Comment by mountainb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mountainb | Hacker News Reader

The bigger issue related to this is not the Khashoggi was tortured to death and dismembered, but that America's alliance with Saudi Arabia is both immoral and strategically stupid. However, Saudi Arabia's corrupt grip on our ruling class is so thorough that it is able to suppress speech like this that might make the Saudi government look even slightly bad.

We never get to the point to which the Saudi alliance is questioned at a fundamental level. The motte and bailey style 'debate' stays in the realm of whether or not the Khashoggi murder was bad, or on some other irrelevant side issue of the Saudi government's conduct. The problem, essentially, is our military alliance with Saudi Arabia. This is almost never debated. Only side issues such as Saudi women not being allowed to drive or Saudi use of the death penalty are ever allowed to be raised. It's considered 'unserious' to question the iron security guarantee that our republic provides to this royal family.

Saudi Arabia could turn 1 million Kahsoggis into meatballs and the American Op-Ed-Oligarchy would be unwilling to question the fundamental diplomatic issue of America's alliance with Saudi Arabia. We have already tested this commitment when a couple dozen Saudi nationals blew up the World Trade Center twice and the alliance with Saudi Arabia only strengthened as a response.

This would be like Gavrilo Princip killing Franz Ferdinand and the Habsburgs responding by increasing foreign and military aid to Serbia, encouraging Serbia to blow up more of its neighbors, then going to war on behalf of Serbia multiple times to increase its power and influence. 27D chess or corrupt-stupid-evil; you decide.

You can't question our alliance with Saudi Arabia without questioning our alliance with Israel. Well, you can, but the former flows from the latter. If we're going to be allies with Israel, then Iran is our enemy. If Iran is our enemy, then Saudi Arabia is our friend. We've come up with all sorts of other rationalizations over the years, but that is the core of it.

I've begun to see the faintest whiffs of questioning the Saudi alliance among the foreign policy establishment, but I suspect our deeply pro-Israel sentiments will prevent anything from changing for a long time.

> will prevent anything from changing

also petrodollars and preserving reserve currency status

> If Iran is our enemy, then Saudi Arabia is our friend

Why is this?

JFK's attempts to stop Israel's nuclear weapons program ended when he got shot in the head. His successor, LBJ, dropped the issue.

Can’t question the isreal alliance either, some things are just off topic.

Haha. It seems you have hit the nail on the head with exacting precision

That one is a lot stickier, because no one tried to systematically wipe out the Saudi people.

Hundreds of thousands of Saudis didn't immigrate here to escape certain death.

There's also the fact that America is still a very religious country - and takes it seriously - so many people support Israel because they really do believe they're protecting God's chosen people. No one should "wish" for war, but I've often wondered what would happen if Saudi Arabia decided to wage war against Israel. I'm very curious with whom America would ultimately side.

> There's also the fact that America is still a very religious country - and takes it seriously - so many people support Israel because they really do believe they're protecting God's chosen people.

From what I understand, there is also a surprisingly large base of devout Christians who support Israel in the hopes/belief that it will lead to a prophesied battle at Armaggedon, helping to usher the end of the world. Apparently [0] George Bush Jr. may have been a believer in this theory (though others dispute this: [1])

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a...

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/15/bush-chirac-and-the-war...

Your comment reminds me of a series of concepts that I've discovered while going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of protestant theology:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theonomy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

Some of this stuff makes the blood curdle. If it was spewed by some guy in a turban the US would probably have had him killed with robots from the sky by now...

"According to an Ifop opinion poll in October, 57 per cent of French Muslims under 25 think sharia law is more important than the law of the French republic"

https://www.ft.com/content/b6c0681f-3a0a-40fa-8b90-86997925f...

In the past few decades, unequivocal support for Israel has fallen among American Jews, while it has grown among Evangelical Christians. Admittedly, these numbers are complicated, as a majority American Jews say they feel an "emotional connection" to Israel, but nearly 60% are critical of the country's policies, and fewer than 25% are both pro-Israel and supportive of the current government policies. See https://jewishcurrents.org/are-95-of-jews-really-zionists/, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/80-percent-of-us-jews-say-the..., etc.

> There's also the fact that America is still a very religious country - and takes it seriously - so many people support Israel because they really do believe they're protecting God's chosen people.

Even that's stickier than it initially appears, in that some of the American evangelical supporters of Israel do so because they think it's necessary to start the End Times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/h...

These prophesies don't actually end well for the Jews.

Everyone thinks their group is chosen by god. News at 6.

None of theses superstitions end well for humanity.

> Everyone thinks their group is chosen by god. News at 6.

Not all apocalyptic thinkers get a reasonable shot at the nuclear codes of the world's primary superpower every few years, though.

"If Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent one to protect her interests in the region"

“My father would say, were he a Jew, he would never, never entrust the security of his people to any individual nation, no matter how good and how noble it was, like the United States.”

For some reason, we never talk about the religious motivations behind the creation of the state of Israel.

The balfour declaration was signed well before the holocaust had ever happened; using the holocaust to justify the creation of the colony if israel is anachronistic at best.

Christianity and Protestantism in particular have historically been sources of antisemitism and this was true up till well within the 20th century. The fact that hardcore American Christians have now been converted to pro-Israel fanatics, makes the whole thing much weirder, if anything.

The reality is more complicated than that. This line of "pro-Israel fanatics" goes back quite some time, albeit in different forms. Take British Israelism as an example. [0]

Granted, British Israelism would morph into an even more insane (and downright misanthropic) off-shoot, but you know, humans gonna human I guess. I think these attitudes about Israel have existed for quite a long time anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

The Israel alliance is hard to question simply because, unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel is very popular in the US. If all you saw was the polling data - there’s a country A with 70% favorability overall, at least 50% within each political party, and their main rival B has 20% favorability - you wouldn’t be surprised to see a strong and hard to question alliance with A.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more.

And what's worse, its over oil - a resource that, no matter what your stance on climate change is - from which we are rapidly transitioning away.

Absolutely. I am pro-climate change and I still think the US’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is strategically stupid.

> I am pro-climate change

Wait, what? What do you mean?

What does “no matter your stance on climate change” mean? (parent comment)

For the record, I am also pro-gravity.

It sounds as if you fought for the climate to change faster, liberating tons of methane in the atmosphere and burning fossil fuels like crazy.

Which is a stance that nobody believe, so it's clearly not that.

Even people who deny climate change as a science wouldn't describe themselves as "fighting for the climate to change faster."

This would actually be hilarious... some deranged Bond villain who's conspiring to melt the permafrost to release all the methane so as to drive humanity extinct, lol...

That's what Bitcoin is, essentially.

As someone with quite a few Bitcoins, and who actively mines using my hardware when it isn't in use, that is most emphatically not what it is.

Every cent you "save" is diluted when the Federal Reserve decides to print up a trillion or two.

You can't "print up" a few trillion Bitcoins. You can't add more. You can't magically make them go away (unless of course your throw away your hard drive with the wallet data on it...).

And unlike any other type of currency, where some shady deal can take place and there's absolutely no record of it... there's a ledger of every single transaction ever made on the Bitcoin network. You may not know who that address belongs to, but the transaction is there.

> Every cent you "save" is diluted when the Federal Reserve decides to print up a trillion or two.

And yet, disregarding exceptional circumstances in world history, it's generally stable. I can buy bread for roughly the same amount of dollars I bought it for last year.

> You can't "print up" a few trillion Bitcoins. You can't add more. You can't magically make them go away (unless of course your throw away your hard drive with the wallet data on it...).

You can do plenty other funny things if you have equivalent amount of power.

> And unlike any other type of currency, where some shady deal can take place and there's absolutely no record of it... there's a ledger of every single transaction ever made on the Bitcoin network. You may not know who that address belongs to, but the transaction is there.

Sure. But instead, you can just... give someone the key to your address. Roughly equivalent to how shady deals happen with fiat - you give someone a briefcase full of cash.

All of that is irrelevant to the point here, though: the point is that if you tried to imagine an evil mastermind hell-bent on accelerating climate change, Bitcoin is what they would come up with - an engine of unlimited energy waste, fueled by naivety and unadulterated greed.

Whether you believe climate change is real, not real, man-made, not man-made, naturally induced, unnaturally induced, etc., its all pointless.

Electric cars are the future no matter what. They're quieter, they produce less emissions over their life cycle, they have a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), they're faster, and frankly, every electric vehicle I've ever driven is just plain more fun to drive (granted I've only ever driven three, but still...).

Our shipping is moving away from oil and to natural gas, because shipping is an enormous contributor to CO2 emissions.

So oil's value is going to be dropping precipitously in the next 100 years.

I don’t think it’s just over oil. Saudi Arabia is also considered strategically important as an outpost against Iran. I went to Google Iran and this was the top hit [1]. The timing of these two stories is very interesting.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-exploring-...

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize“

Yeah, but why is the list growing?

If you respond to a power grab by competing over who can surrender the fastest, what do you expect to happen?

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