An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Well statistically, wouldn’t “just like that of your parents” mean “divorced” for about half of them?
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
it seems strange why nobody did so
It’s a norm that evolved gradually. For most of the forties and fifties it was assumed that nukes were going to become commonplace in combat, and it would only be worrying if superpowers used them against each other.
Then Truman passed on using them in Korea, and Eisenhower passed on using them them to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. That began to solidify that these were really only special occasion devices, not just something you use because not doing it would be a pain in the ass.
Once you get to the Nixon administration, it’s starting to get set in stone. The Nixon admin considers using them in Vietnam, but determines the international blowback would be too severe.
Now, we’re getting close to Dune levels of nuclear taboo, where using them in any context would be highly controversial.
They aren’t necessarily an instant win button, but in both Ukraine and Iran they would be extremely useful. Iran’s nuclear facilities and underground missile bases would be pretty easy to dismantle with nuclear ground bursts. In Ukraine, every time the Russians had to spend nine months besieging an empty town like Bahkmut or Kramantorsk, they could have just dropped a 380kt warhead on it and been done in a week (mostly waiting for the fallout to settle).
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
You’re misinterpreting it. We’ve shot way past the point we can actually do anything about it, and it’s going to be much worse, much faster than previously expected. The calmness you’re seeing is public panic management.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be that bloody. There are plenty of ways to use nuclear weapons on Iran or Ukraine that would be highly effective and cause minimal civilian casualties.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, even though they were both written before it happened.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
To be fair, Iran is just one of the first countries to get hit by this. There’s a pretty good chance that you will see similar hydrological collapses in multiple other middle eastern countries, India/Pakistan, Western China, and the American Southwest.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
What is the name for the epistemological framework where you believe whatever is maximally hilarious?
ABigGuy4U
21d ago
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You were feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she could hike off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it had one simple result: her body was more enjoyable for the bear who would eventually feast on her every limb.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random bear who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who eats her. He gets to chow down on her tight juicy body. He gets the benefits of her wholesome and nutritious organs that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to produce bear feed. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
ABigGuy4U
23d ago
The administration was getting a bunch of bad HUMINT from the Tehran university bubble about how the regime was on the brink of collapse. It was assumed that the whole thing would come down like a house of cards the second the Ayatollah died.
That’s partially it though, Europe gave a lot of scarce military equipment to Ukraine and now their belts have to be a lot tighter.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see this behavior as demonstrably different from MLK.
The evidence here is a lot stronger (especially from a left-wing perspective) than MLK’s “totally real rumors in J. Edgar Hoover’s burn book”
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
They pretty overtly made it a massive turd on purpose in order to spike further monetization attempts.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Not that I’m aware of. In his youth he was probably something of a womanizing cad but in consensual way (hard to believe but as a young man he was something of a pretty-boy). Once he got into the higher rungs of power he quickly ended up married to the job, and he lost a wife and then two mistresses by being a workaholic.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Ok but what I wonder is why the content-industrial complex suddenly felt the need to dig up Woodstock ‘99 and hang it’s corpse Oliver Cromwell-style. It feels coordinated.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
When your point of comparison is 2003 era Iraq, where the units on the front line weren’t even allowed to speak to each other by radio to avoid coup planning, the IRGC looks pretty damn elite.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Regarding your second point about escalation options: The United States has nuclear weapons. Like Russia in the Ukraine War, the Trump administration has been overtly laying the ground work for cassus beli in case the button is pressed.
The administration’s whole theory of the war is that Iran is very, very close to both an atomic bomb and missiles capable of hitting the US. Justifying nuclear strikes here would be trivial: “The IRGC has access to a few prototype ballistic missiles capable of reaching Europe and parts of the United States. We just got intelligence showing that a deep underground Iranian nuclear facility was able to crash enrich enough Uranium for three or four kiloton-yield warheads. We believe they have successfully assembled the warheads. The risks here are too great, we must start striking deep underground missile batteries and nuclear facilities with tactical nuclear warheads.”
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I have heard rumors that the planned uprising was going to be concurrent with the strikes, but that it was discovered and had to go early.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
We can wipe out Iranian missile launcher sites while keeping our carriers safe and sound
The way they did that was by just not using the carriers, and running the entire first week of the war by an elaborate relay of aerial tankers to run squadrons in from far away for sorties. Smart, but not an effective tactic in the pacific and not a good sign either.
The assassin is black thoughbeit.
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