Reminds me of what I say when people ask if I believe in conspiracy theories: are you talking about psychic lizards in the Hollow Earth, or stuff the CIA straight-up admitted?

Among other good advice in this thread: lie and be inconsistent about personal interests and anything else identifiable.

Iran might have hypersonics? Trying to remember the news I’ve seen in the past few years, and of course the secrecy makes the magin of error huge.

If they do, I can see a few reasons for not using them already:

1. Maybe they don’t have a bunch, and think they can fight off the U.S. without using them. And if they use them all and the U.S. keeps at it, that’s not good.
2. Maybe they are less “guaranteed” and more “high success,” and the odds of success improve if you deplete a bunch of anti-missle defenses first.
3. Iran is fighting two nuclear-armed countries that have very recently shown they don’t care about civilian deaths at all. Trading Tehran for an aircraft carrier is not something Iran wants to do.

“Man, imagine if we fought for 20 years and the Taliban came in to replace the Taliban!”

I think the real reveal here is that the worst scenario they can imagine isn’t that bad for the empire. It’s inconceivable to them that a carrier goes down and the bubble of U.S. invulnerability pops. It’s inconceivable to them that Iran fights off the U.S. and decides it’s time to build nukes. It’s inconceivable to them that there’s some real paradigm shift with Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Europe. It’s inconceivable that Iran gets a couple of guys with ARs in front of the right substations and takes down a chunk of the U.S. electrical grid.

I doubt they’ve been doing explicitly that (even worse – it’s Trump making the final calls!), but I would bet anything on AI slop being folded into a bunch of smaller decisions/analyses that inform the larger ones.

I’m not an expert in missiles, but it seems like a strait that’s 24 mi / 39 km at its narrowest makes it easier for a neighboring country to shoot missiles at ships and harder for those ships to defend themselves.

Groups the law binds but does not protect, groups the law protects but does not bind, and so on

Maybe they once cared, but the blackmail is out and no damage has been done. Wonder if that affects anything down the line.

Good point. I’m sure the F-15s the U.S. is flying today have been upgraded quite a bit from the 70s.

I’m thinking if someone had been able to take down F-15s in, say, 1995, the U.S. probably wouldn’t still be using them, or at least not using them in the same way.

I don’t know, but I do know some military aircraft have expected service lives measured in decades, and that it’s common to keep them around decades longer than expected.

And being so self-serious about it.

Less false flag, more ignoring a real threat to ensure it happens.

I think one characteristic of fascism is that it can start wagging the dog that is the capital class.

Literally the “it’s 9/11 times 1000” bit from Team America: World Police.

My guess is this is just poor planning. They think they have work to do in an area, so they hire someone for it. Turns out there’s much less work in that area than they thought, or they don’t follow through on really developing it, or they assign the new hire some minor tasks du jour and when they’re done the original project has never gotten off the ground.

We’re supposed to hem and haw about how repressive Iran is or isn’t (no ordinary person has any knowledge of this beyond “CNN aired it between the Nayirah testimony and Colin Powell at the UN”), but then just shrug off mass slaughter at hospitals and schools.

I think it happens like this:

1. An organization grows large enough to need a significant amount of management, planning, training, etc. It hires managers, who do what at this point is useful work.
2. The organization grows by an order of magnitude. Your managers now have managers of their own – a lot of this is still useful work.
3. Your managers start to hire people to do administrative tasks for them, or lower-level management work. Plenty of this is just plain-old division of labor, but you start to get more potential for useless tasks.
4. The organization changes significantly over time. Restructures, shuttering departments, mergers, and the like. You wind up with vestigial parts of past organizational structures doing make work or marking time: bullshit jobs.

To not be suicidal, a revolt takes a lot more than lot of unhappy people. Criticism of the U.S. populace is more than fair on many fronts, but it’s hard to overstate the difficulty of the task.

It’s a film about an inherently political topic that’s almost entirely free of politics.

It doesn’t even portray war reporters all that positively, or make the case that what they’re doing is important. The one guy is cheering and saying something like “I live for this!” as he’s watching bombing going on in the distance – depraved shit, especially if you don’t even have a stake in the fighting. And at the start of the film the main lady says “my parents are in [flyover state] pretending none of this is happening.” Then what the hell is so important about The News?