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.
Oh they achieved their goal.
They killed brown people. That’s the goal of most of the policies this administration has undertaken.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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
Like it or not if you pay taxes is on you too.
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.
We’ll be annihilated if we try to do anything about it too. The only “opposition” our overlords allow is to vote.
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.
