UK’s F-35 exports more important than stopping genocide, lawyers to argue

4 comments

1. They’re right. If you sell people weapons that require shit tons of maintenance and then try to hold that maintenance hostage for political reasons, you won’t sell many more weapons.

   Which is great, right? Less weapons! Except now all your weapons are more expensive and none of that money is flowing back into your own industry anymore.

   The time to be squeamish is when you sell the F35’s, not when people use them.

2. I almost feel bad for any lawyer that has to stand in front of a court and say out loud that Kier Starmer’s government gets to choose which laws would be too inconvenient to follow.

3. The entire premise is flawed and the headline misleading. If you sell weapons you’re obligated to your voter base and your global customer base to deliver them. You’re free not to sell weapons.

   That’s perfectly viable and incredibly respectable.

   Simply ending your production because competents might end up in the hands of one of three dozen customers is too little too late and completely asinine.

   Because that’s what it’d take. They’d have to shot down all the plants completely.

   Why’d these activists not protest the arms dealing when the factories were built?

   Did they think they were making collectables?

   Cope.

4. In the Netherlands, the court ruled that it could not export F-35 components to Israel. Small issue, the Netherlands exports to a pooled set of components that is later distributed to different countries, which makes it impossible to ban exports to Israel, as it is not the Netherlands that determines the destination of the pool.

   Net result? The Netherlands continues to export F-35 components to Israel despite a court ruling.

   The activists who initially won this case basically demand in the Supreme Court for the Netherlands to make special arrangements with the US to avoid Dutch components to be sent to Israel, as the US determines this. However, chances of Trump agreeing to that is effectively zero.

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