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‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

hellothere1337 wrote: post #105
dredmorbius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >

Where did I insinuate about astroturfing mate?

In your now-deleted comment, which had already been flagged when I wrote the above.

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#112

Post by f6v »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #58
mschuster91 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. Gaddafi would have died sooner or later anyway, and he was a kleptocrat like all other dictators were and are. > but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore? What would be needed is an intervention force t…

Gaddafi was bad but his regime did manage to make Libya one of the most developed countries of the region before Western sanctions eventually hit, and they did that without borrowing any money abroad thanks to their oil reserves. > the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa That is pure propaganda BS.

> Gaddafi was bad

It’s not like Libyan society was ripe for democracy. We see that those who replaced him aren’t democratic leaders, but savages. Was he a merciless ruler? I mean, maybe. More interesting question is whether his methods were appropriate for the challenges of ruling that kind of society.

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#113

Post by badcppdev »

hnbad wrote: post #59
nonrandomstring wrote: post #5

Heartbreaking. The tone of all observers is that this is as much a failure of governance as an environmental catastrophe. As everyone who was at Burning Man learned, plumbing and drainage is the basis of civilisation. Letting it go to rack and ruin is storing up misery, so it worries me that in the UK we've had 20 years of government that has effectively "washed its hands" of water management.

There's a dead comment here about how it was "actually a dam collapse, not a flood" and how no news source is reporting on that. From what I can gather, at a glance, at least the AP, The Guardian and Al Jazeera all state that the flood was the result of two dams collapsing and the cause of the collapse was the storm. Even the article itself states that the two dams were poorly maintained and the collapse is the resul…

The dead comment was from a HN user who, from their comment history, has trouble fitting in with the norms of participation in this forum. They were unhappy with the use of the word flood even though the example sentence for the word flood in the Oxford dictionary is: "the dam burst, flooding a small town"

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#114

Post by f6v »

misja111 wrote: post #18
totetsu wrote: post #2

When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. I know that’s kind of a knee jerk reaction, but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?

> .. if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi Gaddafi was assassinated by his own people. America and a few European countries gave military support to the rebels after Gaddafi had started trying to violently suppress the rebellion of his people, that is true. If they wouldn't have done that, he might have succeeded in murdering enough of his people to stay in power, who knows.

Rebellions aren’t good just because they’re rebellions.

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#116

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #88

Dams (and their collapses) are one of those risks which are latent and underappreciated but devastating force-multipliers of weather and climate-related events. The Derna dam collapses, even with only partial death reports is already the second deadliest recorded dam failure, and is close on the lower-end range of death estimates for the worst, the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China, following another weather catastro…

Another Guardian story examines the contrast between Morocco's response to its earthquake disaster, and Libya to Storm Daniel and resulting dam collapses. It highlights some of the same points I've made above:

Peter Beaumont, a senior Guardian international reporter, has spent this week in the Atlas mountains and is a veteran of several reporting trips to Libya. He says: “Libya is a failed – or semi-failed – state that has been caught up in a protracted civil war since 2011, which has obviously had a massive impact on the country’s infrastructure and social cohesion.

“Morocco, on the other hand, is a functioning modern state. The place works – Marrakech, Tangier, Rabat are all modern cities. Ordinary people have been mobilised on a mass scale, and there is a very strong sense of nationhood.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/15/libya-and-moro...>

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#117

Post by lenkite »

legutierr wrote: post #101
objektif wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like after the coup?

A Russian puppet was overthrown by a revolution of the people, and replaced by a democratically-elected president, followed by multiple successful elections, and the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another, over nearly a decade, and Russian apologists call it a "coup".

A coup sponsored by the US and orchestrated by Nuland with support of the U.S. state department.

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#118

Post by LargeTomato »

themgt wrote: post #21
PedroBatista wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi. If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today. Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the reb…

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi. Right. "We came, we saw, he died! [lol]" Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities This is just revisionist nonsense. There…

What parts of North Africa were affected?

Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Less Rocco (sometimes called Western Sahara) are either stable or were not destabilized by the Libyan civil war.

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#119

Post by FireBeyond »

misja111 wrote: post #45
mcv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is because they didn't intervene in Rwanda, and got widely criticised for that. I believe it was decided that genocide demands intervention.

The bottom line seems to be that the West is criticized by some people no matter what they do, or even what they don't do.

> what they do, or even what they don't do

That's part of it. Because the West usually does these things for purely self-interest, but likes to play the "world police" card to justify things, then gets frustrated when people say "well, if you're the world police, why are you not stopping the genocide in Rwanda?" and the West shrugs, but the answer is generally obvious, "because there's no benefit we can glean from it".

Re: ‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

#120

Post by jcranmer »

thriftwy wrote: post #20
PedroBatista wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi. If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today. Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the reb…

EU/US has supported a rebellion in Lybia (equals created a rebellion in Lybia) and then used direct military force to topple Lybian regime. I'm not even sure who administered the city which was crushed by the flood in 2023 considering the free-for-all in Lybia ever since. As usual with Western-induced rebellions, everybody ended up losing. I'm also not sure why you are confident that Gaffafi was going to "obliterate…

> I'm not even sure who administered the city which was crushed by the flood in 2023 considering the free-for-all in Lybia ever since.

Derna is in Eastern Libya, so it's under control of the Libyan National Army regime, the one run out of Benghazi. Pretty easy to look up actually.

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