The Gaming Den

tussock wrote:Oh, and the entire "anti-corruption" group in the police was just full of shit and trying to put the government out and lied all the time. Which is, yeah, that's not what police are supposed to do at all.

Being super corrupt is, however, what police actually do all the time. The only weird thing here is that they worked against their own government as part of a coup - usually they're the ones propping up "whoever happens to be in power" while maintaining their own status quo.

Perhaps most remarkably, after Bolsonaro won the presidency, he created a new position of unprecedented authority, referred to by Brazilians as “super justice minister,” to oversee an agency with consolidated powers over law enforcement, surveillance, and investigation previously interspersed among multiple ministries. Bolsonaro created that position for the benefit of the very judge who found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, and it is the position Moro now occupies.

Australia has the same deal going on, where a corrupt police chief turned corrupt government minister was put in charge of a new super justice division that covers the entirety of law enforcement, surveillance, espionage, investigation and corruption. In his case it was more to keep him happy and prevent yet another in-party coup, rather than as payment for helping with a coup.

tussock wrote:In Brazilian news today, or a couple days ago at least, the current Minister of Justice, who was previously the Judge overseeing the case against the previous President, actually conspired with prosecution to bring the case that he then sat on, imprisoning Lula, and resulting in the change of govt. where he is now a high paid part of the new one.

Oh, and the entire "anti-corruption" group in the police was just full of shit and trying to put the government out and lied all the time. Which is, yeah, that's not what police are supposed to do at all.

Hmm. That's, shocking really. More to come, as Glen Greenwald apparently has a huge hoard of leaked tapes and documents. Excellent.

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/bra ... -car-wash/

Perhaps most remarkably, after Bolsonaro won the presidency, he created a new position of unprecedented authority, referred to by Brazilians as “super justice minister,” to oversee an agency with consolidated powers over law enforcement, surveillance, and investigation previously interspersed among multiple ministries. Bolsonaro created that position for the benefit of the very judge who found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, and it is the position Moro now occupies. In other words, Moro now wields immense police and surveillance powers in Brazil — courtesy of a president who was elected only after Moro, while he was as judge, rendered Bolsonaro’s key adversary ineligible to run against him.

It just gets worse as you read more. Complete coup hidden behind a sham of an election.

I don't have enough "I told you so"s to distribute to people who swore on their mothers that Moro was basically the second coming of Jesus. And what's worse it's that most of these same people are still sure that that fucking traitor did the right thing, because he saved us from Social Democracy Socialism Communism.

Really, I've been avoiding posting about Brazil's politics here because this is now such a hopeless shitshow and I guess you guys already have to deal with the shitshows in your respective countries. But hey, this time Glenn fucking Greenwald is overseeing the leaks, so the World will know one way or another.

Glad Glenn found the one white supremacist fascist he disagrees with.

nockermensch wrote:Really, I've been avoiding posting about Brazil's politics here because this is now such a hopeless shitshow and I guess you guys already have to deal with the shitshows in your respective countries.

I enjoy hearing about other countrys shitshows though, lets the US (and Britian and Australia and China and ...) know they aren't alone, plus having news come from someone with some "skin in the game" makes it more interesting to me rather than some rando posting news about Brazil.

SCHADENFREUDE!

Americans love the misery of other countries. It fuels our exceptionalism and justifies our belief that, although things might be tough here, the rest of the world is worse, and that we are the best country on God's green cock.

A wild article appeared! This one is about the British tanker captured by Iran ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... hip-latest ). It was bound for Saudi Arabia.

And as I was looking at the world map above my desk, I realized that there is no way for Saudi Arabia to get directly to the ocean. And the wild conspiracy theory part of my brain thought So maybe Saudi Arabia is meddling in Yemen so that they can gain ground enough to establish a direct port. And upon searching for that, I found a YouTube video (everything's on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om7q2t3X4p8 ) about just that. Yay! I'm not the only person who thinks so! But wait... That's an RT video; it's not to be taken seriously.

So is the idea actually crazy?

For the most part it isn't worth invading countries to get access to ports when your existing trade networks are fine. But also they were literally in control of the puppet Yemeni government before, so it's not like this would be a new thing they were acquiring.

Also, did you know that an Iranian Tanker was seized by the UK? Just thought I'd bring that up, might be relevant to Iran/UK relations.

But the rebels threw that stability into question, right?

Yes, I did know about the tanker - it was seized near Gibraltar, if I recall correctly. I have no doubt that the British tanker was retaliation.

Maj wrote:But the rebels threw that stability into question, right?

Yes, I did know about the tanker - it was seized near Gibraltar, if I recall correctly. I have no doubt that the British tanker was retaliation.

I'm not sure it is appropriate to call them rebels, but it is certainly true that KSA has less control because of the civil war. But I'm really not sure that effects their ability to trade oil since KSA already has ports in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and owning an entire country so you can transport your oil by land across that country and then use their ports is more work than just shipping by sea where 9999 times out of 10000 no one is going to bother your shipping.

The Saudis are opposed to Iran, Yemen is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It's also very close to Saudi Arabia, and so they are dropping a lot of bombs on it, with refuelling and targeting support from the United States of America, which congress and senate voted to stop, and Trump vetoed, which is an insane way to run a country, but whatever.

Trump supports Saudi Arabia for the same reason every American president has, they sell cheap oil, vastly under market rates, to US oil companies, who then import it to the US. The end.

tussock wrote:The Saudis are opposed to Iran, Yemen is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

This is a really stupid thing to say.

The Yemeni factions have been boiling to and or killing each other since 2009. They are local Yemeni factions, and KSA involved itself on behalf of the party in power who was widely understood to know his place right away.

Iran has no control over the Houthis, has no significant path to supply them, and even the most aggressive unfounded allegations of Iranian evil influence postdate KSA involvement and amount to some AK shipments.

This isn't "a proxy war with Iran" this is KSA involving itself in a civil war because they had a clear favorite side and then a year later Iran shipping some AK crates because they realized that KSA bombing another country with US bombs is great because it distracts from people bombing them.

How do you think proxy wars work, other than by one big country militarily supporting one side and another big country militarily supporting the other?

Like, In Afghanistan in the 80's, that was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States, because the US gave some weapons to the rebels and the SU bombed the rebels on behalf of the government they liked.

Seriously, what the fuck? It's literally exactly the same thing as the gold standard proxy war.

tussock wrote:How do you think proxy wars work, other than by one big country militarily supporting one side and another big country militarily supporting the other?

Like, In Afghanistan in the 80's, that was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States, because the US gave some weapons to the rebels and the SU bombed the rebels on behalf of the government they liked.

Seriously, what the fuck? It's literally exactly the same thing as the gold standard proxy war.

How do you think Chronology works?

You answered a question of "why is KSA in Yemen?" with "well KSA used time machines to know that in the future there would be an AK shipment from Iran, so they waged a several year long bombing campaign and spent billions of dollars to thwart an AK shipment that hand't happened yet when they started bombing."

There was a history to Afghanistan before the Russians went in.

Like, at some point that many thousands of years of history and events and wars and dying empires drew in the Soviet Union and it became a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

And there is a much shorter history to the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but still, Saudi Arabia was claiming from day 1 of their bombing that they supported the government because the rebels had Iranian military support, and they considered the whole thing to be a plot by Iran to remove one of their routes to the sea.

Iran was likewise, vocal in their support for the rebels, and did have a few senior military personnel in advisory positions within the movement (all on their own and without official government anything, just like the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan had unofficial US support through the CIA).

The thing in Syria, you know the Saudis support different groups to the Iranians, and those groups often shoot at each other, right? Even though Iran has much more trouble getting supplies in? Yes?

It is a proxy war. That is how proxy wars have always worked. That is what they are.

Regardless, the Iran shipment seizure isn't complicated at all.

• The UK seized an Iranian tanker that was passing through their waters near Gibraltar to get into the Mediterranean. The UK says it was bound for Syria and intended to break sanctions. This is entirely possible.
• The Iranians said explicitly that they would seize a British flagged vessel in response.
• After a few days, the Iranians seized a British flagged vessel on the grounds that its GPS wasn't reporting properly and it was slightly off course. This is entirely likely, since that kind of shit happens constantly, but you don't normally impound vessels for that kind of minor infraction unless you are looking for a reason to do so (which the Iranian government had already previously stated it was).

Impounding the original Iranian ship may have been "correct" in the sense that it may indeed have been intending to break Syrian sanctions. I don't know, but that story seems superficially plausible as there are lots of smuggling ships bringing things into and out of Syria right now and it's no stretch of the imagination that one of them might have been flying an Iranian flag or traveling from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

However, it's important to note that being "in the right" in international disputes counts for somewhere between "diddly squat" and "fuck all." In order to impound a ship and get away with it, you need to be able to either flex your military muscles and get the other party to back down or call in enough diplomatic favors to get other countries to convince the other party to take the loss. It does not appear that the UK has access to either of those as post-Brexit England.

First of all, the United States under Trump flagrantly broke all their deals with Iran and walked away for no actual gain. This removes all leverage the US has at any hypothetical diplomatic table with Iran. Iran is totally uninterested in anything the Trump administration has to say about anything at all. The UK's special relationship with the US may or may not be in jeopardy over the rise of fascism in both countries, but it doesn't much matter for this particular conflict because the amount of diplomatic pressure the US can bring to Tehran is zero.

Secondly, the UK's remaining main allies are mostly Europeans. But Theresa May has spent the last 2 years alienating and annoying Europe and the incoming prime minister BoJo has threatened to be more overtly antagonistic to European allies. What diplomatic capital is France or Italy willing to burn on England's behalf right now?

This isn't an example of a proxy war, it's just England testing her strength and finding that she has none.

-Username17

Someone claimed that the escalation pattern would look something like:

1. UK Seizes Iranian ship, Iran seizes UK ship
2. UK & allies lock down Iran's oil trade, Iran locks down the strait of Hormuz
3. Something involving bombs

To which I said, "so why not escalate to level 2 and stop, to increase oil costs and help save the world?", and the only real downside they could come up with was, "well... increasing oil prices will let Russia make more money!"

Which isn't nothing, but the more I think about it, the less impressed I am by it.

FrankTrollman wrote: This isn't an example of a proxy war, it's just England testing her strength and finding that she has none.

Or you know, it's just they doing what they've been doing for centuries.

British stealing shit from other countries at sea is quite old news.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Someone claimed that the escalation pattern would look something like:

1. UK Seizes Iranian ship, Iran seizes UK ship
2. UK & allies lock down Iran's oil trade, Iran locks down the strait of Hormuz
3. Something involving bombs

To which I said, "so why not escalate to level 2 and stop, to increase oil costs and help save the world?", and the only real downside they could come up with was, "well... increasing oil prices will let Russia make more money!"

Which isn't nothing, but the more I think about it, the less impressed I am by it.

You mean that maybe Russia isn't the ultimate evil? Shocking I know.

Somebody coming to accuse you of being Putin's puppet in 3,2,1...

I was never particularly optimistic about our chances against climate change but it is going to be real funny when a bunch of neoliberal shit sacks trumping up bullshit charges to arrest a popular left candidate in brazil ends up dooming the human race.

Stuff recently: 1) the lula arrest was absolute bullshit and we have the inside records to prove it.

2) bolsanaro has been doing lots of deforestation as expected.

3) soon we will reach a deforestation tipping point that turns the entire amazon into savanna and this will output more carbon dioxide than all human emissions since 1800.

So, at what point does Brazil's efforts to deforest the Amazon become an act of war on the rest of the world?

violence in the media wrote:So, at what point does Brazil's efforts to deforest the Amazon become an act of war on the rest of the world?

Never because according to capitalism you have an inherent right to kill everyone in the world to get five extra dollars in profit since it is "your" property. You could buy all the food and then refuse to give it to anyone starve them all to death and that is morally just since it's your property, and CO2 emissions are fine under the same metric.

More practically, if only there was a large powerful country that had done any work at all to reduce CO2 releases of it's own, they could have the moral and political weight to cause changes in Brazil.

There's China, they've done lots about climate change, but they're sadly rather passive on the international scene. Or, you know, not sadly, but unfortunately? There's a word there somewhere for when someone's doing the right thing for complicated reasons and it's not helping.

--

Meanwhile, my local city council is going to reclaim some of the harbour and put us all in massive debt to help some useless fucker build a 5-star hotel in, well, probably the coldest and shittiest part of the coldest and shittiest city in the country.

The papers are full of stories about how this will help something sometime, and very few about how it's going to built at fucking sea level, and require immense public spending on new roads, power, sewage, and other things, that will all be at or below sea level.

Report today, by a local expert, somewhat plaintive about how he'd not been consulted, had to point out the fucking thing will be in the fucking ocean in fifty years, and they're expecting to take twenty years to finish building it.


Like, I despair. There's so much needs done, and instead of that they're doing this. Mind you, land prices rocketing up where I live, because 50m above sea level is enough.

20 years. To build a Hotel.
Shoot them all and start from scratch.

The NZ construction industry is astonishingly bad at its job, but that does sound unusual even by those standards. Which town/city is this?

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/201 ... ssion=true

French woman goes to the police to get an escort so that she can retrieve her belongings from her home after her boyfriend threatened to kill her. The police tells her that they can't give her an escort without a court order. The Woman calls a domestic violence hotline, the hotline operator tells the police that they're just spewing bullshit and that the law requires them to escort her without a court order. They still refuse.

This would be just a minor tragedy and not at all newsworthy, except that the President of France was taking a tour of the call center at the time, and was listening in on that specific call.