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Well, at least seeing this made me forget about the stupid way people are reacting to the covid crisis...

https://apnews.com/4dec4c8431e8a6465aaeea0ab306f386

Basically, there's a crippled, decaying and slowing sinking oil freighter with like a million barrels of oil on board that is pretty much literally a ticking ecological time bomb anchored off the coast of yemen and has been there, slowly decaying, for years.

A group of yemeni rebels is refusing to let inspectors board the tanker, which is now too decayed to repair, as they see threatening to attack it and cause a massive oil spill as a sort of 'nuclear weapon" to threaten the world with, They are demanding millions of dollars to allow the oil to be removed from the tanker and threaten to attack anyone trying to take the oil.

So, these brilliant strategists are threatening to create a crisis that will cripple fishing and desalinization efforts in the area they live in as a weapon to extort money from the west.

It's actually kind of nice to see another crisis being created by human stupidity and refusal to deal with a looming disaster reasonably on a non covid related matter. Almost like a breath of fresh air after so long.

Or am I just getting cynical?

I hope no one here lives near enough to the million barrel ecological WMD to be hurt by in when the idiocy involved reached critical mass and triggers an explosion. If you do, you have my best wishes.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Or am I just getting cynical?

Honestly, the situation in Yemen is so fethed up from every conceivable angle, this threat (while shocking to us) is probably to them a drop of water in a bucket full of drops of water. Yemen is basically the Yugoslavia of the Arabian Penninsula, and like Yugoslavia there is no winning for the people who live there. There's just bad, badder, and baddest.

Drops of water in this example are metaphors for bombs. Yemen has literally be rained on with bombs the past few years. I doubt environmental consciousness is anywhere on their priorities list in that environment (that pun is accidental...).

The scary thing abut your post, lordofhats, is that you may be right The people of yemen may have reached a point where many of them just want to watch the world burn.

I think if that were the world I'd live in I'd find the idea I just want to watch the world burn laughable. The world there is already burning. What's one more fire?

Desperate people with little to lose and what appears to be a giant asset will do seemingly stupid things.

To the rebels, they think they've got a goldmine they can sell for hard cash but that everyone's trying to stiff them. Everyone else realizes the danger, but also, legitimately do not want to give any money to the rebels.

All parties involved are seemingly okay with an ecological disaster as the default outcome should they not get their way.

Deleted.

 Elbows wrote:
They could also take a tactic from some of the African pirates on the West coast of the continent. I forgot which country, precisely, but there is a country which actively pays pirates...not to raid their ships. They pose such a threat that the country can't deal with them military or via law enforcement...so they simply pay them a monthly wage NOT to pirate.

Bizarro world.

might aswell hire them as coastguard at that point no?

Deleted.

 Matt Swain wrote:
The scary thing abut your post, lordofhats, is that you may be right The people of yemen may have reached a point where many of them just want to watch the world burn.

no, they don't want the world burn, they don't care anymore if it burns, due to hunger, thirst, violence, trauma, etc. their imediate survival trumps any concern they might have beyond survival.

Yemen is a gak show, bombed to smithereens and back, with an allready bad infrastructural position before this and in a neighbourhood that has two local hegemons play " Who will be the only Hegemon, no rules adhered too¨", fighting a proxy war.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Elbows wrote:
Yeah, but think of all the healthcare and retirement you'd have to pay into? That's madness!

And?
States and institutions can allways be developped out of such groups. Now inevitably it will have consequences if such groups get institutionalised and also applicable to the rule of law and the inevitable buerocratisation and organisation and they will influence each other but it isn't the worst approach.
Not to mention who better to catch a pirate then another pirate that knows the MO.

 Elbows wrote:
They could also take a tactic from some of the African pirates on the West coast of the continent. I forgot which country, precisely, but there is a country which actively pays pirates...not to raid their ships. They pose such a threat that the country can't deal with them military or via law enforcement...so they simply pay them a monthly wage NOT to pirate.

Bizarro world.

Not that bizarre, its happened many times in history. Heck during the age of sail era the major players in Europe would pay privateers to raid each others ships - they weren't "pirates" they were "privateers" but they were basically doing the same thing, just now under the official flag of one nation or another.


In the end if its cheaper to pay the pirates not to pirate than it is to deal with them head on then it can be a net win situation for all involved. Of course the risk is that as a country you're paying people who are directly opposed to you and empowering their position. This only works if the group is generally not all that interested in greater power. If they are then you're simply paying the opposing side who could come back with greater resources and instead of pirating your ships they come for your ports and land as well.

Another issue is if you give in and pay out to terrorist style demands for money/resources then that terror group is empowered. They might not blow up that oil ship, but it might give them the idea that its a really good way to get money. So they go steal another one and do it all over again. So instead of resolving the issue you simply kick the can down the road; with the risk that the next time they might steal a bigger ship or they might bungle the theft and it all goes up in flames or spills out anyway. It's a bit like how N. Korea has learned to bully the south a bit; blow something up; do some military displays; shout about a new weapon; lob some missiles over peoples heads. Often as not all in a bid to get some aid/money/relief/food etc... They've learned that they can perform an action and get a reward from it. Of course they are also punished, but with the huge black market system, smuggling and whatever China is doing; they've learned to survive (they also dont' really care a vast amount about their general population it would seem). In the end they'll likely keep doing that until either they do too much and get attacked/invaded or sanctions become too extreme or they get a major regime change.