Why was the cruise ship in those waters? The ship was in the news last November about how they had no money and canceled a planned cruise, and I can't figure out what it's been doing since then.
Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
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Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#92More info on the cruise liner: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCGS_Resolute
Seems buying one made in Finland can be a lucky charm as ice breaking is obligatory here.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#93Since the US is currently trying to invade Venezuela under the guise of the fight against drugs trafficking I understand Venezuelans being more strict with their borders and would not diacard it being a setup.
The US ought to invade Venezuela. It makes a whole lot more sense than invading Iraq or Syria. Venezuelans are hungry and destitute due to the regime, and the country's domestic turmoil has been spilling over into other nations where Venezuelan emigrants endure so much hardship in their travels that many of them turn to crime and panhandling just to be able to eat and have a place to sleep. It's truly disgusting the kind of inhumanity that Russia and Cuba have propped up in Venezuela.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#94Does anyone else feel like we've been living in a comic strip lately?
I've felt like I'm stuck in some alternate history timeline since 2001.
Since 2001? The CIA was actually trying to spy on the Russians via psychic powers in the late 1970's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project (edit- I suppose it was the US Army and the CIA)
There was a group of people that committed suicide to try and get their souls on a magical spaceship in the early 1970's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
Weird stuff has been going on forever, it's just that our capacity to report meaningless stuff has grown over time. A few decades ago you would have never heard about two ships colliding with zero casualties unless you worked in the shipping industry or maybe the Venezuelan government.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#95Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US wanted to invade, apparently we could do it with a handful of cruise ships. Why send carriers when Carnival will do?
The US could not want to invade, instead opting to arm and assist an insurgency in Venezuela. A cruise liner that is supposed to be arrested in Buenos Aires would make for an excellent way to smuggle in supplies and mercenaries. Or they want a civil war that they can then assist with. We have done similar things in the past, in Syria and a host of Latin American countries. Even in Venezuela, the US aid Maduro forbid…
Look at the Latin American countries where the US propped up dictatorships in defense against the spread of Communism. Compare those places to nations like Nicaragua and Cuba. Which are the places where people starve, and which are the places where people thrive?
The problem with decrying US participation in domestic political affairs in Latin America during the Cold War is that the US was successful in fending off the spread of Communism, so we will never really know just how much poverty and kleptocracy would have been established if the spread of Communism in Latin America had been successful. Today, the only observable counterfactual is a handful of paranoid, illiberal, dirt-poor nations where the government rules with an iron fist, which is certainly the case in Venezuela.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those shells will do nothing to stop the ship but will just kill a lot of people for no gains. If they wanted to seize the ship, they should have brought a boarding party with them, I'm sure they have trained sailors for that. Source: I'm a former naval officer and I served as an ordnance officer on a ship with that exact 76mm gun. I also acted as the officer of the deck for quite a few boardings.
So how do you stop a cruiser like that?
Antiship missiles (AShM) or torpedeos would be the fastest way to get rid of a big ship.
But in this case they'd have a really hard time explaining why they thought that a cruise ship was enough of a menace to warrant launching AShMs at it.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#98Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#99> Of course, this would not be the first time a country has seized, or attempted to seize, a commercial ship to exert its own pressure on its international opponents.
Seems like many HN readers are failing to make it to this line, and are assuming "crazy captain" as the motivation.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#100More details here (from ship's owners, I presume):-
https://www.columbia-cs.com/statement-on-rcgs-resolute-incid...