There are shadow fleets of tankers trafficking oil across the world. Venezuelan oil is sanctioned as well as Iranian so no company without licenses and correct paperwork would touch it unless you move it enough to hide the origin. In the end they all know where it comes from but like the plausible deniability.
Most Venezuelan oil is very heavy and sour and needs to be mixed with lighter oil to be refined and they need access to restricted chemicals for the process. As it was explained to me a few months ago Iran provides lighter oil, solvents and materials for the refining and they take the heavier oil to sell it in the black market.
Sanctions aside the tanker was there for the taking by any government. Spoofing location and flying a false flag are enough to justify boarding and seizure by any country since it's a stateless ship likely involved in illegal activities.
In short yes, USA does it because it can and there's legal justification for it beyond "Trump oil, Trump bad lel", but as usual HN devolves to a potato when world events touch USA politics.
It wasn't apolitical, there were a lot of discussions about the nature and politics of OSS but it was never this radical.
I remember a few fights in a few of my local LUG and communities that were very heated, but never death threats and almost always was online trash talking and in real life going back to being normal people with some snarky comments here and there.
Always saw him as a commentator or blogger that wrote about Linux back in the day and not an actual developer, each have their place and OSS.
There are plenty of more politically motivated people that have no contributions on anything, haven't built a thing and all they do is preach OSS. Some lean left, others more to the right. Although I would say I've seem more leftists like this because there's this believe among many that OSS is socialist, but to each their own as long as they're not trampling on other people's rights.
The problem I see is with some of the crazy people becoming more and more emboldened and the moderate majority just there bending backwards to appease them as if in hopes that it will calm them down, but they just increase the threat level.
That's precisely the issue. There's a subset of the community that resorts to labeling anyone they deem guilty of wrongthink as a nazi or fascist and is the same crew that preach the "punch a nazi" line.
If it was just a normal exchange of ideas it wouldn't matter and DHH would be just whining, but first response was "he's a nazi" "lets take away his project".
There's crazier stuff in Lunduke's tweets from days ago including death threats and inciting violence against him on public events. I knew he was disliked by a large chunk of the OSS community but to threaten to kill people because someone attends a conference is crazy.
That is not the way to behave in a civilized society and is time people stop bending backwards to appease the lunatics otherwise there's no telling when any of us will be on the wrong end of the mob.
Because people are idiots and assholes. There are a bunch of radicalized idiots in FLOSS that want to impose their world view on everyone else and then have the balls to call anyone who disagrees fascist, nazi, or whatever term they can come up with.
It's like when they were adding caveats to licenses in the vein of "if you believe this or that then you cannot use my software because you're trash" (paraphrasing, but similar enough).
It's time we end up this shit. FLOSS is supposed to be about contribution and building something that's useful for all of us regardless of our political leaning. Instead we have assholes poisoning the well and idiots that follow them thinking that the monster they're creating is not going to eat them if they clap hard enough.
This comment will probably get flagged but whatever.
You can disagree with someone politically and still work with them. It happens all the time in the real world unless you're someone so mentally ill that you cannot fathom different ideas (like actual nazis did wink).
Calling anyone who is conservative or with whom you happen to disagree with a "nazi" is disingenuous and in current times probably dangerous since there is a lot of crazy people preaching the "it's ok to punch a nazi".
Most Venezuelan oil is very heavy and sour and needs to be mixed with lighter oil to be refined and they need access to restricted chemicals for the process. As it was explained to me a few months ago Iran provides lighter oil, solvents and materials for the refining and they take the heavier oil to sell it in the black market.
Sanctions aside the tanker was there for the taking by any government. Spoofing location and flying a false flag are enough to justify boarding and seizure by any country since it's a stateless ship likely involved in illegal activities.
In short yes, USA does it because it can and there's legal justification for it beyond "Trump oil, Trump bad lel", but as usual HN devolves to a potato when world events touch USA politics.