Granted, it is a few dozen bungled policies ago, but remember when we were blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean as part of the administration’s Operation Dude Bro antidrug strategy? Well, the results are in, and they are sadly predictable. From The Washington Post:
In a recent assessment reviewed by The Washington Post, DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire. In a closed-door briefing last month, Pentagon officials told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced its purity.
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Oh they achieved their goal.
They killed brown people. That’s the goal of most of the policies this administration has undertaken.It was always about a campaign of terror and the charade of “doing something“.
For over 45 years, the “war on drugs“ was lost before it began. Drugs won. Why? Because everyone loves drugs. And the only way to win the “war on drugs“ is to reduce or eliminate the reasons why people want to use drugs in the first place: because they’re fucking miserable. Happy people don’t use drugs. Well, not the bad drugs. Happy people like smoking weed, but weed isn’t really one of the “bad drugs”. Anyway…
No, no… All of this was performative bullshit to make the “strong men” look strong when, in fact, they all knew it wouldn’t really accomplish anything other than making the American public think that they were actually accomplishing something. Which, of course, they weren’t. Nothing, aside from, of course, the stochastic terror they have been perpetrating upon everyone. and murdering brown people, which the Nazis in the current administration, love, regardless of the purpose or end result.
yes, the charade of “doing something”, or “the cult of action” as Umberto Eco called it
OK, I’ll be that one person downvoting you. It wasn’t about killing brown people. They don’t give a fuck about brown people. It is all about power and the graft and so on and those brown people are just expendable.
Nah, their goal is to transfer wealth.
These bombs are expensive as fuck. This moved tax dollars into the hands of the private military companies, which you’ll find Trump and his buddies are stockholders.
The fact that they’re brown just ensures that the racist population is less likely to complain.
Turns Out We
Blew Up All Those BoatsMURDERED ALL THOSE PEOPLE in the Caribbean for NothingFTFY, Esquire!
This regime is so far beyond the pale monstrous that it’s hard even for people trying to criticize it to avoid accidentally carrying water for it though understatement. Hell, even “beyond the pale monstrous” isn’t as emphatic as I should’ve been!
“I committed a bunch of war crimes, and all I got was this lousy hat.” (It’s a Trump 2028 hat.)
It’s not for nothing. Hegseth got wank fodder from it.
The WaPo also seems to imply that the people murdered were actually smugglers, which is very much unproven.
It didn’t matter if they were smugglers or not, they were just trying to scare ones that were into not doing it, with war crimes
I think that’s generous. I think the actual driving emotion behind this was Trump’s desire to feel powerful. Murdering people while knowing that their loved ones would never be able to return the favour to you seems to do that for him.
Yeah, you’re probably right. As if trump cares if cocaine is allowed into the country. He would be doing it himself if he wasn’t basically dead
I think that’s generous. I think the actual driving emotion behind this was Trump’s desire to…
…compensate for his tiny little mushroom cap by proving that he could order people killed.
I know. Same thing. I just like my phrasing better.
I was going to go even more basic, he just likes explosions. The side effect that they were killing brown people on a whim was just icing on his stubby syphlitic appendage.
They were fishermen. So murderers killing murderers.
Fishermen are murderers?
Obviously.
It was also about forcing armed forces officers to resign who wouldn’t bomb unidentified small boats (and double tap to kill survivors).
This weeds out officers who won’t fire on Americans when it is necessary to complete Trump’s coup.
It weeds out officers who won’t fire on thin pretexts. But it doesn’t do anything to improve the logistics or the communications or the intelligence or your engineering. Most of your army isn’t trigger pullers. That’s a very small part of the overall job.
aw pissyboy just wanted to play soldier after talking it so much on fox
Americans snort way more coke weekly than what could fit on those boats combined anyway.
But was there ever any proof these weren’t just actual fishing boats?
And did they even bother to say they found drugs on the venezuelan oil tanker they seized at that time?
What they did though is proceed to attack Venezuela for its oil.
I’m fairly confident they just wanted to kill poor brown people for fun.
Waging a terror campaign on the Venezuelan coast had a number of second-order effects, not the least of which was to destabilize the central government and strong-arm neighboring states into complying with US foreign policy.
You can get a lot of what you want by pointing a gun at someone’s head and barking orders.
I’m certain of it.
I think they’re a bunch of non-military bros who got the reins to military firepower and thought they could scare off actual soldiers by wielding that firepower like “badasses”. Turns out: nope. Just a war crime.
Exactly, this whole thing wasn’t for nothing, it was for a bunch of war criminals’ egos
But was there ever any proof these weren’t just actual fishing boats?
The proof would have been capturing a boat full of cocaine. Hard to do that when it’s blown to bits and scattered across the bottom of the ocean.
Even if we knew the boats were full of cocaine, the penalty for smuggling drugs into the US is not death. And even if the penalty was death, it would (or rather, should) not be a summary execution without a trial.
These are clearly illegal orders, and everyone participating in these strikes needs to be removed and tried for their crimes, starting with Hegseth, and going all the way down to the man who pushed the button to fire the missile.
Americans
I have a question, are you American?
The problem is that to most Republican voters, the fact that this didn’t actually impact drug supply isn’t really all that important. What matters to them is that - theoretically - “bad people” got killed. They’re more interested in punishing people they see as evil than they are in actually improving the world. Even the ones who won’t openly admit - or even admit to themselves - that they just like seeing brown people get killed will still defend this as an ultimately good action because it satisfies their twisted notion of justice. The meting out of punishment is what matters to them, far more than whatever social good that punishment is actually supposed to achieve.
It’s the same reason why they have so little interest in welfare policies even when those policies are demonstrably cheaper than the alternative. They won’t give shelter and money to homeless people even when it’s shown to reduce crime, for example, because the most important thing to them is that no one should ever be given something that they “don’t deserve.” They’re less interested in reducing crime than they are in seeing the poor suffer for whatever imagined sins made them poor.
I think the logic here is that if we punish/eliminate the “bad people” then the world will improve. But we can’t just enact policies to help people because if we try to do good things, the “bad people” will just ruin it for everyone. So it all circles back to punish/eliminate the “bad people”. And when that inevitably doesnt work, its cause there’s still more “bad people”, we just have to find them.
Since Reagan they have been pushing a “War on Drugs”. For those people “Since we are at war killing people is perfectly fine.”
Cops shooting an unarmed drug dealer in the back is okay with them. So is using the military randomly kill people in other countries.
I disagree. I don’t think that’s the reasoning at all, because they don’t even think about it that deeply. It’s not about the idea that logically this course of action will somehow make the world better. It’s about the feeling that the world needs to conform to their twisted ideas of fairness, and that feeling overrides any reason or logic.
“He’s not hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting.”
What matters to them is that “BROWN people” got killed
FTFY
Its always been about racism. Same thing with all the bullshit with ICE, all of it is nothing but unfettered racism.
I literally addressed this exact argument in the comment you replied to, but you just skipped right past that part.
Yes, but you stated it like it was a secondary motive or just a bonus from killing the “bad people”. When I’m saying that the only reason for any and all action done by this administration has been to hurt people of color, plain and simple. Well that and enrich themselves in the process.
Exactly, the problem isn’t how bad trump is, there’s always going to be insanely evil people – the problem is the hundreds of millions who gave him power. There would be nothing wrong with a world where trump is the same amount of insane evil but ends up in prison where he belongs. He’s not the problem, the rest of us are.
Every word of this is true, and it requires very little conversation with anyone on the right to see how true it is.
Lemmy gold for you sir or madam.
It wasn’t for nothing. It was to make low IQ mouth breathers think they were doing something. Aggression is always a positive for conservative voters. And the Republican party always needs ways to make it look like they’re doing something of value for the American people while robbing them blind.
“We” did not do anything. The US federal government’s actions are so far removed from the will of the people that we might as well considered separate entities at this point.
Don’t fool yourself, nearly half of the US population was either cheering it on, or simply did not care.
The boat strikes? That doesn’t sound probable to me, and since there was no vote taken on it I don’t see where that data comes from. Only the morons occupying the government right now think that what they are doing is just.
They are your representatives. You may not like how your representatives are representing you on the international stage but they’re still your representatives. None of us care that someone is “one of the good Americans.” It’s your country’s leaders that are taking a shit on everyone else and Americans are the only people who can do anything about it. From the outside it seem like although very few Americans like what’s going on, even fewer are willing to do anything about it and expect the rest of the world to do it for them.
Well guess what, Americans did this to America. We’re not coming to save you, we can’t. We’ll be annihilated by the United States if we even suggest we’ll try. You’re on your own, figure it out.
You are right that they are the representatives of the whole country. Which is pretty fucked up. I just want to point out that most citizens (definitely over half) see the murder of civilians as a war crime, and not something that the executive branch should have the ability to do.
We’ll be annihilated if we try to do anything about it too. The only “opposition” our overlords allow is to vote.
I think that’s how US leadership’s felt for a long time. You’re very separate.
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Like it or not if you pay taxes is on you too.
How does one get out of paying taxes on a W2? Just claim tons of exemptions?
What’s a W2?
In the US, for most “employee” type positions (as opposed to an independent contractor) you receive a form (form W2) that shows your total pay for the year and your total deductions. When you are hired you fill out another form (W4) to tell your employer how many income tax exemptions you claim. (More exemptions = more tax breaks). In every W2 job I have worked, my taxes were taken out automatically before I got my check. So your employer kind of “pays your income taxes for you” prior to every check. As far as I know the only way to stop them from doing this is to fraudulently claim more exemptions, which the IRS will absolutely catch onto.
There are other taxes (sales tax, property tax, etc.) which you can absolutely refuse to pay, if you’re okay with the IRS coming after you.
(Apologies if my explanation is slightly incorrect, I’m sure there’s someone out there who can explain it better)
Yea it’s illegal to not pay taxes. If the US bombed a school in france and murdered 150 white kids, not paying taxes to the government and go to jail as a result would sound as being part of the resistance.
Do back to my original question of how does one avoid paying income tax when working a W2 position? Or, now that I think about it, avoid paying sales tax? Places won’t sell to you tax-free unless you have a legitimate exception.
Property tax is easy enough, just don’t pay it.
Do back to my original question of how does one avoid paying income tax when working a W2 position?
you work “illegally” without paying taxes
As a non expert, I would assume disrupting supply routes would decrease purity. If what you did made them use slower boats and take different routes there would have been less supply and same demand right? Aka more reasons for people to cut it until supply got back up.
So really this tells me it’s more likely that they didn’t disrupt any supply of cocaine, and may have hit normal civilians or someone with marijuana as I remember someone reported bags of weed washing up on a beach…
Those weren’t drug boats. The cartels aren’t stupid, they know boats are one of the easiest ways to get intercepted. They build fucking submarines for smuggling drugs, if boats were enough you think they would go to all that effort?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
Also as the other guy said you don’t cram 6 people on a boat full of drugs. Why would you need the extra people? Are the sharks gonna rob you so you need extra guards? If you’re afraid some rival cartel is gonna intercept you probably want the boat to be lighter so it goes faster and escapes them so less people are better in that case too.
All this means is that most likely those boats were just fishermen or civilians on recreational rides. Oh, and another thing. You don’t get the death penalty in the US for drug smuggling so why would those people be killed even if they were drug smugglers?
You dont cram double digit people on a speedboat to smuggle drugs.
Because the weight of all those people could instead be more drugs, and that’s a bunch of people to keep their mouths closed and take a payment.
They were just blowing up anything that was coming to America, because they don’t want anyone from south America coming up north for any reason.
The “theyre drug smugglers” was likely never believed by anyone. It was about showing everyone that they’ll claim you’re a smuggler and kill you.
You can’t win. There are too many shipping containers, boats, planes, automobiles, an endless stream of commerce with a thousand different points of opportunity.
Every “victory” is Pyrrhic, the tighter you grip the more it will slip out of your fingers. You’re trying to treat a “disease” by controlling only one symptom, not the cause itself.
If you “succeed” in one facet, another will become much worse. For example, the war against opiates is what created the Fentanyl market. Good job, idiots.
Just let it go. Sell it all over the counter and control the quality to reduce overdose. Addicts are better off without you throwing them in dungeons. Leave it alone.
No? Really?
/s for the clueless.
You know tone indicators are used by neurodivergent people who struggle to understand intent, right?
I know I’m neurodivergent and am clueless about a lot of social monkey clicks and twitches. Sarcasm and the inability to recognize it has nothing to do with being on the spectrum. Its is more a function of one of the forms of intelligence.
Okay even then the point still stands. You don’t just shun people because they can’t recognize social cues, and you don’t assume they’re any less intelligent for it. It’s just presumptuous.
Not only that, but most cues for the intent of a message are either through tone of voice or body language. It’s disingenuous to assert that there’s no hindrance in the efficacy of communication when being done through a strictly written format. Something your first source lines out explicitly:
Other research has show[n] that sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted, particularly when communicated electronically. In one study, 30 pairs of university students were given a list of statements to communicate, half of which were sarcastic and half of which were serious. Some students communicated their messages via e-mail and others via voice recordings. Participants who received the voice messages accurately gleaned the sarcasm (or lack thereof) 73 percent of the time, but those who received the statements via e-mail did so only 56 percent of the time, hardly better than chance. By comparison, the e-mailers had anticipated that 78 percent of participants would pick up on the sarcasm inherent in their sarcastic statements. That is, they badly overestimated their ability to communicate the tenor of their sarcastic statements via e-mail. What’s more, the recipients of the sarcastic e-mails were also decidedly overconfident. They guessed they would correctly interpret the tone of the e-mails they received about 90 percent of the time. They were considerably less overconfident about their ability to interpret voice messages.
Given the risks and benefits of sarcasm, your best bet is to keep salty remarks limited to conversations with those you know well, lest you offend others—even as you potentially help them think more creatively.
That last argument I quoted can be directly overcome through the use of tone indicators, regardless of “how intelligent” the recipient is.
I get it. You can’t accept I don’t agree with you.
It’s less about you not agreeing with me and more about your opinion being based on false presumptions. You’re entitled to thinking that sarcasm and the ability to detect it is associated with intelligence; I would agree with you on that. But assuming it’s as simple as that without taking into account the method of communication is misleading.
No its not any of those things. Its you not agreeing with me and me not agreeing with you. Just another day ending in Y on the internet. bye.
“remember when we…”
Homie, they are still doing it. They never stopped. The media just moved on.
I mean the whole thing was optics anyway right?
“Trump’s so tough on crime he launches missiles at it” kinda stuff. It’s stupid but his supporters think it makes their side strong. They’re even more about it if the “criminal” is brown.
Conservative voters value aggression. The GOP knows this. That’s why this took place.
i’m mostly mad at the AF drone operators who chose not to miss
I don’t think you can whiff a thermal signature
Edit: but your rage is justified reguardless
I grew up near an afb. Convenient target for rage since DC is all the fuckin way over there
Edit: but sure, those boats were comin right at em
Hellfires are laser guided.
It’s almost like your strategy for the “wAr On dRuGs” isn’t very useful
