DeSantis: Whoopsie

[TurkeysGhost]

Do you mean to say that the Florida cops were not permitted to violently harass and break up rallies like BLM before this legislation?

If "No" then BLM protesters should have been arrested for looting already. Has that happened?

If "Yes" then this legislation is somehow a license for Florida cops to be more aggressive. And yet the only offenders it is snaring are right-wing nutcases, not BLM.

So where is this mythical BLM arsonist? Anyone?

I'm not sure I follow you.

Cops were absolutely being unrestrained goons to BLM protests before the law passed, brutalizing and arresting protestors with reckless abandon.

Now this brutality will be worse. Cops have all the incentive to mass arrest nonviolent protestors because they know these draconian laws will turn a petty arrest into an extended jail stay.

 

[Ziggurat]

There's been a blockade for decades that has been a painful thorn in the side for the entire country.

No, there is no blockade on Cuba. The US has a trade embargo for Cuba, but it is not a blockade. A blockade is something else. Calling our embargo a blockade is a lie, and is part of the communist regime's propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

 

[Stacyhs]

Then, no worries, right?

If so, then why did DeSantis and his fellow GOP legislators feel the need to create such a law immediately after the BLM protests of last year? Coinky-dink, right?

 

[Norman Alexander]

I'm not sure I follow you.

Cops were absolutely being unrestrained goons to BLM protests before the law passed, brutalizing and arresting protestors with reckless abandon.

Now this brutality will be worse. Cops have all the incentive to mass arrest nonviolent protestors because they know these draconian laws will turn a petty arrest into an extended jail stay.

But they had those powers before. So why the need to open an already open door?

Even so, I'm enjoying the fact that the only people caught so far by these GOP crackdown laws are their own kind. Although I am betting that when the next one happens, the cops will try to find some innocent dark-skinned passerby and charge them instead.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

No, there is no blockade on Cuba. The US has a trade embargo for Cuba, but it is not a blockade. A blockade is something else. Calling our embargo a blockade is a lie, and is part of the communist regime's propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

blockade
noun: blockade; plural noun: blockades

an act or means of sealing off a place to prevent goods or people from entering or leaving.​

Economic sanctions

...may include various forms of trade barriers, tariffs, and restrictions on financial transactions. An embargo is similar, but usually implies a more severe sanction, often with a direct no-fly zone or naval blockade...

Embargoes are considered strong diplomatic measures imposed in an effort, by the imposing country, to elicit a given national-interest result from the country on which it is imposed. Embargoes are generally considered legal barriers to trade, not to be confused with blockades, which are often considered to be acts of war

United States embargo against Cuba

In Cuba, the embargo is called el bloqueo (the blockade), despite there being no naval blockade of the country by the United States since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

History

After the Castro socialist government came to power on January 1, 1959, relations were initially friendly between Castro and the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration but became strained after the Agricultural Reform confiscated land owned by many American businesses and Cuba continued to sponsor revolutionary movements in other parts of the Caribbean. By March 1960 the US government began making plans to help overthrow the Castro administration...

After the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, which had been largely planned under the Eisenhower administration, but which Kennedy had been informed of and approved during the months preceding his presidency and in his first few months as president, the Cuban government declared that it now considered itself Marxist and socialist, and aligned with the Soviet Union. On September 4, 1961, partly in response, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act, a Cold War Act (among many other measures) which prohibited aid to Cuba and authorized the President to impose a complete trade embargo against Cuba.

Naval blockade, invasion, a "staggering number" of assassination plots, a complete trade embargo and prohibition of travel to Cuba, but calling our embargo 'the blockade' is a commie lie! - because we never officially declared war on Cuba.

Using semantics to imply that our embargo is nothing like a blockade is disingenuous, and is part of the Cuban separatists' propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

 

[RolandRat]

blockade
noun: blockade; plural noun: blockades

an act or means of sealing off a place to prevent goods or people from entering or leaving.​

Economic sanctions


United States embargo against Cuba

Naval blockade, invasion, a "staggering number" of assassination plots, a complete trade embargo and prohibition of travel to Cuba, but calling our embargo 'the blockade' is a commie lie! - because we never officially declared war on Cuba.

Using semantics to imply that our embargo is nothing like a blockade is disingenuous, and is part of the Cuban separatists' propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

I think "an act or means of sealing off a place" is an important qualifier here. Has the US actually done this?

 

[Norman Alexander]

I think "an act or means of sealing off a place" is an important qualify here. Has the US actually done this?

Given how easily US citizens can get to Cuba, I think the US action can be summarised as "We're not talking to them! Pffft!"

 

[RolandRat]

Given how easily US citizens can get to Cuba, I think the US action can be summarised as "We're not talking to them! Pffft!"

It seems the US does actually trade with Cuba too.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2390.html#2020

 

[TurkeysGhost]

But they had those powers before. So why the need to open an already open door?

Even so, I'm enjoying the fact that the only people caught so far by these GOP crackdown laws are their own kind. Although I am betting that when the next one happens, the cops will try to find some innocent dark-skinned passerby and charge them instead.

I'm not sure what we're in disagreement about here.

Cops were mass arresting and brutalizing BLM protestors before this law passed, and will continue to do so after now that the law has passed at the first opportunity. This won't change police behavior, but it will make the experience more punitive for the targets of petty arrest during political demonstration.

 

[Ziggurat]

Using semantics to imply that our embargo is nothing like a blockade is disingenuous, and is part of the Cuban separatists' propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

It ISN’T anything like an actual blockade. We did an actual blockade during the Cuban missile crisis, but we aren’t doing one now. Plenty of trade happens between Cuba and other countries, and we aren’t stopping it. That isn’t a semantic difference at all.

 

[Ziggurat]

Given how easily US citizens can get to Cuba, I think the US action can be summarised as "We're not talking to them! Pffft!"

And whether or not any of that is helping is certainly a fair question. It’s definitely the opposite approach than we took with China.

But on the other hand, our China policy was an abject failure in terms of getting them to liberalize.

 

[Ziggurat]

I think "an act or means of sealing off a place" is an important qualifier here. Has the US actually done this?

We did during the Cuban missile crisis. That was an actual blockade.

We aren’t doing anything like that now.

 

[trustbutverify]

blockade
noun: blockade; plural noun: blockades

an act or means of sealing off a place to prevent goods or people from entering or leaving.​

Economic sanctions


United States embargo against Cuba

Naval blockade, invasion, a "staggering number" of assassination plots, a complete trade embargo and prohibition of travel to Cuba, but calling our embargo 'the blockade' is a commie lie! - because we never officially declared war on Cuba.

Using semantics to imply that our embargo is nothing like a blockade is disingenuous, and is part of the Cuban separatists' propaganda efforts. Don't be a part of that effort.

Outside of the missile crisis, there has been no US blockade of Cuba, nor anything resembling it.

 

[Parsman]

Back to De Santis, does this law remind anyone else of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons?

 

[Segnosaur]

And whether or not any of that is helping is certainly a fair question. It’s definitely the opposite approach than we took with China.

But on the other hand, our China policy was an abject failure in terms of getting them to liberalize.

Maybe, maybe not.

I am not saying China is any sort of freedom-loving democracy. It is a dictatorship with widespread human rights abuses. But even among dictatorships, you can have different levels of abuse. China may be bad, but (for example) North Korea is worse.

Without a way to go back and re-run history, it is hard to know what China would have been like had the U.S. not opened up trade and diplomatic relations. Maybe they would have ended up in the same sort of situation they are in now (a relatively stable dictatorship, with some market reforms), maybe they would have collapsed like the Soviet Union, or maybe they might have become worse than they are now, with repeats of things like Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.

Every situation needs to be considered in context, and what works in one situation may not work in another.

 

[Ziggurat]

Maybe, maybe not.

I am not saying China is any sort of freedom-loving democracy. It is a dictatorship with widespread human rights abuses. But even among dictatorships, you can have different levels of abuse. China may be bad, but (for example) North Korea is worse.

It doesn't have to be the worst of the worst for our policy to have failed.

And it wasn't an unreasonable thing to try. But even in the absence of knowing how alternatives would have played out, we can still say with certainty that what we tried hasn't succeeded. There's no maybe about that. We had a goal for that policy, we did not achieve that goal. That's unambiguously a failure of that policy to achieve that goal. What to do as an alternative is an open question, but we cannot expect continued open trade relations to produce in the future what decades of it in the past have failed to do.