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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25128 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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The United States Navy is conducting a full-scale search-and-destroy campaign against alleged drug smugglers in the waters off Latin America and posting the results on Twitter.

The strikes have been going on for almost two months now and have killed over 50 people if Wikipedia is to be believed. I had no idea this was even an option. It turns out that You Can Just Do Things™.

I think that these are all probably smugglers of some kind. I have seen speculation that the some of the crew counts are higher than one would expect for drug running, which could imply human trafficking (consensual or otherwise) as well. If any of these boats were conducting legitimate business I suspect we would have had receipts by now.

The legal justification, to the extent that anyone cares about that anymore, seems to be that:

  • Drug cartels are terrorist organizations.

  • These boats contained cartel members targeting the United States (with drugs).

  • Therefore, these boats contained terrorists targeting the United States (with drugs).

This seems kinda flimsy, but again, does anyone actually care? Democrats are backed into a corner here. They will probably lose if they attempt to litigate whether or not these boats were actually smuggling drugs, but the other strategy would be to condemn the strikes under the legal technicality that they weren’t authorized by congress, even though the boats were smuggling drugs. This makes them look like exactly the kind of out-or touch institutionalists that voters hate.

In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

The US has broad dominion over Latin America and Central America in particular (and Venezuela after the totality of its decay is now a standard Central American country, geography aside). I don’t think this is anything new, nobody in the rest of the world even cares much. There are probably some cringe X edits set to synthwave music that a previous admin wouldn’t have (re)tweeted, but I don’t consider that a change of policy.

IMO, it's quite stupid behavior. Upsets the normies worldwide.

If you want to do a show of strength, you can always stop these boats, board them, videotape the cargo and sink them. Blowing them up only looks good to a certain segment of male populations.

Maybe it's a way of putting pressure on a subset of Venezuelan drug smugglers (as I understand they also use planes ).

I am surprised they are still coming. I would have expected them to stop after the first two or three boats got fragged. How many guys in boats are there?

There isn't high quality video of most of these boats. We don't know if they're actually all drug runners.

In Latin America, there is no shortage of crimelords with boats full of drugs to shotgun, nor of desperate young males willing to take whatever risks for a big payday.

This seems kinda flimsy, but again, does anyone actually care?

Just as an anecdote, the editor of the Tangle newsletter (which I recommend) considers this extra-judicial killing to be one of the worst things the Trump administration has done.

This is an insane normalization of what should be a major, stop-you-in-your-tracks, likely illegal use of military force. After the first strike in early September, we criticized the lack of evidence for the government’s claims, questioned the legality of the attack, and called the military operation that killed 11 to be Trump’s most lethal use of executive authority yet. Now, the United States has struck at least three more boats off the coast of Venezuela, and we don’t know who was on the boats, what they were carrying, where they were headed, if they were in international waters at the time, or even how many the U.S. has struck.

And in a later post:

One of the most alarming aspects of this situation was that, in the case of at least one of the men who was killed in the strike, some evidence emerged that he was a fisherman. One of the survivors of the recent strike did have a prior record of trafficking drugs, but the other man, from Ecuador, was released by his country and won’t be charged because they said there was no crime to charge him with. In other words, it’s possible that the Trump administration just killed at least one innocent person. At the very least, they declined to detain and charge someone on U.S. soil they just got done trying to kill extrajudicially.

That this administration had not been fighting narcoterrorists but actually killing innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela was already something a few journalists had theorized. When Colombia’s president condemned the strikes, Trump pulled U.S. aid to the country, rather than admit a potential mistake.

People care, there's just not much anyone can really do about it.

It's just a flimsy excuse for regime change cooked up by Neocon Rubio, who has been regularly sabotaging Trump's foreign policy for the deepstate. American's are getting killed by fent and meth, almost all of which comes from Mexican cartels and Chinese precursors. They are mad about this and want someone to stop it. So here comes Rubio to... park 20% of the US navy off the coast of Venezuela which acts as a smuggling hub for a small fraction of cocaine that enters the US (more goes through there to Europe). Cocaine is a drug and it can kill but its more of a posh party drug, it's a white house party drug. It's not something that is killing the poor on the street.

It's all very obvious, this is why they blow up the ships coming for Venezuela instead of recovering them and they don't bother prosecuting the surviving crew and just repatriate them. Otherwise we'd find out there is no fentanyl. The globalists are just taking advantage of populist anger and Trump's naivete to continue their unprovoked wars of imperial aggression. Venezuela will get new leadership courtesy of the tax payer's dime and its oil will go to Rubio's globalist friends.

How does blowing up a few tiny boats near venezuela contribute to regime change. The venezuelan people as well as the venezuelan normies couldn't care less

How does blowing up a few tiny boats require the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group? The tiny boats and drugs are the pretense for what is coming.

Consent is currently being manufactured https://x.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1981866833549635597

I don’t think this alone will do it but the only way to topple the bolivarian regime is to deject and destroy the morale of the millions of indigenous peasants who prevented previous coup attempts and who form the loyal core of Maduro’s support. With the military co-opted fully after 25 years of socialism, the right lack the manpower to mount an effective revolutionary attempt; those with money have fled and the remaining and even former middle classes have the most to lose from another failed attempt to topple him. The US will never invade Venezuela, it’s hardly Granada and would likely hit the casualty level (~2000 US troops) where public sentiment can quickly turn, but if it can humiliate the military, and humiliate the regime, it probably makes the end marginally more likely.

~2000 US troops

How???? Maybe in the case of an insurgency or occupation they can pick off a bunch of troops, but I don't see how Venezuela can break the double digits in kills in a conventional conflict with the US.

Because the loyal natives who benefited most from socialism will riot and the army is relatively loyal (and they don’t need to be fully loyal, just loyal enough for some to rebel and hand over the weapons and ammunition stores), the chance of a prolonged leftist insurgency in the country’s difficult terrain is significant. A FARC type campaign (and various other Latin American leftist groups, cartels and likely low key foreign governments hostile to the US would gladly fund it) would be very costly in terms of lives even if an initial invasion was fast, there would be bombings and terror campaigns targeting occupying soldiers, the whole thing would turn into a quagmire.

My understanding is that drug running boats are designed differently from a boat that would be used for other civilian purpose- they're semisubmersible cargo vessels, introducing mechanical complexity that requires a bigger crew than 'pilot, navigator, relief shifts, maybe a cook'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine

That is... not a fishing vessel. I'd also point out that an organization that can run a submarine R&D program and build it's own shipyards is one which is not going away- a lot of first worlders think of Latin American cartels as big gangs, but the crips ain't doing that. An organization that designs and builds submersible stealth oceangoing cargo ships to carry narcotics into the first world is big enough to justify a lot more force than some guys in a rowboat trying to make a drop in a wildlife refuge nobody ever goes to.

The video on Wikipedia, which I believe is the first strike, is a normal-looking speedboat. I expect those are a lot more common than the crazy submarines. They’re just not as newsworthy.

The videos I've seen of the drug strikes haven't been on narco-subs, but have been on go-fasts. Assuming SecDef hasn't been completely lying about the location of the strikes in the video... there are very, very few other reasons to be in that part of the open ocean in a go-fast without a motheryacht nearby.*

And if you've got the money for a yacht and auxiliary go-fast... well, maybe you are a drug smuggler, but you're sure as hell not the one personally smuggling them.

*Granted, kinetic strikes on the whole boat is a step up from the previous interdiction methods, which are a) USCG boarding team, or b) USCG sniper in a helicopter with an anti-materiel rifle, and my understanding is that in the latter case, the smugglers will sometimes try to interpose themselves between the chopper and the engines in the (usually true) hope that the Coast Guard will hesitate to kill someone just to stop a smuggler.

“Very few other reasons” is also not a good standard for regular use of deadly force. If you’re not actively at war, which we are not (certain Mexican cartels are functionally at war with the Mexican military but not our own), then if not a beyond reasonable doubt standard, you need to be in that similar ballpark. That innocent reasons are unlikely does not make them impossible.

The entire point of having a different standard for actual war is that different standards inherently apply. But philosophically and legally, using wartime standards because you’ve used some kind of indirect killing logic is a terrible, terrible precedent. Actual terror groups have histories of directly and intentionally killing Americans, and so there is legally and philosophically more latitude. Drug cartels sell drugs to other people, who sell those drugs to Americans, who occasionally misuse the drugs and kill themselves (which the cartels don’t even want to happen because it deprives them of ongoing revenue)*. That’s… morally still somewhat direct, but the famously law is about far more than just morality. Doubly so when it comes to lethal force, something which definitionally is irreversible in multiple ways. Which, weirdly, is under appreciated in our society today.

(*Vertical integration among cartels varies widely and intentionality can vary, so there’s a theoretical maximalist case where a completely vertically integrated cartel deliberately laces their drugs with lethal doses and use false marketing to directly sell them to Americans only, but that’s not even something the Trump admin has bothered to argue and is highly implausible to boot).

“Very few other reasons” is also not a good standard for regular use of deadly force.

This is the evidence by which we, as individuals without any privileged information, must judge the situation. It's not (I very much hope) the sum-total of the evidence by which the administration is making these determinations. They haven't presented that evidence to the public... but they obviously wouldn't if its means of acquisition was at all circumspect. This administration has proven... erratic on certain matters, but they presumably would at least consult military intelligence regarding their targets, and I have pretty high hopes the NSA is capable of identifying genuine cartel vessels; is their security better than Iran's nuclear program?

None of which is to say we should just trust the process -- they've certainly made mistakes before -- and that's not to say the strikes are justified conditional on the targets being as described. Just that, pending evidence to the contrary, I think these likely are cartel vessels.

  • It turns out that You Can Just Do Things™.

Once again Trump is a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. This has been done from every administration I can think of in the recent decades. Trump just is his vulgar self again and bragging about it. It is not that Gitmo and Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki hadn't happened.

Everyone who voted for the 2001 Authorization for use of Military Force (99% of congressmen) knew that the military was going to kill Al-Qaida people. That was the whole point.

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