US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.

  • Mk23simp@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 days ago

    Huh, I wonder why they seized it instead of shooting it like the others? It couldn’t possibly be for the oil, right?

      • frongt@lemmy.zip
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        9 days ago

        Never heard of human trafficking?

        Oil is just a lot more profitable and easier to work with.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          Trump has plenty of experience as a human trafficker, but those were underage models in his little fake modeling agency, Trump Model Management, which was a friendly competitor to Epstein’s MC2 Model Management.

          But I can understand him not wanting to draw on that experience here. That and Hegaeth is a murderous fuck, and he was the one awake enough to give the order.

      • Agent641@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        You’re not getting paid top dollar for your people? You should see my people guy, he do you a good deal.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 days ago

        I genuinelly believe at least some people in positions of power inside and around the MAGA-Fascist party have plans to make Slavery legal again.

        (I would certainly bet that Peter Tiel is one of those).

    • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      I mean, I know what your point is, but can we actually just be thankful that they did not in fact blow up an oil tanker and spill all that into the sea?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      I can think of a few reasons why the US Navy wouldn’t want to fire high explosives into a contain full of flammable materials, depending on the range of their artillery.

      Also definitely possible they’re just doing Privateer shit with Navy assets. I do wonder whether the vessel gets impounded or just escorted to a friendly port in El Salvador or Honduras and quietly re-flagged and titled.

        • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
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          8 days ago

          Venezuelas oil infrastructure is in such bad shape, that oil spills are pretty common. Lake Maracaibo has them on a regular bases.

  • SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 days ago

    Starting a nonsense war under the guise of “spreading democracy” just to take their oil reserves so that rednecks back home can pollute the air and warm the earth with their oversized trucks. Can it get any more American this?

    • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 days ago

      He wants to declare war on Venezuela next year (or hopes that he can agitate them enough to commit an act of terror on the US) so he can deny midterm elections because he knows the GOP majority will potentially be cooked

      Remember how much his eyes shifted when he was told that elections can be delayed due to a country being at war

      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        He’s not 100% wrong.

        I’m sure he remembers fondly how every single news network praised him profusely when he dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan.

        He knows very well how much the US loves a warmongering president.

          • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            No, this was in his first term.

            Here’s an article on it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39598046

            But yeah, every single news outlet sang his praises after this. I specifically remember being on the treadmill in the gym, watching CNN, and I’ll quote Fareed Zakaria: “In that moment, he became president of the United States.”

            This country loves war to the point of absolute absurdity.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 days ago

          I’m starting to get the impression that a large fraction of Americans have lustful thoughts at the idea of mass murdering civilians (including children) as well as at the idea of their “leaders” having sex with children.

          Theirs is a diseased relationship with power.

          • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            We are a nation that really has never given a crap about bombing civilians en masse. Hell, President Obama, whom many still revere, dropped 20,000 bombs just in the last year of his presidency and killed an American citizen in Iraq ordering a bombing as well.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 days ago

              At one point President Obama had the definition of “enemy combatant” be changed to “Any man between the ages of 16 and 60” because the numbers of “collateral” civilian casualties from the drone attacks he ordered were so bad.

      • n0respect@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Remember

        It looked like he thought no one had ever thought of it before, and that he was a genius.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        9 days ago

        same tactic bush used to get elected, make a ware gives brownie points to the election in thier favor.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    9 days ago

    Let me guess… It was carrying drugs? Just packed full of cocaine? Can’t wait to hear the justification for this one.

    • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      It was carrying drugs?

      This type of drug has several street names, among them, black gold and Texas tea.

    • ohulancutash@feddit.uk
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      8 days ago

      It has been under US sanctions since 2022 for supplying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It was spoofing its position. It was flying a false flag.

      As to the legal justification, there are technicalities that could be argued. But that’s incidental to the intention here probably.

        • FatVegan@leminal.space
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          8 days ago

          He reminds me so much of my little nephew sometimes. He’s obsessed with trophies and medals. When we’re in a store where they sell trophies, he asks me if they are “real” and i try to explain to him that trophies aren’t “real” they are just a symbol. Sometimes for nothing. And he tries to understand. And then when i ask him if i should buy him a meaningless trophy, he goes yes pleeeease, a big one.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.

      That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War

          Read through that and tell me what we missed.

          The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.

          Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.

          But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.

          • dellish@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?

            I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?

              The Very Same!

              I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.

              It is nearly non-existent in US History textbooks, which is a big fat “W” from the perspective of the capitalist-friendly intelligence services.

    • Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca
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      9 days ago

      Actually the US has a shockingly short list of wars they have outright won where they were NOT part of an international coalition.

  • Arancello@aussie.zone
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    9 days ago

    Welcome to the sixteenth century! When Queen Elizabeth couldn’t afford to go to war against Spain so created ‘letters of marque’ which legalised piracy against Spain and its empire. Single handedly created the pirate economy.

    Then, welcome to the eighteenth century, when america created the fiction of the Barbary Corsairs to legalise american piracy of the atlantic trade.

    Isnt it Mark Twain who states that history rhymes?

  • itisileclerk@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    USA turns into Taliban country. Taliban originaly is “political and militant organization with an ideology comprising elements of the Deobandi movement of Islamic fundamentalism and Pashtun nationalism”, now is just “political and militant organization with an ideology comprising elements of the MAGA movement of Evangelical fundamentalism and WASP nationalism”

    • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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      8 days ago

      Taliban

      Remember when the CIA funded and armed what became the Taliban?

      Remember when the CIA had their guy running the Taliban?

        • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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          7 days ago

          Oh, maybe I’m conflating the Taliban with Al-Qaeda a bit (and [for the next part of this] maybe even ISIS too a bit? idk) ~ I’m no Whitney Webb for this stuff, so do use several websearch engines likely to be honest about this stuff for yourself, but…

          Tim Osman? (Whom you may know by another name.)

          Then after that there was that guy they once called a terrorist, then put a suit on and invited to the white house… I’m terrible with names… was it… Ahmed al-Sharaa/Abu Mohammad al-Julani?

          Hard to keep track if not paying close attention.

          Hard to keep paying close attention after seeing the same old ploys and fakery played out over and over.

          “Pick up the gun”

          “You all saw him. He had a gun.”

    • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Actually, hearing about this, I’m now surprised that our military didn’t stop the fishing boats first to siphon all of the gasoline out of their tanks before blowing them up and murdering their crew.

    • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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      9 days ago

      The time Iran stole a US oil tanker was in response to the US stealing one of their oil tankers.

      This is how America has always acted.

      • ohulancutash@feddit.uk
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        8 days ago

        The US didn’t “steal” it. It executed a european warrant for siezure at the request of the country that had rightful jurisdiction. Iran was just embarrassed that it was only possible due to the crew’s incompetence.

        • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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          8 days ago

          Oh I forgot, one of America’s vassals said it was OK. That changes everything. Very international rules and order.

      • not_that_guy05@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I like how you went straight for color of people when no one is talking about color.

        Good job!! Next time let’s talk about religion as well since you know, fuck it.

  • Psythik@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Well at least we know the real reason for the murders now. Why it it always the most greedy, predictable cause?

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Dude has been saying for 20 years that we should’ve stolen Iraq’s oil. Yet somehow everyone acts surprised when he does pretty predictable things like this.