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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/

Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.

Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...

  1. Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?

  2. The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."

1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.

2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?

My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.

Trump had said US should have taken (meaning stolen) Iraqi oil on multiple occasions.

I mean, maybe we should have. It's hard to imagine a counterfactual world where Iraq had a thriving US-financed and operated oil infustry employing locals and generating economic activity/tax revenue is worse for the Iraqi people than what they currently have.

A western-backed petrol state is vastly preferable to a failed state, for essentially everyone except the jihadis. Just ask the Kuwaitis.

It not like Iraq isn't producing oil anyway (top 7th in the world), that's not one of their many problems.

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