likely not have passed there in the first place.

In any case it doesn’t matter because the Senate will probably never vote on it, and even if they did and it passed Biden would veto it.

It’s also important to understand that this bill would not add any new arms transfers to Israel, but only compel the completion of existing transfers which the executive branch had chosen to withhold.

Ultimately, the point is that Congress does not have the authority to force the transfer of US military equipment to a foreign power. The disposition of military equipment is the purview of the Department of Defense, and trade with other national governments is the purview of the Department of Foreign Affairs, both of which report to the President.

So in May the (majority Republican) House passed H.R.8369 - Israel Security Assistance Support Act:

This bill specifies that no federal funds may be used to withhold, halt, reverse, or cancel the delivery of defense articles or defense services to Israel. Also, no funds may be used to pay the salary of any Department of Defense (DOD) or Department of State employee who acts to limit defense deliveries to Israel.

This bill attempts to force the completion of arms sales to Israel. This basically amounts to the legislative branch meddling directly with how the executive branch conducts foreign policy and defense policy, which the White House objected to (completely correctly). Biden threatened to veto the act if it were sent to him. The bill was placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar on May 21, 2024, and has not been voted on. It will probably not go anywhere at this point.

The executive branch has already been actively delaying some military equipment transfers to Israel, that’s why the House pushed this act.

Slav is an ethnicity, or at least an ethno-linguistic group, and it’s much broader than just Russia. Russian is just a nationality. Russians (specifically) are not an ethnicity unto themselves. Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and Bulgarians (among many others) all fall into the Slavic group along with Russians.

You can’t be racist against a nationality. Maybe jingoist, but jingoism is typically identified as considering a particular nation to be superior to others, rather than inferior to others.

TIL Russian is a race

Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.

Because TikTok told her thats what the olds were doing.

This is not really true:

While it is true that American-made vehicles, weapons, and other supplies have fallen into the Taliban’s hands, the value of this equipment has been wildly exaggerated as rumors and memes circulated on social media.

In this case, pretty much. The Taliban do not negotiate and do not honor agreements made in negotiations. Oh, they’ll happily sit down at a table with you and tell you anything you want to hear, and accept any concessions you want to give them, but they won’t do what they’ve said. After the US pulled out and the Taliban took over they super promised that they wouldn’t oppress women again:

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s longtime spokesman, emerged from the shadows Tuesday in his first-ever public appearance to address those concerns at a news conference.

He promised the Taliban would honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law, without elaborating.

And of course, we know what they’ve actually done:

the Taliban have issued more than eighty edicts targeting the twenty million women and girls who make up just short of 50 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Women and girls face draconian restrictions in public life, namely, on education, employment, access to the justice system, and activities and travel outside the home.

The Taliban traffic women as slaves, just as they did when they were in power before. They are not going to be convinced to suddenly start respecting women according to western ideals about equality through any sort of political pressure. If you want to stop the Taliban’s oppression of women, the only option is to remove them from power.

No, your post starts with the implication that “the west” is not doing anything about the oppression of women in Afghanistan and doesn’t care:

The only sound you’ll hear from the west […]

To properly address the point you’re trying to make, it’s necessary to address the premise first… to begin at the beginning, as it were. If you can’t justify your premise, then your conclusion doesn’t hold water.

So what is it that you think “the west” is not doing, that it could or should be doing?

I’m not saying it was a good thing, I’m saying it’s what the rest of the world wanted the US to do. After all the accusations of imperialism and global hegemony &etc., the US military finally packed up and left, even though this outcome with the Taliban was fully predictable.

So now what, the US should go back and fix it? Occupy Afghanistan again?

You say that, but the sound the west heard from everybody for a long time was “get out of Afghanistan”.

Now that that’s done, you want what? That we should go back and occupy it again?

Or just fraud

allegedlies