I mean, I have a chaotic solution we might try. Let’s simply…reverse the Budapest Memorandum! Let’s just hand Ukraine a few hundred thermonuclear warheads, with launchers and launch codes and say, “here, go have fun!”

“The president has announced…that we have reversed the Budapest Memorandum…”

:D

I don’t get why companies can’t solve this problem entirely by just flying out applicants for in-person interviews towards the end of the hiring process. Or hell, maybe only even ask the candidate to fly out for a visit after they’ve already accepted the job offer. Just one minimal and relatively cheap step to confirm the remote worker you’re hiring is who they claim to be. For the cost of a flight, a night or two in a hotel, and some meal vouchers, you can verify someone’s identity. Sure, maybe not for freelance work. But for any well paid technical field? This is a trivial expense.

You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.

Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.

Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.

We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.

The rich aren’t accessible, but their property sure is awfully flammable.

It’s not enough to reform campaign finance. We need to destroy the class of people behind this. We need to really wage class war, a class war of annihilation.

We need a national wealth cap. 1000x median household income. Anything more is taxed at 100%.

Man, there’s got to be a way to solve the Taiwan problem. Maybe a great compromise, a grand bargain? Taiwan lets Beijing save face by admitting that the PRC has been the legitimate government of all of mainland China and Taiwan from the beginning. But at the same time, Beijing then magnanimously grants Taiwan formal independence. Moreover, such an agreement is part of a larger grand bargain involving US normalization with Cuba. The US learns to live with a Communist neighbor off their coast, and China learns to live with a highly capitalist neighbor off their coast. The US military can keep troops stationed in Taiwan, and in turn China gets to station military troops in Cuba (if the Cubans are cool with that.)

One can dream, one can dream…

Or, with my luck, we’ll end up with the nightmare monkey’s paw version of this, where the two superpowers simply arrange to deport the entire Cuban population to Taiwan and the entire Taiwanese population to Cuba, and both countries then annex their respective neighboring islands. Authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing for all, all in the name of peace!

Trump lies.

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.

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.

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

Nah, go for the darker more realistic version. Mulder just goes further down the rabbit hole, ends up going full Qanon, and ends up being killed trying to storm the capital building.

No, but you and your buddies could use your peashooters to raid an army base, kill the guards, and steal the keys to the tanks in a surprise raid. This is a very common occurrence in rebellions. When you see Syrian rebels or rebels in other countries, where exactly do you think they got their heavy weapons from? Do you think they made them in a garage somewhere?

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/world/africa/29libya.html

https://www.france24.com/en/20170808-venezuela-hunts-rebels-behind-military-base-attack-army-maduro

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1925688/putin-russia-ukraine-drone-attack-millerovo-airbase

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syrian-rebel-seize-military-base-idlib-govt-forces-back-foot

https://sudantribune.com/article56201/

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2178773/philippine-rebels-abduct-soldiers-and-militiamen-predawn

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/6/3/ukraine-separatists-lay-siege-to-luhansk-base

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/1/8/syrian-rebels-seize-isil-base-in-aleppo

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/11/06/Communist-rebels-destroy-three-military-aircraft-in-raid/6997721026000/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/28/syrian-rebel-missiles-assad-aircraft

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/04/11/2003250030

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7794057.stm

https://www.france24.com/en/20160918-india-kashmir-rebel-attack-insurgency-indian-soldiers-killed

https://www.india.com/news/world/air-strike-kills-11-at-rebel-held-yemen-base-official-1172934/

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/04/23/11-die-in-attack-at-Sri-Lanka-air-base/5417577771200/

You would “both sides” your way right to the gas chambers.

Each good human being only needs to kill one fascist, and the fascists will quickly be gone.

Look at somewhere like Syria. Governments still get taken down by armed revolutionaries. Yes, there is the issue that governments are better armed. But there are a few fatal flaws in the idea that this makes them invincible:

1. A lot of expensive weapons systems like airplanes and tanks can be taken out by much cheaper and accessible systems like MANPADS and drones.

2. There will be people on the side of the rebels with previous military experience that will know how to use the heavier weapons.

3. Groups of revolutionaries armed with civilian-accessible weapons can find lightly defended military bases, storm them, and seize heavier weapons.

4. Rebel groups always receive outside assistance from foreign powers.

If a group of revolutionaries deposes the California state government, declares the New California Republic, and tries to secede from the US, they won’t be fighting with AR-15s for long. They’ll be using the strongest available civilian weapons to raid National Guard armories and other locations that may not be so heavily defended. They may even do so with the tacit support of those working at those facilities. Then their goal will be to hold out long enough against the US government that they can petition foreign powers like China to support their rebellion against the US federal government.

Revolts don’t happen in a vacuum. Rebels don’t need to hold out against the central government indefinitely armed only with light weaponry. At the end of the day, there’s going to be some other well armed country out there that’s going to be more than happy to see their geopolitical rival be embroiled in a war of secession. If California decided to rebel on Monday, by Friday the PRC would be loading every drone, antitank missile, and MANPAD they can find into crates, ready to smuggle them in container ships past the US Navy. Even if China didn’t support the aims of the California rebels, it wouldn’t matter. Hell, they wouldn’t even care about the final outcome of the war. They would happily fund heavy weapons to the rebels just to make sure the US federal government was too embroiled in a crisis at home to devote many resources to places like Taiwan.

That’s when you use the smaller weapons to storm lightly defended military bases and seize the really big guns.

Israel doesn’t seem to be using its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent for invasion.

So it’s just a coincidence that no neighboring country has threatened them with outright military invasion since they got nukes?

And when has Iran ever threatened to use a bomb against Israel? They deny they’re even trying to get a bomb. Do their politicians like to say, “death to Israel?” Sure, but that’s just part of their discourse. The Iranians use “death to” as a synonym for “down with.” They say the same thing during political campaigns against opposing political candidates.

An Iranian bomb would stabilize the situation because the same pattern has occurred in numerous other conflicts. Yes, nukes don’t prevent conventional wars, but they do prevent total war between nuclear powers. Russia would have never attempted its invasion of Ukraine if Ukraine still had their nukes. India and Pakistan’s arsenals are what kept the recent conflict between them from spiraling further than it did.

You can speculate that nukes wouldn’t prevent further expansion of Israel, but that’s ahistorical analysis. Having an opponent that is just as well armed as you are makes you act more carefully. The Soviets didn’t just keep expanding across Europe, precisely because the US had the bomb to hold them in check. Israel has been able to act with such impunity because ultimately none of its neighbors can stand up to it. It’s only when some of Israel’s neighbors actually have nukes, and they have to address their neighbors as equals, that peace is actually possible. As long as one side holds complete military dominance, real peace isn’t possible.

We should welcome an Iranian bomb. Honestly, it’s what the Middle East really needs to bring it to stability.

The biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East is Israel. They’re a destabilizing force because they’re an expansionist nuclear-armed power with no hard borders. Their borders aren’t actually fixed; they’re in a decades-long process to slowly expand them. For those who forget, Israel’s MO is to:

1. Destabilize border regions of neighboring countries and foster the creation of militant groups within them.
2. Use those destabilized regions as justification for military occupation of the territory of neighboring countries.
3. Announce the creation of border “buffer zones.”
4. Allow their civilians to move into what is supposed to be a DMZ-like buffer zone.
5. Again have civilians in the line of fire of militants, demanding further border expansion.

Israel has been expanding like this for decades, and there’s no end in site. Their immediate neighbors are all to weak and destabilized to resist this process of slow Israeli lebensraum. The people in the Middle East are rightly afraid that they’ll be next under the Israeli boot, and they’ll find themselves reduced to the plight of the Gazans.

Israel is out of control. It’s an expansionist military power hellbent on gobbling up its neighbors. The reason they’re able to get away with this is because they have nuclear weapons. No Arab nation can invade them without the threat of being nuked in return. Israel uses its nuclear arsenal to conquer its neighbors.

Another nuclear power is desperately needed in the region to hold them in check. A nuclear Iran would serve this role well. They wouldn’t be able to wipe Israel off the map, as that would result in them getting nuked in return. What a nuclear-armed Iran can do is to finally put a check on Israel’s endless military expansion. We need powers that can stand up to the Israelis as equals and say, “no. Your borders are fucking big enough. You’re not taking one more square meter of land.”