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.
Maybe it really was doing something fishy.
Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
111–120 of 164 posts
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Venezuela has a habit (recently) of putting loyalty ahead of meritocracy in government positions. I would not be at all surprised if the captain had minimal actual nautical experience, but a lot of party loyalty.
Even with the merit, it's hard to train a professional Navy. Being a ship captain (or any other position, even the lowly deck seaman) is a mentally challenging task. There's a lot going on and it's expensive to get as much underway time as the well-financed Navies do. Most Navy ships in small countries sit in port a lot, not sure about Venezuela, but they can't have a ton of cash to waste on underway time.
Even lots of money is no guarantee, just look at the US Navy's embarrassing string of recent nautical incidents like the USS FitzGerald's.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The US ought to invade Venezuela. Interesting coming from someone who claims to feel for the hardships of venezuelans. > Venezuelans are hungry and destitute due to the regime They are hungry because of crippling economic sanctions. > and the country's domestic turmoil Started by foreign desire for regime change. > It's truly disgusting the kind of inhumanity that Russia and Cuba have propped up in Venezuela. They…
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Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US ought to invade Venezuela. Interesting coming from someone who claims to feel for the hardships of venezuelans. > Venezuelans are hungry and destitute due to the regime They are hungry because of crippling economic sanctions. > and the country's domestic turmoil Started by foreign desire for regime change. > It's truly disgusting the kind of inhumanity that Russia and Cuba have propped up in Venezuela. They…
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> Only a small part of the economic issues are caused by sanctions:
Forbes is part of the pro-regime change crowd, just like the nytimes, washington post, etc. If sanctions are so neglible, then why bother with it? Let venezuela crumble on its own. Or maybe the fact that it wasn't crumbling was the reason to sanction/destabilize/destroy it?
> Cuba went through the same but didn't turn out like that.
Turn out like what?
> Looking at your post history you appear to support the genocide of millions of Muslim Uyghurs in China + Chinese colonization of Africa, maybe try being less of a tankie and look more into the facts.
People can freely look at my comment history and tell that you are lying. So why bother lying with your throwaway?
Maybe you can answer my question. "What's with the ridiculous anti-venezuelan propaganda all of a sudden everywhere on social media?"
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Only a small part of the economic issues are caused by sanctions: Forbes is part of the pro-regime change crowd, just like the nytimes, washington post, etc. If sanctions are so neglible, then why bother with it? Let venezuela crumble on its own. Or maybe the fact that it wasn't crumbling was the reason to sanction/destabilize/destroy it? > Cuba went through the same but didn't turn out like that. Turn out like wha…
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Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a boarding party via helicopter or specialized boarding craft (fast boats and rapeling?).
And how do you stop a ship if you consider it a biohazard and don’t want it to get near your dock (and also don’t have the equipment to safely board it without effectively throwing your sailors’ lives away), but it’s insistently coming in anyway? (Perhaps because it’s a “ship of the dead”, drifting unmanned toward your port. Or because it’s, say, just a big barge carrying a pile of tires that’s on fire.) ...would a s…
its called a tugboat.
a depth charge is something you drop at submarines - a charge at depth. You can sink surface vessels with any combination of regular munitions.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
>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.
Right, the rest of Latin America is doing far better than the country under decades of US economic attacks. That's why there's no immigrant problem of overly poor people from countries like Uruguay, basking in that glorious US assisted regime change.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, ramming used to be BIG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lissa_(1866) One can't possibly blame the captain wanting to be as cool as admiral Tegetthoff back then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anton_Romako_001.jpg
No need to go that far back. One famous one is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_torpedo_boat_PT-109
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glowworm_(H92)
Back in WWI it still worked, with the famous HMS Dreadnought ramming a submarine.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#119This is insane. I can't imagine what was going through the Venezuelan captain's head trying to do this. It's one thing if the shooting is already started to defend yourself. But even if this stunt had worked, you're looking at many months of downtime while your ship is being repaired in drydock. Millions of dollars, and bigtime loss of capability for a small navy. Unless you are an icebreaker, you just don't intentio…
Ramming (or "shouldering") is not that uncommon. The Chinese Coast Guard has built large, lightly-armed ships[1] partly because the size helps them ram/shoulder other ships out of the way in the course of attempting to build artificial islands and claim sovereignty in the South China Sea. Of course, ramming an 8500-ton icebreaker with a 1500-ton corvette is a different story, and in the Venezuelan case, the stupid ha…
The Tamil Tigers (?) also used ramming boats to great effect.
Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, less crazy than trying to ram a ship with a locomotive I suppose: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0... https://in.reuters.com/video/watch/idOVC7T0OCH Strange days.
haha, what's the under/over on this guy being a q-anon freak?
He is one.