4 ms·

It was sad to watch so many "intellectual elites" fawn over MBS' "reforms". Wow women can drive and go to football games. Wow folks can watch Black Panther at t

It was sad to watch so many "intellectual elites" fawn over MBS' "reforms". Wow women can drive and go to football games. Wow folks can watch Black Panther at the movies. All the while the Saudi government is bombing the hell of out kids in Yemen with bombs that have the US flag painted on em. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a thorough re-evaluation of our relationship with KSA but I highly doubt it.

firasd 8y ago
I was also suspicious of MBS' 'anti-corruption' drive last year. There is no doubt that there's corruption among the rich and powerful but a sudden purge seemed more like a power consolidation move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Saudi_Arabian_purge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Saudi_Arabian_purge
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  That's smart for him to do. If you want absolute power you need to scare the crap out of the competitors(1). Remember, the way he got power is new, and could be there for 50 years. Lots of super rich, but unhappy cousins and uncles. No doubt the Marriot family meeting will happen again and again. (1)...of course after you've made sure no coup d'etat happens in response. He's consolidating power but if recordings come out on how the journo was murdered, this guy will no longer meet Bill Gates or Bezos in his next US trip. He'll be treated like mad African dictators were.
- FundThrowaway 8y ago
  An anti-corruption drive is nearly always just a power shift. Look at the various ones in China, it's never about corruption and more about one branch of the political elite taking out another.
walrus01 8y ago
It is not just the USA. The UK is a major manufacturer and supplier of military equipment to the Saudis, as is Canada. In fact just about every NATO country sells a significant amount of armaments to the Saudi military. Take a look at the wikipedia page for the saudi army and saudi air force and examine what aircraft, vehicles and weapons systems they use. There are ongoing operational maintenance and training contracts worth billions. US "advisors" employed by major defense contractors are in Saudi Arabia right now training the Saudi air force. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uk+arms+deal+saudi&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uk+...
- reaperducer 8y ago
  And the Saudi military comes to train on U.S. soil, as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Red_Flag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Red_Flag
- kopo 8y ago
  With all that oil money do you really want them to be propping up the Russian or Chinese mil complex?
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    With all that money (imho) they should have eliminated poverty, achieve peace with everyone around them, and have developed/progressed to the Star-Trek-TNG-quality-of-life we all dream of. But instead of the "United Federation of Planets" they became a mix beteen Ferengi and Cardassian.
thundergolfer 8y ago
Chomsky usefully distinguishes between truly dissident intellectuals and intellectuals who are merely servants of power. Those "intellectual elites" are most likely the latter.
duxup 8y ago
There was a dude doing an interview on NPR where he talked about a conference he was attending in Saudi Arabia. He said he was still going to the conference and talked about how the prince had a really tough job dealing with entrenched interests and he was doing "the best he could".... It was pretty sickening to listen to.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Do you have a better way to rule a country? Iraw had a terrible dictator so the USA military killed him (which he personally deserved), which created mass chaos and gruesome murder across get middle East.
  - duxup 8y ago
    My comment was really about the dude going to the conference. As far as your question the first step I guess would obviously be that I would object to killing journalists. Not a small ask, probabbly wouldn't create the collapse you're talking about.
CaptainZapp 8y ago
Wow women can drive and go to football games. Yeah; There's that little hitch that woman who actually camgaigned for this are rotting in a Saudi jail [1] [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/saudi-arabia-chilling-smear-campaign-tries-to-discredit-loujain-al-hathloul-and-other-detained-womens-rights-defenders/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/saudi-arabia-...
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is simple. They play lapdog for the petrodollar, and we not only turn a blind eye to everything they do, but even provide them weapons and other support in their endeavors. The only thing that would ever cause us to reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia, in the fashion you imply, is if one of the never ending Rumors of Saudi Arabia transitioning to settle oil contracts in e.g. the yuan became true. At that point expect us to suddenly decide Saudi Arabia is a huge violator of human rights under the rule of a despotic monarchy and is in desperate need of 'democracy' and 'regime change.' This whole relationship makes all the Rumors of the Sauds swapping to the yuan all the more intriguing. If that ever did happen our response could well trigger something like a worldwide Cold War. China and probably Russia would likely have an obligation of support for Saudi Arabia, America would pull in NATO and the world would likely split along one side or the other. For that matter Saudi Arabia is also not like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, ... . Saudi Arabia itself is now world's third largest spender on defense in raw dollars - and #1 in the world by percent of GDP. 10% of their entire GDP goes to defense. By contrast, we spend about 3%. On top of that Mecca and Medina reside within Saudi Arabia. Propaganda would be strongly on the side of the Saudis who would portray an attack on them as an attack on Islam.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >China and probably Russia would likely have an obligation of support for Saudi Arabia... I doubt that. In the KSA - Iran cold war, China is squarely in the Iran camp. Personally, I don't even think they side with Iran because we support The Kingdom. Rather I think they side with Iran because the more sanctions we put on Iran, the cheaper the oil and gas China can get out of Iran becomes. But yeah, there is pretty much zero chance that China supports KSA. Even if KSA wanted to use the Yuan. Just wouldn't happen.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    The US dollar is currently implicitly backed by oil. We 'print' (not literally - that's not how money is created) immense amounts of money to pay for things we cannot afford which ought have a catastrophic impact on any currency. We create 'growth' in wealth by dumping aforementioned funny money into assets creating price inflation -- quantitative easing. And our deficit is gradually growing out of control meaning we're left ever more paying off old debts by taking on more debts -- a policy that has a special term in the world of finance... But the big thing here is that oil is still by far the most in demand resource in the world. And, thanks to some incredibly prescient negotiations dating back to the 70s, the majority of all oil producing nations only settle oil contracts in the dollar. This means that if you have a dollar you have access to oil. This creates an amazing system of externalizing stability. Imagine the value of the dollar decreases. This incentivizes foreign nations to increase their reserves of the dollar to ensure stable access to a fixed amount of oil. This, simultaneously, creates a natural dampening affect on any sort of inflation as that money is taken out of circulation. And this even applies with the Mideastern nations themselves. Saudi Arabia and other nations also agreed to purchase US securities with whatever leftover dollars they have after accounting for national expenses. Once again, helping to mitigate any negative consequence of let's say 'creative' economic policy. Oil, the petro dollar in particular, stabilizes our currency and our economy. If you take the control of oil away from America, I do not think our military might alone would be sufficient to keep the dollar stable. And if the dollar loses stability our entire nation implodes. Everything that happens in the Mideast is based around this relatively simple fundamental aspect. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya. What they all actually have in common is that they expressed real intents to move away from the petro dollar. Venezuela has done the same. The reason China/Russia would side against the US has nothing to do with oil or Saudi Arabia or Iran. It has to do with the US. If the petro dollar collapses, which it arguably already is, the US isn't far behind. And the US is still the greatest immediate danger to those nations. And the only reason Saudi Arabia would ever turn away from the petro dollar is if they believe the US will not be able to force them back to it, which would all but require the collapse of the US.
adventured 8y ago
We're watching the exact same thing going on with China and the Xi dictatorship. Before that, Silicon Valley enjoyed loading up on vast amounts of money from Russian gangsters. They're torturing millions of Muslims in Xinjiang, directly or indirectly through terrifying police state actions that entirely revoke all human liberty. There is no greater mass atrocity going on anywhere on earth than what's happening in Xinjiang. How many people, companies, VC firms in Silicon Valley are working with China and living off of Chinese money? Where's the mass outrage and suspension of relations with China? Nope, you won't see that. No chance in hell. The millions of Muslims in China being tortured don't matter, and one journalist does? Not exactly: it's because China is a big fat platter of money and many want to feast on it. It's a willingness to disregard all ethics because the check is big enough. It's so much money, the people that claim to care about a single journalist, don't care about millions of people being actively repressed and tortured. It goes to the line about a million deaths being a statistic, and one death being a tragedy. Same premise at work.
- bildung 8y ago
  > They're torturing millions of Muslims in Xinjiang, directly or indirectly through terrifying police state actions that entirely revoke all human liberty. Despite being repeated often, to my knowledge there's no evidence for that. It also doesn't sound very plausible as only about 10M Uigurs and Kasachs live there (those two are the mostly muslim minorities living there). If we assume this is about young to middle age male adults (because this is the relevant cohort in practically every violent conflict), "millions" of these are getting imprisoned and tortured implies that a whopping 100% of non-elderly muslim males in the region are in internment camps. Actually more than 100%, if we assume not every Uigur is a Muslim. What we do know though, is that the conflicts in the region are very violent. Islamic extremists have bombed civilians on multiple occasions, including public markets, buses, killing sleeping workers in coal mines etc. [1] And we know the Chinese police has killed people at riots, though I haven't yet researched the circumstances. In both cases the violence is abhorrent and to be condemned. The mass torturing story seems to be fake, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict
relyio 8y ago
>Saudi government is bombing the hell of out kids in Yemen with bombs that have the US flag painted on em https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab... I don't want to single out the US or give the impression that I hate it. I actually love that country. No doubt one of the best countries in the world despite everything. But I don't think SA is particularly worse than any other regional/global powerful country on earth wrt. foreign policy. Why should that prompt the US (or any other security council country for that matter) to re-evaluate their relationship when they commit the same, if not worse, crimes.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Because it's one thing to do shitty things for your own self interested reasons... and somewhere along a scale it becomes another to do shitty things for somebody else's twisted reasons. I realize it's all intertwined and the House of Saud and the US are allies for reasons, but at some point it not only looks bad, I wonder if the Saudis will lose respect for the US?
- lenkite 8y ago
  All the casualties of the Iraq War (measure over a decade and a half) are just a drop in the bucket compared to number of people who have been killed or the number of children who have died of hunger in Yemen over a few years. Casualties in Yemen are reaching a half million and the number of deaths have not yet been tallied correctly by the UN due to the blockade
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
The US has killed 100k+ civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The press forgot about it and the American people mostly don't care. Welcome to the club, Saud.

firasd 8y ago

I was also suspicious of MBS' 'anti-corruption' drive last year. There is no doubt that there's corruption among the rich and powerful but a sudden purge seemed more like a power consolidation move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Saudi_Arabian_purge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Saudi_Arabian_purge

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
onetimemanytime 8y ago
That's smart for him to do. If you want absolute power you need to scare the crap out of the competitors(1). Remember, the way he got power is new, and could be there for 50 years. Lots of super rich, but unhappy cousins and uncles. No doubt the Marriot family meeting will happen again and again. (1)...of course after you've made sure no coup d'etat happens in response. He's consolidating power but if recordings come out on how the journo was murdered, this guy will no longer meet Bill Gates or Bezos in his next US trip. He'll be treated like mad African dictators were.
FundThrowaway 8y ago
An anti-corruption drive is nearly always just a power shift. Look at the various ones in China, it's never about corruption and more about one branch of the political elite taking out another.

walrus01 8y ago

It is not just the USA. The UK is a major manufacturer and supplier of military equipment to the Saudis, as is Canada. In fact just about every NATO country sells a significant amount of armaments to the Saudi military. Take a look at the wikipedia page for the saudi army and saudi air force and examine what aircraft, vehicles and weapons systems they use. There are ongoing operational maintenance and training contracts worth billions. US "advisors" employed by major defense contractors are in Saudi Arabia right now training the Saudi air force. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uk+arms+deal+saudi&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uk+...

reaperducer 8y ago
And the Saudi military comes to train on U.S. soil, as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Red_Flag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Red_Flag
kopo 8y ago
With all that oil money do you really want them to be propping up the Russian or Chinese mil complex?
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  With all that money (imho) they should have eliminated poverty, achieve peace with everyone around them, and have developed/progressed to the Star-Trek-TNG-quality-of-life we all dream of. But instead of the "United Federation of Planets" they became a mix beteen Ferengi and Cardassian.

thundergolfer 8y ago

Chomsky usefully distinguishes between truly dissident intellectuals and intellectuals who are merely servants of power. Those "intellectual elites" are most likely the latter.

duxup 8y ago

There was a dude doing an interview on NPR where he talked about a conference he was attending in Saudi Arabia. He said he was still going to the conference and talked about how the prince had a really tough job dealing with entrenched interests and he was doing "the best he could".... It was pretty sickening to listen to.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fjsolwmv 8y ago
Do you have a better way to rule a country? Iraw had a terrible dictator so the USA military killed him (which he personally deserved), which created mass chaos and gruesome murder across get middle East.
- duxup 8y ago
  My comment was really about the dude going to the conference. As far as your question the first step I guess would obviously be that I would object to killing journalists. Not a small ask, probabbly wouldn't create the collapse you're talking about.

CaptainZapp 8y ago

Wow women can drive and go to football games. Yeah; There's that little hitch that woman who actually camgaigned for this are rotting in a Saudi jail [1] [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/saudi-arabia-chilling-smear-campaign-tries-to-discredit-loujain-al-hathloul-and-other-detained-womens-rights-defenders/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/saudi-arabia-...

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is simple. They play lapdog for the petrodollar, and we not only turn a blind eye to everything they do, but even provide them weapons and other support in their endeavors. The only thing that would ever cause us to reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia, in the fashion you imply, is if one of the never ending Rumors of Saudi Arabia transitioning to settle oil contracts in e.g. the yuan became true. At that point expect us to suddenly decide Saudi Arabia is a huge violator of human rights under the rule of a despotic monarchy and is in desperate need of 'democracy' and 'regime change.' This whole relationship makes all the Rumors of the Sauds swapping to the yuan all the more intriguing. If that ever did happen our response could well trigger something like a worldwide Cold War. China and probably Russia would likely have an obligation of support for Saudi Arabia, America would pull in NATO and the world would likely split along one side or the other. For that matter Saudi Arabia is also not like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, ... . Saudi Arabia itself is now world's third largest spender on defense in raw dollars - and #1 in the world by percent of GDP. 10% of their entire GDP goes to defense. By contrast, we spend about 3%. On top of that Mecca and Medina reside within Saudi Arabia. Propaganda would be strongly on the side of the Saudis who would portray an attack on them as an attack on Islam.

bilbo0s 8y ago
>China and probably Russia would likely have an obligation of support for Saudi Arabia... I doubt that. In the KSA - Iran cold war, China is squarely in the Iran camp. Personally, I don't even think they side with Iran because we support The Kingdom. Rather I think they side with Iran because the more sanctions we put on Iran, the cheaper the oil and gas China can get out of Iran becomes. But yeah, there is pretty much zero chance that China supports KSA. Even if KSA wanted to use the Yuan. Just wouldn't happen.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  The US dollar is currently implicitly backed by oil. We 'print' (not literally - that's not how money is created) immense amounts of money to pay for things we cannot afford which ought have a catastrophic impact on any currency. We create 'growth' in wealth by dumping aforementioned funny money into assets creating price inflation -- quantitative easing. And our deficit is gradually growing out of control meaning we're left ever more paying off old debts by taking on more debts -- a policy that has a special term in the world of finance... But the big thing here is that oil is still by far the most in demand resource in the world. And, thanks to some incredibly prescient negotiations dating back to the 70s, the majority of all oil producing nations only settle oil contracts in the dollar. This means that if you have a dollar you have access to oil. This creates an amazing system of externalizing stability. Imagine the value of the dollar decreases. This incentivizes foreign nations to increase their reserves of the dollar to ensure stable access to a fixed amount of oil. This, simultaneously, creates a natural dampening affect on any sort of inflation as that money is taken out of circulation. And this even applies with the Mideastern nations themselves. Saudi Arabia and other nations also agreed to purchase US securities with whatever leftover dollars they have after accounting for national expenses. Once again, helping to mitigate any negative consequence of let's say 'creative' economic policy. Oil, the petro dollar in particular, stabilizes our currency and our economy. If you take the control of oil away from America, I do not think our military might alone would be sufficient to keep the dollar stable. And if the dollar loses stability our entire nation implodes. Everything that happens in the Mideast is based around this relatively simple fundamental aspect. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya. What they all actually have in common is that they expressed real intents to move away from the petro dollar. Venezuela has done the same. The reason China/Russia would side against the US has nothing to do with oil or Saudi Arabia or Iran. It has to do with the US. If the petro dollar collapses, which it arguably already is, the US isn't far behind. And the US is still the greatest immediate danger to those nations. And the only reason Saudi Arabia would ever turn away from the petro dollar is if they believe the US will not be able to force them back to it, which would all but require the collapse of the US.

adventured 8y ago

We're watching the exact same thing going on with China and the Xi dictatorship. Before that, Silicon Valley enjoyed loading up on vast amounts of money from Russian gangsters. They're torturing millions of Muslims in Xinjiang, directly or indirectly through terrifying police state actions that entirely revoke all human liberty. There is no greater mass atrocity going on anywhere on earth than what's happening in Xinjiang. How many people, companies, VC firms in Silicon Valley are working with China and living off of Chinese money? Where's the mass outrage and suspension of relations with China? Nope, you won't see that. No chance in hell. The millions of Muslims in China being tortured don't matter, and one journalist does? Not exactly: it's because China is a big fat platter of money and many want to feast on it. It's a willingness to disregard all ethics because the check is big enough. It's so much money, the people that claim to care about a single journalist, don't care about millions of people being actively repressed and tortured. It goes to the line about a million deaths being a statistic, and one death being a tragedy. Same premise at work.

bildung 8y ago
> They're torturing millions of Muslims in Xinjiang, directly or indirectly through terrifying police state actions that entirely revoke all human liberty. Despite being repeated often, to my knowledge there's no evidence for that. It also doesn't sound very plausible as only about 10M Uigurs and Kasachs live there (those two are the mostly muslim minorities living there). If we assume this is about young to middle age male adults (because this is the relevant cohort in practically every violent conflict), "millions" of these are getting imprisoned and tortured implies that a whopping 100% of non-elderly muslim males in the region are in internment camps. Actually more than 100%, if we assume not every Uigur is a Muslim. What we do know though, is that the conflicts in the region are very violent. Islamic extremists have bombed civilians on multiple occasions, including public markets, buses, killing sleeping workers in coal mines etc. [1] And we know the Chinese police has killed people at riots, though I haven't yet researched the circumstances. In both cases the violence is abhorrent and to be condemned. The mass torturing story seems to be fake, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict

relyio 8y ago

>Saudi government is bombing the hell of out kids in Yemen with bombs that have the US flag painted on em https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab... I don't want to single out the US or give the impression that I hate it. I actually love that country. No doubt one of the best countries in the world despite everything. But I don't think SA is particularly worse than any other regional/global powerful country on earth wrt. foreign policy. Why should that prompt the US (or any other security council country for that matter) to re-evaluate their relationship when they commit the same, if not worse, crimes.

jacobush 8y ago
Because it's one thing to do shitty things for your own self interested reasons... and somewhere along a scale it becomes another to do shitty things for somebody else's twisted reasons. I realize it's all intertwined and the House of Saud and the US are allies for reasons, but at some point it not only looks bad, I wonder if the Saudis will lose respect for the US?
lenkite 8y ago
All the casualties of the Iraq War (measure over a decade and a half) are just a drop in the bucket compared to number of people who have been killed or the number of children who have died of hunger in Yemen over a few years. Casualties in Yemen are reaching a half million and the number of deaths have not yet been tallied correctly by the UN due to the blockade

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

The US has killed 100k+ civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The press forgot about it and the American people mostly don't care. Welcome to the club, Saud.