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Florida is planning to end all vaccination requirements in the state, including requirements for school children to get routine childhood vaccinations that protect them and their communities from severe and life-threatening diseases, such as Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), pertussis (whooping cough), diphtheria, measles, tetanus, RSV, and polio.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made the announcement at a press conference on Wednesday alongside Governor Ron DeSantis.
"What I'm most excited about is an announcement that we're making now, which is that the Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law—all of them, all of them, all of them, every last one of them," Ladapo said. "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery."
Ladapo, who has a history of being anti-vaccine and spreading misinformation, went on to argue against the public aspect of public health, saying that there is "no ethical basis" for requiring vaccination to, in part, protect the most vulnerable from infectious diseases. That vulnerable people, such as newborns and the immunocompromised, may be unnecessarily exposed to vaccine-preventable, life-threatening diseases is just "part of the experience of life," Ladapo claimed. He also called mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives at the height of the pandemic, "poison."
Combined with the weak immune systems of its heavily aging and obese population, this is going to cause a whole lot of dying from shit we thought we didn't have to deal with anymore.
Epiphyte City
reply
On Sept. 2nd, the Trump administration announced what it described as a “lethal strike” against an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean. In a post on social media accompanied with a video of the strike, President Donald Trump stated that the attack was “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Trump also noted that Tren de Aragua had previously been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The social media post also asserted that the strike had occurred in international waters and killed “11 terrorists.”
Although the facts are still emerging, the Trump administration’s extraordinary lethal attack on this purported smuggling vessel – and its vow that the strike was a start of a campaign – raise a number of significant potential legal issues. And even apart from these legal concerns, the strike constitutes a deeply troubling gratuitous use of the military that resulted in the unnecessary killing of 11 individuals.
Background
President Trump had reportedly flirted with the idea of using military force against drug trafficking organizations during his first term. Early in his second term, his administration began to cast drug trafficking organizations as terrorists and hinted at possibly using targeted killing tools developed over the last few decades in the counter-terrorism context. In February, the State Department for the first time designated eight drug trafficking organizations, including Tren de Aragua, as FTO). To be clear, this step does not by itself provide authority for the use of force. In the past, however, it has paved the way to military action, including the strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Certainly, the rhetoric from key figures close to Trump suggests that the administration views FTO designation as a stepping stone to using force. Soon after the designations were publicly revealed, Elon Musk commented on social media that listing “means they’re eligible for drone strikes.” The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan said in November that the president was “committed to calling [the cartels] terrorist organizations and using the full might of the United States special operations to take them out.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth stressed on Fox News that “all options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border.”
The Trump administration would cite the FTO designation of Tren de Aragua and lean further into the use of military tools against the group when in March it invoked the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act—and then relied on that authority to rendition hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
The September military strike occurs in the context of a broader military deployment to the Caribbean—a deployment reportedly pushed by Secretary of State Rubio to put pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The deployment includes three destroyers and an amphibious assault group with 4,500 sailors, including 2,500 marines, on board. U.S. forces in the region were further bolstered by a guided missile cruiser and at least one submarine, the nuclear-powered USS Newport News.
Domestic Legal Authority for the Use of Force
A U.S. president may direct the use of military force pursuant to either (1) a congressional authorization for the use of force/declaration of war or (2) inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution, typically as commander in chief of the U.S. military. The scope of the president’s authority to direct the use of force under Article II in the absence of congressional authorization is contested. Although there is broad agreement that the president may use force to repel “sudden attack,” the U.S. executive branch has taken a much more expansive view of the president’s unilateral war powers.
Here the Trump administration will almost certainly rely solely on Article II of the Constitution as the source of authority for the attack on this vessel. Despite labelling the targets “narcoterrorists,” there is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the U.S. so-called “war on terror”—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua.
Under the executive branch’s two-prong test for when a president may use force without congressional authorization, the contemplated operation must advance an important “national interest” and must not amount to “war in the constitutional sense,” which the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has recognized as an outer limit on the president’s unilateral warmaking authority. That said, OLC precedent marks out remarkably wide latitude, with the first prong in particular having been critiqued as being unconstraining, and it is not clear whether it would have limited the president in this instance even assuming OLC advice was sought before the strike took place.
Further, though Trump and others in his administration have emphasized the prior designation of Tren de Aragua as an FTO, such designation does not by itself convey authority to use force. Nonetheless, such FTO designations are widely and mistakenly perceived as authorizing such action within the executive branch. Thus, designation of Tren de Aragua and a number of other Latin American criminal entities as FTOs in February foreshadowed this week’s attack in the Caribbean, despite providing no actual legal authority for it.
War Powers Resolution
When the U.S. president directs certain military actions in the absence of prior congressional authorization, those actions must be reported to Congress under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Further, when U.S. armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must not only report the action to Congress within 48-hours but terminate such military action within 60-days unless Congress votes to authorize it.
The War Powers Resolution does not define what it means for U.S. armed forces to be introduced into hostilities. Nonetheless, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s report on the Resolution explains:
The word hostilities was substituted for the phrase armed conflict during the subcommittee drafting process because it was considered to be somewhat broader in scope. In addition to a situation in which fighting actually has begun, hostilities also encompasses a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired but where there is a clear and present danger of armed conflict. “Imminent hostilities” denotes a situation in which there is a clear potential either for such a state of confrontation or for actual armed conflict.
Unsurprisingly, the executive branch has espoused different, narrower interpretations of these terms that are less likely to constrain the president’s ability to use military force without congressional authorization. In the most oft-repeated formulation, the State Department’s Legal Adviser informed Congress in a 1975 letter that its working definition of “hostilities” meant “a situation in which units of the U.S. armed forces are actively engaged in exchanges of fire with opposing units of hostile forces.” “Imminent hostilities” means “a situation in which there is a serious risk from hostile fire to the safety of United States forces.”
The executive branch has at times taken the position that supposedly defensive action by U.S. armed forces is exempt from the reporting and withdrawal requirements of the War Powers Resolution because U.S. armed forces were not “introduced” into hostilities, but instead hostilities were introduced to U.S. armed forces. The Biden administration adopted this legal theory to wage a yearslong military campaign against the Houthis without congressional authorization despite the restrictions of the War Powers Resolution.
The White House has in the past sometimes treated U.S. attacks on foreign vessels as introductions into hostilities triggering the War Powers Resolution. This was the case for the 1986 Gulf of Sidra incident involving air and naval fighting with Libya and a 1988 episode during the Tanker War when U.S. helicopters in the Persian Gulf responded to the distress call of a tanker under attack by (presumably Iranian) small boats, were fired on by the boats and returned fire in self-defense.
In my view, the U.S. attack on this supposed smuggling vessel constituted the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities, triggering both the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as its 60-day clock for withdrawing U.S. forces. The attack not only resembles previously reported incidents during the Reagan administration, but U.S. armed forces were deliberately introduced into the situation with the U.S. president himself reportedly giving the order to “blow up” the supposed smuggling vessel.
UN Charter
Any use of force by the United States must also comply with the UN Charter—both as a matter of international and domestic law. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter provides that: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The UN Charter safeguards states from the use of force. It is not currently clear what states (if any) were impacted by the U.S. attack on this vessel and thus whether Article 2(4) of the Charter is implicated by this strike. According to the Trump administration, the strike occurred in international waters. There is no indication that the vessel was flagged under any country (which would make an attack on the vessel an attack on the flag state in the view of the United States) Although some countries (such as the United States) have in the past treated attacks on their nationals abroad as attacks on the state itself, as of publication no country has claimed the 11 people reportedly killed in this attack and the Venezuelan government claimed the video of the incident was generated by artificial intelligence.
Use of Lethal Force
Working in collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy has for many years conducted maritime interdictions of suspected drug smugglers under a law enforcement paradigm—including during the current Trump administration. In such operations, U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement personnel board the suspect vessel and take the crew into custody.
The attack on the smuggling vessel in the Caribbean was so extraordinary because there was no reported attempt to stop the boat or detain its crew. Instead, the use of lethal force was used in the first resort. According to Secretary of State Rubio, President Trump was given the option of conducting a maritime interdiction but instead elected to blow up the vessel to send a message. Such use of lethal force raises a number of distinct legal issues.
Assassination Ban
Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassinations, providing that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Under executive branch legal doctrine, “assassination” is understood to include the targeted killing of individuals. (The Uniform Code of Military Justice also of course criminalizes murder.)
Public reporting on the past interpretation of the assassination ban indicates that the U.S. executive branch has recognized two potentially relevant exceptions to the prohibition in recent decades: (1) actions taken in self-defense; and (2) use of lethal force consistent with the law of war.
With respect to self-defense, the Trump administration has indicated that it is countering the flow of drugs to the United States. But drug trafficking by itself does not constitute an “armed attack,” nor a threat of an imminent armed attack, for the purposes in international law. Nor does drug trafficking represent the predicate for self-defense commonly recognized as required for the invocation of self-defense under criminal law in the United States.
The Law of War
Although not explicit, the administration’s framing of its attack on the alleged Tren de Aragua smuggling vessel suggests that it is targeting the group as if it were a terrorist organization with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. Such a law of war framework in turn raises a number of subsidiary questions.
Even assuming that Tren de Aragua constitutes an organized armed group (which there is reason to doubt) with which the United States is involved in a non-international armed conflict, it is far from clear that the attack on the vessel and the killing of those aboard was lawful under the law of war. The administration has not sought to explain how either the boat or its passengers were lawful military objectives.
In armed conflict, combatants/fighters (not hors de combat) may be targeted on a status basis. Further, civilians directly participating in hostilities may also be made the object of attack. Smuggling drugs by itself does not render a civilian a combatant/fighter subject to status-based targeting. Nor does it constitute direct participation in hostilities.
Nor has the administration argued that the cargo of the vessels was somehow a lawful military objective and the passengers somehow lawful collateral damage consistent with the principle of proportionality.
Assuming arguendo that the United States is operating under the law of war in targeting this supposed Tren de Aragua vessel, attacks directed against civilians or civilian objects violate the law of war.
Moreover, certain violations of the law of war constitute war crimes under both international and U.S. domestic law. Specifically, the U.S. War Crimes Act criminalizes murder, defined as the
“act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
Many other states not only criminalize this offense but have universal jurisdiction over the crime, regardless of who perpetrates it.
We still lack details about the individuals aboard the targeted vessel as well as the legal rationale for the attack. But if U.S. forces are targeting individuals who are civilians—not qualifying as combatants/fighters or directly participating in hostilities—this raises the specter of accountability under the War Crimes Act.
The Right to Life in Human Rights Law
Such attacks may also violate the right to life under international human rights law. And while the U.S. government has not consistently acknowledged the extraterritorial application of the relevant legal obligation as a matter of treaty law (see this 2014 Just Security symposium for long-running debate on that issue), DoD’s 2024 Operational Law Handbook (pages 98-99) adopts the view that murder is prohibited by a peremptory rule of customary international law applicable even extraterritorially.
An Extraordinary and Unsettling Action
The Trump administration’s military attack on this alleged smuggling vessel is not only extraordinary and unsettling in its own right, but also because of the context in which it occurs and for what it may portend for future action.
The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation. Of a piece with the deployment of troops to U.S. cities, the strike is an unnecessary and performative use of the U.S. military—a use that is legally fraught at best. (Indeed, Trump threatened Chicago with a troop deployment in the same Oval Office appearance in which he announced the strike.) And the use of lethal force against these supposed terrorists is ominous both because the Trump administration has vowed further such strikes in Latin America and because this administration has deployed the “terrorist” label more broadly domestically, including against migrants and political opponents.
Congress—which has largely been missing in action this year—needs to reassert its own prerogatives over war powers and the use of these military tools as the White House seeks to further abuse these instruments both abroad and at home.
FEATURED IMAGE: The US Navy warship USS Sampson (DDG 102) docks at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City on September 02, 2025. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on September 1, 2025, that eight US military vessels with 1,200 missiles were targeting his country, which he declared to be in a state of "maximum readiness to defend" itself. (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)
Page 2
On Sept. 2nd, the Trump administration announced what it described as a “lethal strike” against an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean. In a post on social media accompanied with a video of the strike, President Donald Trump stated that the attack was “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Trump also noted that Tren de Aragua had previously been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The social media post also asserted that the strike had occurred in international waters and killed “11 terrorists.”
Although the facts are still emerging, the Trump administration’s extraordinary lethal attack on this purported smuggling vessel – and its vow that the strike was a start of a campaign – raise a number of significant potential legal issues. And even apart from these legal concerns, the strike constitutes a deeply troubling gratuitous use of the military that resulted in the unnecessary killing of 11 individuals.
Background
President Trump had reportedly flirted with the idea of using military force against drug trafficking organizations during his first term. Early in his second term, his administration began to cast drug trafficking organizations as terrorists and hinted at possibly using targeted killing tools developed over the last few decades in the counter-terrorism context. In February, the State Department for the first time designated eight drug trafficking organizations, including Tren de Aragua, as FTO). To be clear, this step does not by itself provide authority for the use of force. In the past, however, it has paved the way to military action, including the strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Certainly, the rhetoric from key figures close to Trump suggests that the administration views FTO designation as a stepping stone to using force. Soon after the designations were publicly revealed, Elon Musk commented on social media that listing “means they’re eligible for drone strikes.” The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan said in November that the president was “committed to calling [the cartels] terrorist organizations and using the full might of the United States special operations to take them out.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth stressed on Fox News that “all options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border.”
The Trump administration would cite the FTO designation of Tren de Aragua and lean further into the use of military tools against the group when in March it invoked the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act—and then relied on that authority to rendition hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
The September military strike occurs in the context of a broader military deployment to the Caribbean—a deployment reportedly pushed by Secretary of State Rubio to put pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The deployment includes three destroyers and an amphibious assault group with 4,500 sailors, including 2,500 marines, on board. U.S. forces in the region were further bolstered by a guided missile cruiser and at least one submarine, the nuclear-powered USS Newport News.
Domestic Legal Authority for the Use of Force
A U.S. president may direct the use of military force pursuant to either (1) a congressional authorization for the use of force/declaration of war or (2) inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution, typically as commander in chief of the U.S. military. The scope of the president’s authority to direct the use of force under Article II in the absence of congressional authorization is contested. Although there is broad agreement that the president may use force to repel “sudden attack,” the U.S. executive branch has taken a much more expansive view of the president’s unilateral war powers.
Here the Trump administration will almost certainly rely solely on Article II of the Constitution as the source of authority for the attack on this vessel. Despite labelling the targets “narcoterrorists,” there is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the U.S. so-called “war on terror”—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua.
Under the executive branch’s two-prong test for when a president may use force without congressional authorization, the contemplated operation must advance an important “national interest” and must not amount to “war in the constitutional sense,” which the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has recognized as an outer limit on the president’s unilateral warmaking authority. That said, OLC precedent marks out remarkably wide latitude, with the first prong in particular having been critiqued as being unconstraining, and it is not clear whether it would have limited the president in this instance even assuming OLC advice was sought before the strike took place.
Further, though Trump and others in his administration have emphasized the prior designation of Tren de Aragua as an FTO, such designation does not by itself convey authority to use force. Nonetheless, such FTO designations are widely and mistakenly perceived as authorizing such action within the executive branch. Thus, designation of Tren de Aragua and a number of other Latin American criminal entities as FTOs in February foreshadowed this week’s attack in the Caribbean, despite providing no actual legal authority for it.
War Powers Resolution
When the U.S. president directs certain military actions in the absence of prior congressional authorization, those actions must be reported to Congress under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Further, when U.S. armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must not only report the action to Congress within 48-hours but terminate such military action within 60-days unless Congress votes to authorize it.
The War Powers Resolution does not define what it means for U.S. armed forces to be introduced into hostilities. Nonetheless, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s report on the Resolution explains:
The word hostilities was substituted for the phrase armed conflict during the subcommittee drafting process because it was considered to be somewhat broader in scope. In addition to a situation in which fighting actually has begun, hostilities also encompasses a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired but where there is a clear and present danger of armed conflict. “Imminent hostilities” denotes a situation in which there is a clear potential either for such a state of confrontation or for actual armed conflict.
Unsurprisingly, the executive branch has espoused different, narrower interpretations of these terms that are less likely to constrain the president’s ability to use military force without congressional authorization. In the most oft-repeated formulation, the State Department’s Legal Adviser informed Congress in a 1975 letter that its working definition of “hostilities” meant “a situation in which units of the U.S. armed forces are actively engaged in exchanges of fire with opposing units of hostile forces.” “Imminent hostilities” means “a situation in which there is a serious risk from hostile fire to the safety of United States forces.”
The executive branch has at times taken the position that supposedly defensive action by U.S. armed forces is exempt from the reporting and withdrawal requirements of the War Powers Resolution because U.S. armed forces were not “introduced” into hostilities, but instead hostilities were introduced to U.S. armed forces. The Biden administration adopted this legal theory to wage a yearslong military campaign against the Houthis without congressional authorization despite the restrictions of the War Powers Resolution.
The White House has in the past sometimes treated U.S. attacks on foreign vessels as introductions into hostilities triggering the War Powers Resolution. This was the case for the 1986 Gulf of Sidra incident involving air and naval fighting with Libya and a 1988 episode during the Tanker War when U.S. helicopters in the Persian Gulf responded to the distress call of a tanker under attack by (presumably Iranian) small boats, were fired on by the boats and returned fire in self-defense.
In my view, the U.S. attack on this supposed smuggling vessel constituted the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities, triggering both the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as its 60-day clock for withdrawing U.S. forces. The attack not only resembles previously reported incidents during the Reagan administration, but U.S. armed forces were deliberately introduced into the situation with the U.S. president himself reportedly giving the order to “blow up” the supposed smuggling vessel.
UN Charter
Any use of force by the United States must also comply with the UN Charter—both as a matter of international and domestic law. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter provides that: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The UN Charter safeguards states from the use of force. It is not currently clear what states (if any) were impacted by the U.S. attack on this vessel and thus whether Article 2(4) of the Charter is implicated by this strike. According to the Trump administration, the strike occurred in international waters. There is no indication that the vessel was flagged under any country (which would make an attack on the vessel an attack on the flag state in the view of the United States) Although some countries (such as the United States) have in the past treated attacks on their nationals abroad as attacks on the state itself, as of publication no country has claimed the 11 people reportedly killed in this attack and the Venezuelan government claimed the video of the incident was generated by artificial intelligence.
Use of Lethal Force
Working in collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy has for many years conducted maritime interdictions of suspected drug smugglers under a law enforcement paradigm—including during the current Trump administration. In such operations, U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement personnel board the suspect vessel and take the crew into custody.
The attack on the smuggling vessel in the Caribbean was so extraordinary because there was no reported attempt to stop the boat or detain its crew. Instead, the use of lethal force was used in the first resort. According to Secretary of State Rubio, President Trump was given the option of conducting a maritime interdiction but instead elected to blow up the vessel to send a message. Such use of lethal force raises a number of distinct legal issues.
Assassination Ban
Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassinations, providing that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Under executive branch legal doctrine, “assassination” is understood to include the targeted killing of individuals. (The Uniform Code of Military Justice also of course criminalizes murder.)
Public reporting on the past interpretation of the assassination ban indicates that the U.S. executive branch has recognized two potentially relevant exceptions to the prohibition in recent decades: (1) actions taken in self-defense; and (2) use of lethal force consistent with the law of war.
With respect to self-defense, the Trump administration has indicated that it is countering the flow of drugs to the United States. But drug trafficking by itself does not constitute an “armed attack,” nor a threat of an imminent armed attack, for the purposes in international law. Nor does drug trafficking represent the predicate for self-defense commonly recognized as required for the invocation of self-defense under criminal law in the United States.
The Law of War
Although not explicit, the administration’s framing of its attack on the alleged Tren de Aragua smuggling vessel suggests that it is targeting the group as if it were a terrorist organization with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. Such a law of war framework in turn raises a number of subsidiary questions.
Even assuming that Tren de Aragua constitutes an organized armed group (which there is reason to doubt) with which the United States is involved in a non-international armed conflict, it is far from clear that the attack on the vessel and the killing of those aboard was lawful under the law of war. The administration has not sought to explain how either the boat or its passengers were lawful military objectives.
In armed conflict, combatants/fighters (not hors de combat) may be targeted on a status basis. Further, civilians directly participating in hostilities may also be made the object of attack. Smuggling drugs by itself does not render a civilian a combatant/fighter subject to status-based targeting. Nor does it constitute direct participation in hostilities.
Nor has the administration argued that the cargo of the vessels was somehow a lawful military objective and the passengers somehow lawful collateral damage consistent with the principle of proportionality.
Assuming arguendo that the United States is operating under the law of war in targeting this supposed Tren de Aragua vessel, attacks directed against civilians or civilian objects violate the law of war.
Moreover, certain violations of the law of war constitute war crimes under both international and U.S. domestic law. Specifically, the U.S. War Crimes Act criminalizes murder, defined as the
“act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
Many other states not only criminalize this offense but have universal jurisdiction over the crime, regardless of who perpetrates it.
We still lack details about the individuals aboard the targeted vessel as well as the legal rationale for the attack. But if U.S. forces are targeting individuals who are civilians—not qualifying as combatants/fighters or directly participating in hostilities—this raises the specter of accountability under the War Crimes Act.
The Right to Life in Human Rights Law
Such attacks may also violate the right to life under international human rights law. And while the U.S. government has not consistently acknowledged the extraterritorial application of the relevant legal obligation as a matter of treaty law (see this 2014 Just Security symposium for long-running debate on that issue), DoD’s 2024 Operational Law Handbook (pages 98-99) adopts the view that murder is prohibited by a peremptory rule of customary international law applicable even extraterritorially.
An Extraordinary and Unsettling Action
The Trump administration’s military attack on this alleged smuggling vessel is not only extraordinary and unsettling in its own right, but also because of the context in which it occurs and for what it may portend for future action.
The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation. Of a piece with the deployment of troops to U.S. cities, the strike is an unnecessary and performative use of the U.S. military—a use that is legally fraught at best. (Indeed, Trump threatened Chicago with a troop deployment in the same Oval Office appearance in which he announced the strike.) And the use of lethal force against these supposed terrorists is ominous both because the Trump administration has vowed further such strikes in Latin America and because this administration has deployed the “terrorist” label more broadly domestically, including against migrants and political opponents.
Congress—which has largely been missing in action this year—needs to reassert its own prerogatives over war powers and the use of these military tools as the White House seeks to further abuse these instruments both abroad and at home.
FEATURED IMAGE: The US Navy warship USS Sampson (DDG 102) docks at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City on September 02, 2025. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on September 1, 2025, that eight US military vessels with 1,200 missiles were targeting his country, which he declared to be in a state of "maximum readiness to defend" itself. (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)
Page 3
On Sept. 2nd, the Trump administration announced what it described as a “lethal strike” against an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean. In a post on social media accompanied with a video of the strike, President Donald Trump stated that the attack was “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Trump also noted that Tren de Aragua had previously been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The social media post also asserted that the strike had occurred in international waters and killed “11 terrorists.”
Although the facts are still emerging, the Trump administration’s extraordinary lethal attack on this purported smuggling vessel – and its vow that the strike was a start of a campaign – raise a number of significant potential legal issues. And even apart from these legal concerns, the strike constitutes a deeply troubling gratuitous use of the military that resulted in the unnecessary killing of 11 individuals.
Background
President Trump had reportedly flirted with the idea of using military force against drug trafficking organizations during his first term. Early in his second term, his administration began to cast drug trafficking organizations as terrorists and hinted at possibly using targeted killing tools developed over the last few decades in the counter-terrorism context. In February, the State Department for the first time designated eight drug trafficking organizations, including Tren de Aragua, as FTO). To be clear, this step does not by itself provide authority for the use of force. In the past, however, it has paved the way to military action, including the strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Certainly, the rhetoric from key figures close to Trump suggests that the administration views FTO designation as a stepping stone to using force. Soon after the designations were publicly revealed, Elon Musk commented on social media that listing “means they’re eligible for drone strikes.” The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan said in November that the president was “committed to calling [the cartels] terrorist organizations and using the full might of the United States special operations to take them out.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth stressed on Fox News that “all options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border.”
The Trump administration would cite the FTO designation of Tren de Aragua and lean further into the use of military tools against the group when in March it invoked the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act—and then relied on that authority to rendition hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
The September military strike occurs in the context of a broader military deployment to the Caribbean—a deployment reportedly pushed by Secretary of State Rubio to put pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The deployment includes three destroyers and an amphibious assault group with 4,500 sailors, including 2,500 marines, on board. U.S. forces in the region were further bolstered by a guided missile cruiser and at least one submarine, the nuclear-powered USS Newport News.
Domestic Legal Authority for the Use of Force
A U.S. president may direct the use of military force pursuant to either (1) a congressional authorization for the use of force/declaration of war or (2) inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution, typically as commander in chief of the U.S. military. The scope of the president’s authority to direct the use of force under Article II in the absence of congressional authorization is contested. Although there is broad agreement that the president may use force to repel “sudden attack,” the U.S. executive branch has taken a much more expansive view of the president’s unilateral war powers.
Here the Trump administration will almost certainly rely solely on Article II of the Constitution as the source of authority for the attack on this vessel. Despite labelling the targets “narcoterrorists,” there is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the U.S. so-called “war on terror”—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua.
Under the executive branch’s two-prong test for when a president may use force without congressional authorization, the contemplated operation must advance an important “national interest” and must not amount to “war in the constitutional sense,” which the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has recognized as an outer limit on the president’s unilateral warmaking authority. That said, OLC precedent marks out remarkably wide latitude, with the first prong in particular having been critiqued as being unconstraining, and it is not clear whether it would have limited the president in this instance even assuming OLC advice was sought before the strike took place.
Further, though Trump and others in his administration have emphasized the prior designation of Tren de Aragua as an FTO, such designation does not by itself convey authority to use force. Nonetheless, such FTO designations are widely and mistakenly perceived as authorizing such action within the executive branch. Thus, designation of Tren de Aragua and a number of other Latin American criminal entities as FTOs in February foreshadowed this week’s attack in the Caribbean, despite providing no actual legal authority for it.
War Powers Resolution
When the U.S. president directs certain military actions in the absence of prior congressional authorization, those actions must be reported to Congress under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Further, when U.S. armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must not only report the action to Congress within 48-hours but terminate such military action within 60-days unless Congress votes to authorize it.
The War Powers Resolution does not define what it means for U.S. armed forces to be introduced into hostilities. Nonetheless, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s report on the Resolution explains:
The word hostilities was substituted for the phrase armed conflict during the subcommittee drafting process because it was considered to be somewhat broader in scope. In addition to a situation in which fighting actually has begun, hostilities also encompasses a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired but where there is a clear and present danger of armed conflict. “Imminent hostilities” denotes a situation in which there is a clear potential either for such a state of confrontation or for actual armed conflict.
Unsurprisingly, the executive branch has espoused different, narrower interpretations of these terms that are less likely to constrain the president’s ability to use military force without congressional authorization. In the most oft-repeated formulation, the State Department’s Legal Adviser informed Congress in a 1975 letter that its working definition of “hostilities” meant “a situation in which units of the U.S. armed forces are actively engaged in exchanges of fire with opposing units of hostile forces.” “Imminent hostilities” means “a situation in which there is a serious risk from hostile fire to the safety of United States forces.”
The executive branch has at times taken the position that supposedly defensive action by U.S. armed forces is exempt from the reporting and withdrawal requirements of the War Powers Resolution because U.S. armed forces were not “introduced” into hostilities, but instead hostilities were introduced to U.S. armed forces. The Biden administration adopted this legal theory to wage a yearslong military campaign against the Houthis without congressional authorization despite the restrictions of the War Powers Resolution.
The White House has in the past sometimes treated U.S. attacks on foreign vessels as introductions into hostilities triggering the War Powers Resolution. This was the case for the 1986 Gulf of Sidra incident involving air and naval fighting with Libya and a 1988 episode during the Tanker War when U.S. helicopters in the Persian Gulf responded to the distress call of a tanker under attack by (presumably Iranian) small boats, were fired on by the boats and returned fire in self-defense.
In my view, the U.S. attack on this supposed smuggling vessel constituted the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities, triggering both the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as its 60-day clock for withdrawing U.S. forces. The attack not only resembles previously reported incidents during the Reagan administration, but U.S. armed forces were deliberately introduced into the situation with the U.S. president himself reportedly giving the order to “blow up” the supposed smuggling vessel.
UN Charter
Any use of force by the United States must also comply with the UN Charter—both as a matter of international and domestic law. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter provides that: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The UN Charter safeguards states from the use of force. It is not currently clear what states (if any) were impacted by the U.S. attack on this vessel and thus whether Article 2(4) of the Charter is implicated by this strike. According to the Trump administration, the strike occurred in international waters. There is no indication that the vessel was flagged under any country (which would make an attack on the vessel an attack on the flag state in the view of the United States) Although some countries (such as the United States) have in the past treated attacks on their nationals abroad as attacks on the state itself, as of publication no country has claimed the 11 people reportedly killed in this attack and the Venezuelan government claimed the video of the incident was generated by artificial intelligence.
Use of Lethal Force
Working in collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy has for many years conducted maritime interdictions of suspected drug smugglers under a law enforcement paradigm—including during the current Trump administration. In such operations, U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement personnel board the suspect vessel and take the crew into custody.
The attack on the smuggling vessel in the Caribbean was so extraordinary because there was no reported attempt to stop the boat or detain its crew. Instead, the use of lethal force was used in the first resort. According to Secretary of State Rubio, President Trump was given the option of conducting a maritime interdiction but instead elected to blow up the vessel to send a message. Such use of lethal force raises a number of distinct legal issues.
Assassination Ban
Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassinations, providing that “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Under executive branch legal doctrine, “assassination” is understood to include the targeted killing of individuals. (The Uniform Code of Military Justice also of course criminalizes murder.)
Public reporting on the past interpretation of the assassination ban indicates that the U.S. executive branch has recognized two potentially relevant exceptions to the prohibition in recent decades: (1) actions taken in self-defense; and (2) use of lethal force consistent with the law of war.
With respect to self-defense, the Trump administration has indicated that it is countering the flow of drugs to the United States. But drug trafficking by itself does not constitute an “armed attack,” nor a threat of an imminent armed attack, for the purposes in international law. Nor does drug trafficking represent the predicate for self-defense commonly recognized as required for the invocation of self-defense under criminal law in the United States.
The Law of War
Although not explicit, the administration’s framing of its attack on the alleged Tren de Aragua smuggling vessel suggests that it is targeting the group as if it were a terrorist organization with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. Such a law of war framework in turn raises a number of subsidiary questions.
Even assuming that Tren de Aragua constitutes an organized armed group (which there is reason to doubt) with which the United States is involved in a non-international armed conflict, it is far from clear that the attack on the vessel and the killing of those aboard was lawful under the law of war. The administration has not sought to explain how either the boat or its passengers were lawful military objectives.
In armed conflict, combatants/fighters (not hors de combat) may be targeted on a status basis. Further, civilians directly participating in hostilities may also be made the object of attack. Smuggling drugs by itself does not render a civilian a combatant/fighter subject to status-based targeting. Nor does it constitute direct participation in hostilities.
Nor has the administration argued that the cargo of the vessels was somehow a lawful military objective and the passengers somehow lawful collateral damage consistent with the principle of proportionality.
Assuming arguendo that the United States is operating under the law of war in targeting this supposed Tren de Aragua vessel, attacks directed against civilians or civilian objects violate the law of war.
Moreover, certain violations of the law of war constitute war crimes under both international and U.S. domestic law. Specifically, the U.S. War Crimes Act criminalizes murder, defined as the
“act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
Many other states not only criminalize this offense but have universal jurisdiction over the crime, regardless of who perpetrates it.
We still lack details about the individuals aboard the targeted vessel as well as the legal rationale for the attack. But if U.S. forces are targeting individuals who are civilians—not qualifying as combatants/fighters or directly participating in hostilities—this raises the specter of accountability under the War Crimes Act.
The Right to Life in Human Rights Law
Such attacks may also violate the right to life under international human rights law. And while the U.S. government has not consistently acknowledged the extraterritorial application of the relevant legal obligation as a matter of treaty law (see this 2014 Just Security symposium for long-running debate on that issue), DoD’s 2024 Operational Law Handbook (pages 98-99) adopts the view that murder is prohibited by a peremptory rule of customary international law applicable even extraterritorially.
An Extraordinary and Unsettling Action
The Trump administration’s military attack on this alleged smuggling vessel is not only extraordinary and unsettling in its own right, but also because of the context in which it occurs and for what it may portend for future action.
The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation. Of a piece with the deployment of troops to U.S. cities, the strike is an unnecessary and performative use of the U.S. military—a use that is legally fraught at best. (Indeed, Trump threatened Chicago with a troop deployment in the same Oval Office appearance in which he announced the strike.) And the use of lethal force against these supposed terrorists is ominous both because the Trump administration has vowed further such strikes in Latin America and because this administration has deployed the “terrorist” label more broadly domestically, including against migrants and political opponents.
Congress—which has largely been missing in action this year—needs to reassert its own prerogatives over war powers and the use of these military tools as the White House seeks to further abuse these instruments both abroad and at home.
FEATURED IMAGE: The US Navy warship USS Sampson (DDG 102) docks at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City on September 02, 2025. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on September 1, 2025, that eight US military vessels with 1,200 missiles were targeting his country, which he declared to be in a state of "maximum readiness to defend" itself. (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images)
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Background
The risk of post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 is estimated at 3–6% per infection in 2024. Our previous study identified substantial increases in Norwegian primary healthcare consultations in 2023—compared to pre-pandemic levels—for conditions associated with acute and post-acute COVID-19 sequelae. This study extends that analysis to 2024 and includes age- and sex-specific analyses.
Methods
We used data from the Norwegian Syndromic Surveillance System (NorSySS), which captures primary healthcare consultations coded using 101 ICPC-2 codes. Bayesian linear regression models were fitted to 2010–2019 trends, adjusting for population changes, to estimate expected values for 2024. Excess consultations were calculated and stratified by age and sex.
Results
In 2024, there were 17,170,953 consultations. This corresponds to an excess of 836,033 consultations (90% PI: 559,609 to 1,109,762), or a 5.1% relative excess (90% PI: 3.4–6.9%) compared to expected levels. The 10 code combinations with largest absolute excess in 2024 were respiratory infections (261,168 excess consultations, 16% relative excess), fatigue (185,774 excess consultations, 63% relative excess), psychological symptom/complaint other (170,943 excess consultations, 79% relative excess), acute stress reaction (162,642 excess consultations, 68% relative excess), depression (119,120 excess consultations, 125% relative excess), hyperkinetic disorder (102,250 excess consultations, 106% relative excess), abdominal pain/cramps general (74,623 excess consultations, 26% relative excess), memory disturbance (36,521 excess consultations, 59% relative excess), conjunctivitis (31,744 excess consultations, 54% relative excess), and infectious disease other/NOS (30,379 excess consultations, 73% relative excess). Deviations from expected pre-pandemic trends worsened dramatically from 2022, coinciding with the Norwegian government’s lifting of all COVID-19 preventative measures. Increases typically occurred 3–6 months after COVID-19 waves. Women, children, adolescents, and young adults were disproportionately affected by cognitive issues.
Conclusions
Primary healthcare consultations in 2024 significantly exceeded pre-pandemic expectations, especially for conditions linked to post-acute sequelae of COVID-19. The findings suggest ongoing population-level health impacts associated with repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections, particularly among women, children, adolescents, and young adults. These effects have emerged under a national COVID-19 strategy that does not account for post-acute consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Completely coincidental that the list of things causing more healthcare visits are long covid symptoms
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New research from Imperial College London and the University of South Carolina sheds light on the mysterious link between inflammation and depression.
This study in mice suggests that inflammation-induced histamine dampens the extracellular release of serotonin in the hippocampus and reduces the efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These findings (Hersey et al., 2021) were recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"Inflammation could play a huge role in depression, and there is already strong evidence that patients with both depression and severe inflammation are the ones most likely not to respond to antidepressants," senior author Parastoo Hashemi of ICL's Department of Bioengineering said in an August 2021 news release.
"Our work shines a spotlight on histamine as a potential key player in depression. This, and its interactions with the 'feel-good molecule' serotonin, may thus be a crucial new avenue in improving serotonin-based treatments for depression," she added.
What’s the link between inflammation and depression?
For this study, first author Melinda Hersey and colleagues started by implanting specialized microelectrodes that can measure mouse brain serotonin levels in real-time using a technique known as fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV).
Once the microelectrodes were in place, the researchers injected half the mice with an inflammation-inducing substance called lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and the other half of the mice, which served as a control group, with a non-inflammatory saline solution.
The FSCV data showed that serotonin levels dropped within minutes of receiving the inflammatory LPS injection but were unchanged in the control group. The first phase of this experiment shows how quickly an inflammatory response in the body can affect serotonin in the brain. However, based on previous studies, the researchers knew that LPS itself wasn't causing these brain responses because LPS can't cross the blood-brain barrier.
In the next phase of this experiment, the researchers administered SSRIs to the mice and found that it was much easier to boost serotonin levels in the control group that had less inflammation-induced histamine in their brains. Lastly, the researchers administered histamine-reducing drugs and found that lowering histamine caused serotonin levels to climb back up to baseline levels in the LPS mice.
Of note: The histamine-reducing drugs used in this mouse study are different from antihistamines that people can buy over the counter to treat allergies. Please do not misinterpret these findings in mice to suggest that taking an antihistamine in conjunction with your SSRI will boost its efficacy; OTC histamine antagonists that block H-1 receptors in the central nervous system are not known to have this effect.
Inflammatory responses increase histamine, which may impede serotonin and impair SSRIs.
Upon further investigation, the researchers pinpointed that LPS started a chain reaction that resulted in more inflammation-induced histamine, which stymied the brain's ability to release serotonin and impaired the capacity of an SSRI to increase hippocampal extracellular serotonin.
As the authors explain in the news release, "[We] found that the histamine in the brain was triggered by the inflammatory response and directly inhibited the release of serotonin, by attaching to inhibitory receptors on the serotonin neurons. These inhibitory receptors are also present on human serotonin neurons. So, this effect might translate to people."
Notably, because it's currently impossible to use the combination of serotonin-measuring microelectrodes, FSCV, and LPS in human subjects, this animal research gives us fresh insights into how histamine affects serotonin levels and SSRI efficacy in the mammalian brain.
That said, more human studies are needed to investigate how bodily inflammation might trigger a chain reaction that increases histamine levels in ways that impair SSRIs' ability to boost serotonin levels in people.
"Inflammation is a whole-body response and is therefore hugely complex. Depression is similarly complex, and the chemicals involved are affected in myriad ways by both genetic and environmental factors," Hashemi concluded. "Thus, we need to look at more complex models of depression behaviors in both mice and humans to get a fuller picture of both histamine and serotonin's roles in depression."
References
Melinda Hersey, Srimal Samaranayake, Shane N. Berger, Navid Tavakoli, Sergio Mena, H. Frederik Nijhout, Michael C. Reed, Janet Best, Randy D. Blakely, Lawrence P. Reagan and Parastoo Hashemi. "Inflammation-Induced Histamine Impairs the Capacity of Escitalopram to Increase Hippocampal Extracellular Serotonin." Journal of Neuroscience (First published: July 28, 2021) DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2618-20.2021
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iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Affect (from Latin affectus or adfectus) is a concept, used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that places emphasis on bodily or embodied experience. The word affect takes on a different meaning in psychology and other fields.
For Spinoza, as discussed in Parts Two and Three of his Ethics, affects are states of mind and body that are related to (but not exactly synonymous with) feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: pleasure or joy (laetitia),[1] pain or sorrow (tristitia)[1] and desire (cupiditas) or appetite.[2] Subsequent philosophical usage by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their translator Brian Massumi, while derived explicitly from Spinoza, tends to distinguish more sharply than Spinoza does between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualize because, as Spinoza says, "an affect or passion of the mind [animi pathema] is a confused idea" which is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body's vital force.[3] The term "affect" is central to what has become known as the "affective turn" in the humanities and social sciences.
In Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, Part III Definition 3, the term "affect" (affectus, traditionally translated as "emotion")[4] is the modification or variation produced in a body (including the mind) by an interaction with another body which increases or diminishes the body's power of activity (potentia agendi):
- By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.[5]
Affect is thus a special case of the more neutral term "affection" (affectio), which designates the form "taken on" by some thing,[6] the mode, state or quality of a body's relation to the world or nature (or infinite "substance"). In Part III, "Definitions of the Emotions/Affects", Spinoza defines 48 different forms of affect, including love and hatred, hope and fear, envy and compassion. They are nearly all manifestations of the three basic affects of:
- desire (cupiditas) or appetite (appetitus), defined as "the very essence of man insofar as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself";[7]
- pleasure (laetitia), defined as "man's transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection";[7] and
- pain or sorrow (tristitia), defined as "man's transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection".[7]
In Spinoza's view, since God's power of activity is infinite, any affection which increases the organism's power of activity leads to greater perfection. Affects are transitional states or modes in that they are vital forces by which the organism strives to act against other forces which act on it and continually resist it or hold it in check.[8]
Henri Bergson contends in Matter and Memory (1896) that we do not know our body only "from without" by perceptions, but also "from within" by affections (French: affections).[9]
The terms "affect" and "affection" came to prominence in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In his notes on the terminology employed, the translator Brian Massumi gives the following definitions of the terms as used in the volume:
- AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection (Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies).[10]
Deleuze takes up the term affect from Spinoza and transforms it to meet the central ethical and political problem he poses. Fundamentally, Deleuze uses the term "affect" in two ways: affect as becoming and affect as capacities.[11] Becoming as capacities corresponds to Spinoza's notion of affection, which designates a being's capacities to affect other beings and be affected by them. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, famously argue that a tick has three affects: (1) a capacity to be affected by light, which drives the tick to climb onto a branch, (2) a capacity to be affected by the smell of mammals, which prompts the tick to drop onto a passing host, (3) and lastly a capacity to dig into the animal's skin.[12] The use of affects as becomings[13] delineates affects as drivers of "events or undergoings that have disruptive and creative effects both on an individual’s internal composition and its external relationships with other things."[14] One of the main results of viewing affects as becomings is that they are no longer seen as merely personal feelings, as "they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them"[13] In this respect, affects, according to Deleuze, are not simple affections, as they are independent from their subject. Artists create affects and percepts, "blocks of space-time", whereas science works with functions, according to Deleuze, and philosophy creates concepts.
Since 1995,[15][16] a number of authors in the social sciences and humanities have begun to explore affect theory as a way of understanding spheres of experience (including bodily experience) which fall outside of the dominant paradigm of representation (based on rhetoric and semiotics); this movement has been called the affective turn.[17] Consequently, these approaches are interested in the widest possible variety of interactions and encounters, interactions and encounters that are not necessarily limited to human sensibility.[18] The translator of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Canadian political philosopher Brian Massumi, has given influential definitions of affect (see above) and has written on the neglected importance of movement and sensation in cultural formations and our interaction with real and virtual worlds.[19] Likewise, geographer Nigel Thrift has explored the role of affect in what he terms "non-representational theory".[20] In 2010, The Affect Theory Reader was published by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth and has provided the first compendium of affect theory writings.[21] Researchers such as Mog Stapleton, Daniel D. Hutto and Peter Carruthers[22][23][24] have pointed to the need to investigate and to develop the notions of affect and emotion. They hold that these are important in the developing paradigm of embodiment in cognitive science, in consciousness studies and the philosophy of mind. This step will be necessary for cognitive science, Mog Stapleton maintains, to be "properly embodied" cognitive science.
- ^ a b Part III, Proposition 56. Spinoza, Benedictus de (2001) [1677]. Ethics. Trans. by W.H. White and A.H. Stirling. London: Wordsworth Editions. p. 141. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ "In truth I cannot recognize any difference between human appetite and desire". Spinoza, Benedictus de (2001) [1677]. Ethics [heading= Affect. Trans. by W.H. White and A.H. Stirling. London: Wordsworth Editions. p. 146. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Existendi vis or power of existence. Spinoza, Benedictus de (2001) [1677]. Ethics. Trans. by W.H. White and A.H. Stirling. London: Wordsworth Editions. p. 158. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Of the two "standard" English translations, the version by Samuel Shirley uses "emotion" for affectus, whereas the more recent rendering by Edwin Curley uses "affect". Spinoza, Benedictus de (2002) [1677]. Complete Works. Trans. by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. p. 278. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011. Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. p. 154. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. p. 154. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Samuel Shirley, "Translator's Preface". Spinoza, Benedictus de (1992). The Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters. Trans. by Samuel Shirley. Hackett Publishing. p. 24. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ a b c Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. p. 311. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Kisner, Matthew J. (2011). Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN . Retrieved 28 November 2011.
- ^ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), ch. 1.
- ^ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. p. xvi. ISBN . OCLC 16472336.
- ^ Aktas, Ahmet (2025-05-01). "Was Spinoza a Deleuzian? Rethinking the Politics of Emotions and Affects". Theory, Culture & Society. 42 (3): 99–101. doi:10.1177/02632764241301334. ISSN 0263-2764.
- ^ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Deleuze, Gilles (2007). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (12. print ed.). Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press. p. 257. ISBN .
- ^ a b Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Tomlinson, Janis; Burchell III, Graham (2014). What Is Philosophy?. European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 164. ISBN .
- ^ Aktas, Ahmet (2025-05-01). "Was Spinoza a Deleuzian? Rethinking the Politics of Emotions and Affects". Theory, Culture & Society. 42 (3): 95–114. doi:10.1177/02632764241301334. ISSN 0263-2764.
- ^ Massumi, Brian (1995). "The Autonomy of Affect". Cultural Critique. Autumn (31): 83–109. doi:10.2307/1354446. JSTOR 1354446.
- ^ Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky; Frank, Adam (1995). "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins". Critical Inquiry. 21 (2): 496–522. doi:10.1086/448761. S2CID 143473392.
- ^ Patricia Ticineto Clough, Jean Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Duke University Press, 2007, p. 1; Paul Hoggett, Simon Thompson (eds.), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 1.
- ^ Seyfert, Robert (2012). "Beyond Personal Feelings and Collective Emotions: A Theory of Social Affect". Theory, Culture & Society. 29/6: 35. doi:10.1177/0263276412438591. S2CID 143590063.
- ^ Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Thrift, Nigel J. (2007). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- ^ Gregg, M.; Seigworth, G. (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN . Retrieved 30 April 2013.
- ^ Stapleton, M (2012). "Steps to a "Properly Embodied". Cognitive Science, Cognitive Systems Research. 22–23: 1–11. doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2012.05.001. S2CID 1694792.
- ^ Hutto, D. Intersubjective Engagements without Theory of Mind: A Cross-Species Comparison[1]
- ^ Carruthers, P. (2000). Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. ISBN .
- Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. p. xvi. ISBN . OCLC 16472336.
- Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- Seyfert, Robert (2012). "Beyond Personal Feelings and Collective Emotions: A Theory of Social Affect". Theory, Culture & Society. 29 (6): 27–46. doi:10.1177/0263276412438591. S2CID 143590063.
- Spinoza, Benedictus de (2002) [1677]. Complete Works. Trans. by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. p. 278. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- Skoggard, I. and Waterston, A. (2015), "Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Affect and Evocative Ethnography." Anthropol Conscious, 26: 109–120. doi:10.1111/anoc.12041
- Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. p. 154. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
- Thrift, Nigel J. (2007). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. ISBN . Retrieved 27 November 2011.
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