Iranian channel reminds the world of the Dresden massacre . I wonder why America keeps wanting to overthrow Iran
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Your belief that every politician is a sociopath is utterly without evidence, and is instead solely rooted in your own ideology. I reject ideology, and I require concrete proof and evidence. I have been watching politics a lot longer than you have, and have seen more evidence than you have, none of which supports your claim that every politician is a sociopath. Maybe SOME are, but in western democracies, these people are generally rejected by the voters. It is uniquely a Russian thing to think that politicians ought to behave like sociopaths. Not even Chinese think that way.
I've already read that book and it 100% agrees with me, but even if it did not, I would still be right. The opinion of 2 america academics is not superior to mine. Your appeal to authority fallacy is rejected. If you have a point to make, or an argument to make, you need to make it honestly, not be a little shithead and point to a book and say I'm wrong like a tranny on reddit.
Also since you're a jackass and we both know your little gambit here was to cite a book you knew I hadn't read to declare victory based on the implication that the secret to why I'm wrong is hidden in said book, and you won't reveal what it is, instead you'll only point me to the book, and since you know I won't read it, you get to declare victory, allow me to point out forthrightly that your little tactic is bad faith, is wrong on the merits, and makes you a piece of shit for even trying it. If you think that book proves me wrong, you must actually articulate why using the arguments and evidence you learned from the book, instead of pointing at the book and saying I'm wrong. Again, just because some academics in the US have an opinion, doesn't make their opinion the gospel Truth.
And while I will never do this again, and will instead become hostile and "mean" to you if you pull this shit in the future, I pulled up a pdf of this stupid book in about 30 seconds and skimmed it. I can read very quickly. My job, after all, is to read through thousands of pages of case law to pull out a few choice sentences to use in my arguments. I found nothing in the book that in any way refutes the point I was making, which is that Iran has "nothing until they detonate a test like Pakistan or North Korea did, and at that point they have everything they want, as proven by North Korea and Libya, as soon as you reach the finish line, no one will touch you." Iran is only mentioned at pages 24, 103, 128. Don't come at me.
Why are you citing to relatively recent (2020) obscure books on geopolitics? Are you a university student or were you one recently? That book you cited looks like assigned reading for a class.
The West isn't fighting. It's just giving Ukraine free shit. Turns out you don't need to carefully coordinate that for it to work.
Yet 20x smaller than the Western countries supplying Ukraine.
Except that has been proven false now, hasn't it? Western aid to Ukraine has massively increased in the last few months. It hasn't decreased, as Russia and its fans had hoped.
And it doesn't matter if "Russia cares more than the US" because Ukraine cares a lot more than Russia, and since the West has GDPs more than 20x the size of Russia, the West doesn't need to care as much as Russia, the West can care only 5% as much as Russia does and still win. All the West needs to do is keep giving Ukraine ammo, which is among the cheapest of the aid given. Ukrainian manpower will do the rest.
High end weapon systems, while nice for Ukraine to have, are not necessary to stop Russia. The only way Russia could win is if, like the Winter War, Ukraine runs out of ammo. That will never happen. Ammo resupply would be the last thing to go from aid, and artillery ammo is very cheap at scale.
False. They cost $20,000 to $50,000 each to make, and Russia has to pay a lot more than that to Iran since Iran wants a profit margin.
They could be destroyed with a small re-usable commercial DJI drone that costs a few thousand dollars with some modifications, under the command of an air defense network.
A racing drone with a half dozen shotgun shells strapped to it, pointed down similar to a WW2 Schräge Musik, could be programmed to quickly fly above the Shahed 136, detonate the shotgun shells into the flimsy Shahed 136, and fly home. The Shahed 136 can't be made to be survivable. Even a single shotgun shell would likely kill it, since it would take out the engine or cause a fuel leak or just ruin the aerodynamics, all of which would cause it to crash. Doing this with a manually controlled operator wouldn't be easy, but if the drone interceptor is controlled by a computer, just as drones often are, it would be child's play.
You could also have a much more sophisticated hunter killer drone that costs $50k-100k capable of fully autonomous non-networked intercepts under manual control, which could use thermal optics to "lock on" to a Shahed 136 at long range then fly to it and kill it with some rifle caliber shots.
The reason the Shahed 136 is ultimately an easily countered weapon is that it is extremely slow, flies low, must fly in a straight line, and must leave the protection of Russian SAM and jamming systems. So cheap drones will eventually be knocking them down at the cost of only maybe $20 in ammunition per intercept.
Raytheon can sell the control stations for millions of dollars, but the individual drone interceptors can be very cheap and the cost per intercept can be very low.
US defense contractors are more than happy to work on lasers for the Navy, knowing that the cost per intercept for a laser is pennies. They can make their profit on the system itself, not the "ammo".
While the US engages in a lot of waste in military spending, it is not impossible or unheard of to develop and field efficient systems.
It's the most attested statement in human history. They would not be successful politicians if they weren't...
Not ought, do. 'Voters' don't matter, as like Machiavelli said, the prince should appear to be good without actually being so. I'm not sure how you can miss this.
So no different than usual?
This is a weird way to respond to a book recommendation. If you recommended me a book, I'd consider reading it, because your interests generally align with mine. This one I'd told about you before, but it seems that you haven't read it.
No one cares about nuclear weapons. In fact, having a small nuclear capability may encourage (as you admitted, I believe) a first disarming strike.
Because I found it interesting, and it contradicts a widely held belief - the idiocy that nuclear weapons are not going to be used. There are many common sense rejections of that claim, e.g. that Russia, US and China have all made massive investments in nukes, but this goes into a bit more detail, and I enjoyed it.
Not exactly free when it's exchanging it for the life's blood of its young men. And you do need to coordinate it, because everyone would want to free ride on helping the US empire rather than be commanded to send more of his money for imperial purposes.
Oh, so you admit that this is a war between NATO and Russia? Good to know.
I'm fine with it. I'd like for Russia to smash NATO as a whole, rather than eke out a victory against an isolated Ukraine. In the long term, things will be as Obama predicted.
Doesn't matter, since its GDP is vastly lower, and the people who use Ukraine as their puppet care less than Russia.
It's not 'waste' to fill the pockets of contractors, it's the entire purpose of military spending.
North Korea has a small nuclear capability and it's totally safe as a result. Libya lacked one and so NATO jumped all over Gaddafi in his moment of weakness.
Iran only needs a handful of nukes to be totally safe forever. While I would be in favor of a first strike against North Korea, almost no one else would because people are cowards and they vastly prefer kicking the can down the road and hoping things magically work themselves out.
Don't play games and don't insult my intelligence. We both know what you did. If you meant your "book recommendation" in good faith you would have worded things very differently.
There is always the possibility that nukes can be used, which is why doing things to reduce that possibility must be priority number 1, which is why North Korea and Iran should have gotten an iron fist, and Libya should have gotten the velvet glove. This also means that in the face of nuclear threats, we must escalate to deescalate to punish the one making the threats in order to disincentivize the threats. We must also recognize that bowing to any nuclear threats invites more threats, and leads to the threatener actually using nuclear weapons on the cuck nations who appeased the threats for a long time.
However, I disagree with your claim that the book says "that nuclear weapons are not going to be used." That's not what the book says. It says that MAD isn't something you can just assume will always be true, and you have to actively maintain MAD, which is all true.
And also to refute your claims I didn't read the book after I told you I skimmed it:
Most of the early book attacks a silly notion that nukes bring about peace since fear of nuclear war deters conventional war. This is an idiotic belief that I've never seen anyone advocate since we've had plenty of conventional wars such as the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. So the authors are beating up what is essentially a straw man nobody really believes.
Also, China refutes the authors. While China is on a massive nuclear build up right now, from its inception until very recently, China smartly chose to only build up a minimal deterrent to save money, and it worked. You don't need thousands of warheads to pull off MAD, because even a few hundred still cause unacceptable losses. Putin isn't going to go "oh, so I'll only lose half my population? Good trade, then, let's do it!"
Chapter 3 states the obvious. I could have told you as a child that mobile launchers, mountain tunnels, and silos + dummy silos (which is what China is doing now) all get the job done. You can build 1,000 silos in a remote area, and only 100 have real nukes in them, with the other 900 being cheap dummies that can fool satellites, and your enemy would need to task 1,000 nukes, which is economically unfeasible. The only part of the triad which can be countered is bombers. Subs can't be reliably countered, either.
Chapter 4 states the obvious that nukes don't stop conventional attacks. Even if the US invaded Russia, the odds of Putin being able to use nukes are near-zero. The Russian people would rather be conquered and alive, than pop off nukes and get glassed in response and be dead. The only time this calculus changes is if the defender thinks the attacker would be genocidal, in which case they might figure they have nothing to lose, or if the regime is truly evil, like the Japanese military leadership in WW2, which would have been willing to sacrifice most of the Japanese population if the Emperor had not stepped in.
I also disagree with the authors that nukes are a good thing. The only reason they haven't been used yet is that the people wielding them have behaved responsibly. We cannot always assume this to be true, especially with nukes in the hands of NK and Iran, let alone others. Nukes are dangerous in the hands of Russia in the long term because Russia, as it wallows in its weakness and impotency in the aftermath of this Ukraine war, will lean much harder on nuke threats to deter exploitation of its weakness, and it will be tested. IMO by China. I think the most likely threat to Russia 5+ years from now will be an expansionist China, deterred from striking the West, turning its sights toward Russia as the weaker, easier target which won't provoke a western response. Will Russia use nukes to stop a conventional Chinese seizure of the Russian Far East? I doubt it, but if Russia did, China would not hesitate to nuke them back.
Literally every time you put "Good to know." you know the preceding statement is a lie, and you're writing it just to irritate me.
If NATO was in this war, Russian forces would be obliterated in short order. Russian air defenses are worthless against modern stealth, and NATO F35s and F22s would simply obliterate all Russian positions with GPS glide bombs. Even without stealth, US SEAD is far superior to Russian air defenses.
Ukraine is not paying the West in blood, it is paying for its own freedom and defense against a Russian cultural genocide of Ukrainian culture and language in blood.
Only in your wildest fantasies could Russia win against NATO in combat. They already tried in Syria and got obliterated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
But does the West care 20x less? No. So even if they send what amounts to a small amount of money by Western standards, that's still more than enough. Ukraine is the one doing the fighting and dying, and they have more will to fight than the Russian conscripts being used in human wave attacks for meager gains.
No, the purpose is military power. The fact that the procurement system is corrupted to some degree and government bureaucrats don't care enough about looking after the taxpayer since they'd prefer to get a nice defense contractor job after "retirement" is simple corruption that requires reform, such as by banning all DoD procurement related personnel from working for defense contractors to eliminate the conflict of interest.