WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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6 mo. ago

Yes, France, the country, and France, the nation also share the same name.

Whenever I see people talking like this I get white nationalist vibes.

There are different levels of bombing. This wasn't the US assassinating a single general. This was a strike on strategic assets comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We just did a Pearl Harbor against Iran.

Has Kamala come out yet to denounce a single one of Trump's Israel policies? Unlike a lot of other Democratic lawmakers, she has yet to publicly condemn the strike on Iran. From what evidence we can actually observe, it seems she supports the current strike. Or at least she doesn't oppose it. There's little reason to think she wouldn't have ordered the exact same type of strike Trump just did. She would spin it as "being the tough cop on the international scene."

A good chunk of Kamala's platform was also tacitly supporting Trump.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it encourages short-term rather than long-term thinking.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, the absolute good to the absolute greatest number of people - we would have been better off if Trump won in 2020. He would have had another lame duck term in a continuation of an administration where he had a lot of restraining voices in his cabinet. He wouldn't have had the four years to regroup and come back with an entirely different organizational structure.

A Biden win in 2020 guaranteed a Trump win in 2024. It was eminently predictable and it was widely predicted. Biden wasn't going to do anything to address the actual causes for Trump winning. Biden was only ever going to be a temporary speed bump to fascism. He simply lacked the character to properly confront a fascist movement. He's not morally capable of it.

Even if you stick to a purely utilitarian framework, even if you believe that harm minimization is all that mattes, sometimes voting for the lesser of two evils is the option that's going to get more people killed.

Christ, do they not teach the trolley problem anymore?

It's honestly quite funny and downright sad that you would quote the trolley problem. There's a reason it's brought up in ethics courses. The whole point of the trolley problem is that there is no correct solution to it. Different ethical systems arrive at different conclusions. But here you are, going, "fuck how it's actually used, I've decided the trolley problem proves that utilitarian ethics is the correct answer!"

In a utilitarian ethics framework, you would choose to run over the 1 guy or choose to vote for Kamala. In a respect for persons ethical framework, you would take no action and would refuse to vote for either Kamala or Trump.

You've completely failed to learn the core lesson of the trolley problem.

Exactly. You know how many countries US trans people can get asylum in? Zero. None. Zilch. There is not a country on Earth where a trans person in the US could qualify for asylum, even considering the vast rollback of trans rights currently underway. And if a member of a targeted minority group can't get asylum status, then forget about nearly anyone else.

Depends on the official, really.

Yup. When have established powers ever liked a revolutionary government? We don't have to like the type of revolution Iran underwent to acknowledge that it was a radical revolutionary government in the literal sense of the term. No country on Earth has a form of government like Iran's. It's pretty unique. Any time a decent sized country tries is taken over by revolutionaries who attempt a radically new form of government, they receive immense opposition from the old powers. All of Europe declared war on France for chopping the head off their king. Every western government embargoed the people Haiti for daring to violently overthrow their slavers. An expeditionary army of numerous capitalist powers invaded the nascent Soviet Union to try and shut it down. And Iran has been under massive sanctions since they dared to throw their western-backed dictator out by force.

Established powers always try to clamp down on any kind of revolutionary government. It's not that they fear the government itself; they fear the ideas that government represents. Iran needed to be punished. It needed to be embargoed into poverty. They couldn't just let Iran try out its new form of government and let them sort themselves out. Because if Iran can overthrow a western-backed puppet and seize control over their own natural resources? Well that's an idea that could spread far and wide.

Russia is a real country run by actual human beings. They're not Mordor with a dark lord commanding an army of orcs. And Russia wants allies. They're up against a vast global US-lead alliance system. Of course they want allies.

This could very easily spiral into a full-on WW3 scenario. Note, WW3 may not look like what you expect it to look like. We've been culturally conditioned to think WW3 will look like thousands of mushroom clouds over major cities, but that need not be the case. WW3 could be a large conventional war just like the previous world wars.

Russia is already bogged down in Ukraine, and the US and NATO are supplying them. Israel is at war with a half a dozen countries, and the US is supporting them, including directly entering the war on Iran. The danger of WW3 lies is revealed when you ask, why did Israel choose this time to attack Iran? They chose to because now was simply the perfect opportunity. With Iran's proxy fighters around Israel devastated, with the Gaza a smoking ruin, Iranian power is lower than it has been in years. That's why they decided to do this now - kick them while they're down.

Us getting bogged down in Iran, however, presents other countries with their own windows of opportunity. And the biggest one is China invading Taiwan. China has been saber-rattling and openly planning an invasion of Taiwan, to be done at some point in the next few years. What better time to launch it than when the US has already been depleting their limited weapon stocks in Ukraine, and just got bogged down in Iran?

China is already involved in the Ukraine conflict; they're one of Russia's biggest suppliers. Iran also is a Russian ally, providing them thousands of drones. The alliance system of a potential world war is already laid out. It would be Russia/Iran/China vs the US, NATO, and assorted allies.

This would be unlikely to end up in a full nuclear exchange. Direct invasion of the homelands of Russia, China, or the US are not going to happen. But we could see multiple large conventional armed conflicts breaking out in multiple theaters, a conflict between two vast alliance systems that between them encompass most of the world's population.

If that isn't a world war, I don't know what is. Nukes don't need to fly to have a conflict that leaves millions dead.

Iran would be perfectly within their rights to assassinate various US government officials. After all, that's exactly what the US and Israel have been doing in Iran.

Dude on CNN talking about how “now we are looking for Iran to come to the table for diplomacy”.

I just can't understand how someone can have such low self-awareness. We just seem to have pulled off an attack on Iran that likely dwarfs the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pulled us into WW2. The idea that anyone would be remotely interested in peace talks after such an attack is just flabbergasting.

You do realize we are at war, right? The conservative Christian portion of the population has declared open armed warfare upon the rest of us. That needs to be how you center you're thinking. We are at war. Start acting like it.

Your point?

People need to start dressing up like ICE thugs and abducting/robbing wealthy white conservatives. When they insist they're citizens, dismiss their documents as fake. That's the only way this will end. The powerful need to be just as terrorized as the rest of us.

Reminds me of a joke scenario that really tickles me. Trump's going to make a grab for power. He knows he needs to have a "Reichstag fire" moment. However, he's too stupid to actually understand the meaning of that. So he indeed has his Reichstag fire moment. He arranges arranges to have the real Reichstag, the actual modern German parliament building, set ablaze. He burns down the modern Reichstag and is then befuddled when it fails to produce the political effects he wants.

Yeah, I'm basically envisioning something like that. An old school web index composed entirely of human-curated human-made content. How to actually fund such an effort? I have no idea. That's why I started with the the premise that I somehow had millions to throw at the project. It would invariably be very labor intensive.

It would probably have to be subscription funded. Maybe there's a way to pull it off, but getting people to pay for subscriptions for services like this has long been fraught. Surveillance capitalism was built because donations don't cut it, and no one wanted to spend a few bucks a month for Google or Facebook access.

Fuck. The Mossad got their hands on a Death Note.

Alright Dr. Mengele.