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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5621 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."

  • -10

The story I heard is thag Trump asked for the boat to be destroyed, and someone down the chain of command decided to shoot a second missile, which technically did not voilate his orders. There's a lot of leeway in ways to destroy the boat, and legally I can't see the difference between shooting the boat while it was undamaged, versus shooting it after it was damaged by a missile but still floating.

Anyways clearly the intention is to kill the people on those boats, so any screeching that the survivors were finished off will fall on deaf ears. Anyone who wants those people dead is still happy, and anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

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

There is zero credible argument that these aren't smuggling boats. Even the most biased anti-Trump news isn't making that claim.

and anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.

I'm generally sympathetic about drugs. Drugs are sick. I prescribe them sometimes. But when the drugs in question are almost certainly large amounts of fent, I'm not too fussed if the dealer is blown up by a missile.

If Trump is telling the truth about what is going on, the drugs in question are cocaine being smuggled overland from Colombia through Venezuela, and then by boat island-hopping across the Caribbean - most of the boats sunk were travelling from Venezuela to Trinidad, and they don't have the range to reach the US directly. The fentanyl comes in from Mexico across the land border. (It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).

(It isn't clear to me if it is being cooked in Mexico or if it is being flown into Mexico with Mexican customs paid off).

As far as I know, the consensus view is that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl on US streets takes the following route:

  1. Precursor/component chemicals are produced in China by pharmaceutical companies.
  2. These components are shipped from China to Mexico. Some of this is smuggled in (e.g. triad-to-cartel B2B relationships), some is legally shipped and acquired by cartels later. The Chinese government may or may not be facilitating this process.
  3. The actual fentanyl is produced by the Mexican cartels, in drug labs throughout Mexico.
  4. Fentanyl is smuggled into the US over the land border. The potency of fentanyl means tiny volumes comprise many doses so this is not very hard to get away with on a useful scale, much easier than basically any other drug.
  5. Once in the US, the fentanyl is distributed around the country through traditional criminal channels until it eventually reaches the street-level dealers.

This consensus ignores the vast amounts of fentanyl being produced in Canada and coming across the wild Northern border.

It's drug money being laundered through real estate propping up Vancouver and Toronto housing prices.

I know that Trump's been saying this, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly wrong -- mainly because it's approximately as hard to get precursors into Canada as it is to get them directly into the US; also while we do have our own homegrown gangs their capacity is pretty limited compared to the cartel scene in Mexico.

You are certainly wrong about the real estate <-> drug money pipeline; this is rare enough to be negligible (mom & pop stuff) -- the main laundering going on (in the western part of the country anyways) is people trying to hide money from the Chinese government. Maybe you have real estate confused with casinos?

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