barrbaric [he/him]

Voyeurism.

I think it’s about 50/50. I’m still pretty surprised Venezuela ended up working as well as it did, so that’s a point in its favor, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work every time. Obviously public sentiment is against a ground invasion but when has that stopped anything Trump has done in the past? If his supporters can pardon him being a pedophile they certainly won’t care about another invasion of some distant country.

If I had to guess I think most likely is they try to do another kidnapping campaign that then fails and turns into a prolonged invasion.

The invasion of Afghanistan began with a wave of bombings/air strikes that killed thousands of civilians and destroyed infrastructure because the Taliban/Al Qaeda were located in areas in which other people lived. Especially the Taliban, as they were the ruling government. A decent analogy is actually 9/11: sure, they targeted the white house and pentagon, but also the WTC which were civilians. Given what we know of US intel, I would actually wager that 2/3 of the hijackerss targets being military installations makes them more precise than the US forces. There are then second-order deaths, such as from starvation and disease, due to disruption of infrastructure, power being cut, factories shutting down, etc.

Likewise, the “Shock and Awe” phase of the invasion of Iraq was a terror bombing campaign that aimed (and failed) to cause Saddam’s government to be overthrown by popular uprising due to mass civilian death and destruction of infrastructure. IIRC Iraq’s power grid still hasn’t been repaired to pre-war levels over 20 years later.

We can get semantic about what the phrase “bombing to pieces” means, but come on. The invasions kill over a million people, primarily due to second-order deaths from the initial and ongoing bombing campaigns. Seriously, look at the history of how the US wages war. It always relies on having air superiority and bombing the shit out of the countries it invades and then following up with special forces. Nowadays, that’d be JSOC because that branch of the special forces are directly controlled by the president.

As far as ground invasion, that depends on what their goals are. If they want to use the playbook from Venezuela and kidnap (or assassinate) all leadership then “no” because while they’ll have special forces on the ground they won’t be staying long-term. If they want to use the playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, then yes, they will have to do a ground invasion as strategic terror bombings never actually succeed at causing the popular uprisings (see: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc). The only place it allegedly ever worked was Japan in WWII, but that seems to have been largely incorrect and their surrender was much more due to the soviets declaring war on them.

I can remember what happened to Iraq and Afghanistan?

If you weren’t fairly online and/or in fringe left-wing or right-wing spaces, you probably wouldn’t have heard about him because he wasn’t really that important. Most of my coworkers (and this is in the US) had never heard of him before his neck just did that.

It was Mitt Romney who said they had to ban tiktok because it was too pro-palestinian.

Thank you comrade bee

Did you reply to the wrong person? Not sure how that relates to what I said.

Anyway, I’ll believe it when I see an actual source, not just “Well this rich dipshit famous for lying said it”. AFAIK all the actual serious science points to it being a natural evolution.

It might be simplistic, but I’m always going to go with Occam’s Razor on this: Trump and Elon are just that stupid.

Posting this is a war crime.

Nyaa.si still up, all is well

IIRC rent and food are relatively cheap compared to the US, and you don’t have to own a car which is a pretty big savings.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, AKA “Might as well try my best in case I’m wrong and we manage to pull it off”.

Hey someone help me out, how many people could Biden have freed from prison for drug possession charges if he just pardoned as many as he could? Assuming he was a good person, I mean.

By this analogy, where does Biden, the American Paul von Hindenburg, land? Like obviously it’s worse to actually abolish democracy, but surely working with those doing it and doing nothing to stop them is also evil?

E: As a disclaimer about my political views, I believe that Trump and every other US president should be executed for crimes against humanity.

If it’s about domestic damage, then every president who owned slaves or supported segregation still beats him.

E: Also every president who was involved in the genocide of the indigenous peoples of America to an extent more than Trump (IE he probably ties Biden and Obama on this).

They’re low risk unless you ingest them, because then they’re hitting internal organs directly.

Yeah, more or less proven with Reagan, Trump, and Biden all having dementia while in office.

Even if Putin were solely responsible for Trump winning (he isn’t, far right domestic media like Fox News had and has far more of an effect, remember that Cambridge Analytica was British, and Trump would likely still be a political nobody if the Democrats hadn’t boosted him as part of their “Pied Piper” strategy) it must be noted that this would essentially be Russia doing to the US what the US did to Russia when it supported Yeltsin’s coup. Imo if a country flagrantly subverts the democracies of other countries all the time, that same country can’t really complain when other countries do the same to it.

Do we think Vance is stupid enough to not understand that NATO primarily benefits the US? If “Europe” is cut off from the US, they’re going to make deals with China and (to a lesser extent) Russia. Trump obviously doesn’t understand shit, but Vance is the puppet of Peter Thiel, who you’d think would know better.