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
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 Boats~~ MURDERED ALL THOSE PEOPLE in the Caribbean for Nothing
FTFY, 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.
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.
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.
I'm fairly confident they just wanted to kill poor brown people for fun.
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.
I'm certain of it.
Exactly, this whole thing wasn't for nothing, it was for a bunch of war criminals' egos
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
I think that’s how US leadership’s felt for a long time. You’re very separate.
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.
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.
"remember when we..."
Homie, they are still doing it. They never stopped. The media just moved on.
Hey now, giving Hegseth an orgasm isn't "nothing".
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.
Its purity? As in, the purity of the cocaine? Is that a metric, and hence a goal here? “We’ll still have cocaine, but it’ll be really shitty.”
Or does that refer to the purity of the pentagon?
It's not actually a bad metric. Basically the demand for cocaine is going to be more or less constant over something like a 6 month window, but the supply is going to fluctuate, so the dealers are going to cut what they have until it's enough to meet demand. That means you can basically use the purity as a good proxy for available supply; when it goes down, the dealers are feeling the squeeze and having to stretch their limited supply, when it goes up the dealers aren't having a hard time getting the goods.
Didn’t it instead exacerbate the crisis in Cuba that is also the fault of the US?
remember when we were blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean
It's a stretch given how work has been going, but yeah, I can remember 5 weeks ago.
It was all Big Boat trying to push large boat sales.
When the biggest coke heads are in the highest levels of government, the war on drugs is as rigged as a carnival.
Neboa ships them in banana crates in cargo ships, not small speed boats.
As always, the US puppets are the narco traffickers
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