Richard Branson suspends Saudi Arabia’s investment over missing journalist | Hacker News Reader

Richard Branson suspends Saudi Arabia’s investment over missing journalist

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139 pointsoccamschainsaw35 comments

The starving children in Yemen weren't enough?

Nope, apparently they were not enough.

Nope; neither was bombing a school bus full of children. Weird, huh?

And the most frustrating thing is that even if there is irrefutable proof they murdered the journalist, there is not much the US could do.

If the US apply sanctions the maniacs from SA could threaten to stop buying weapons and using the dollar to sell it's oil.

They could also move investments to Russia or China and try to reach common ground with Iran. Literally making a monumental amount of money and American lives spent on wars in middle east in the last 20 years to be for nothing.

I guess the US government will have to propose some kind of "punishment" that SA is willing to take without hurting their fragile feelings.

All these events just show how completely messed up our world is.

What does this mean for Softbank?

No American hipster startup will accept their money?

No, they don't look to me as if they are here for a type of company typically called startup. They are here to buy big monopoly businesses.

And one may note that they are knee deep in short term debt, that may turn out to be the last prick needed to pop the current tech bubble.

>that may turn out to be the last prick needed to pop the current tech bubble.

And honestly I can't wait to get all the nonsense weeded out and see what's actually useful. All this noise makes it rather hard.

This is great news and a good move Sir Branson.

Our society is past the point where we need to allow bad people to have their way. If we do not accept the money of MBS nor take part in his endeavors we can effectively remove his power.

Too bad he didn't do this when Saudi military started blowing up Yemeni civilians with US-made munitions. But oh, hey, 1 journalist has been killed/missing, better disassociate ASAP.

Nitpick: the "Sir" attaches to the first name, not the last. He'd be Sir Richard.

This is kind of off topic, but is anyone surprised/confused by people's reaction to this?

The Saudis have been bombing Yemen for the last ~3 years and nothing really happened. Then they assassinate a journalist and all hell breaks loose?

I'm disappointed that this remains the pathetic reality but I'm not surprised nor confused. This has been the way it has always worked. Humans hold different levels of value to different people depending on which group or locale they belong to. We associate with the journalist more than the Yemeni children so it makes bigger news. The rest propagates outwards from there.

Ordinary Yemenis don't attend cocktail parties at Davos.

http://www.nrttv.com/EN/News.aspx?id=5863&MapID=3

Though I share your frustration, another relevant fact is that the journalist was a Saudi citizen.

Nations get into armed conflicts fairly frequently, unfortunantly. Since the West is also partial to engaging in armed conflicts, I think we cannot so easily critize others without opening a can of worms most would rather not think about: what is the moral difference between Saudi and US bombing in Yemen?.

On the other hand, even at our worst (Guantanamo?), the US is not kidnapping our own citizens and dismembering them.

Here’s Richard Branson’s blog post announcing this: https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/my-statement-kingdom-...

40 dead Yemeni kids doesn't meet Branson's profit criteria though

Better late than never.

1 death is a tragedy. 1 million is a statistic. -Joseph Stalin

The history of that quote is actually older and much more interesting.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

This was quite the read.

Stalin's quote seems to originate from the 18th century quote which seems to apply as much today as it did then:

One Murder made a Villain, Millions a Hero. — Princes were privileg’d To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime. - 1759, Beilby Porteus, England

That would be bad enough, but I expect the salience of Khashoggi's murder has more to do with identity than numbers. It's not as if a singular dead Yemeni child would have dismayed anyone in the West. What made Khashoggi stand out was that he was a WaPo journalist.

I guess that's complicated by the fact that the insurgent government (Houthi movement) there have a slogan like "God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam" and the Saudis gave the defending government there $2 billion in food aid. War is bad, but is sometimes worse in tragedy then it is in morality. It is different from globally-orchestrated assassinations against political opponents in foreign countries, between peace-time nations. https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-gives-yemen-2-billion-to-...

Oh no they have bad slogans, let's bomb them to hell, perfectly justified. It's the Middle East, where those sorts of opinions are pretty common. Saudis hate Shiites but other than that what exactly were the Houthis capable of doing to justify essentially destroying the entire country.

The context is that it's a proxy war with Iran, which has armed and supported the other side in the Yemeni civil war.

Saudi Arabia fears Iran acquiring another political control point - one on their border at that - in the Middle East and increasingly surrounding Saudi. So they're willing to scorch the earth to stop that.

Also, in terms of territory, with Iran + Persian Gulf, and Yemen + Bab-el-Mandeb straight, you can choke off Saudi Arabia's access to the Arabian Sea. That could heavily cripple their global oil shipping if it came to war, or at least cause a big mess. So Saudi Arabia views having a puppet and or friendly regime in Yemen, to be strategically vital. Saudi has wanted functional pipeline + port access in central Yemen for a long time, to get to the Gulf of Aden, to be able to bypass Iran's territorial waters just in case.

They bombed a school bus full of kids. A straight up war crime and just one of many by a foreign aggresor that is actively bringing death to thousands. That is much more evil than some slogan.

Listen, I am from European country where NATO by mostly US backing bombed and killed more than two thousand civilians, among the targets were train full of civilians, Chinese embassy, etc. And of course nobody would or will ever be punished for that. And that is only my country. So first please clean up your yard.

What’s the difference to bombing weddings, hospitals, schools etc.? Can you prove that it was intentional? It will be more difficult finding an excuse for killing a journalist in an embassy in a somewhat peaceful country

At least something hit it...

How likely is that Branson was not going to get the money to begin with, and this is a convenient PR move to say that it was all his choice.

So what? If true, he's smart. If not, he's... what... decent? Correct? Still smart?

Someone's (imagined) motivations hardly matter if they are doing the right thing. Criticizing someone that has done the decent thing because of what you imagine their motivation might be is a pretty clear indicator of your own bias.

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