AbbysMuscles [she/her]

Looks like the full thing costs $24. Anyone have a pdf handy?

I think the US will still care for a number of reasons.

• They don’t want the PRC to escape the Island Chain (tl;dr Japan, RoK, Okinawa, Taiwan, and the Philipines help contain the PRC to its own narrow waters. This is partially why the PRC built up the Spratley Islands.)
• The USA absolutely does not want to allow the PRC such a huge PR win. Especially if a peaceful unification does happen, it goes against every piece of violent rhetoric ever thrown at China.
• Fuck those commie (slurs)
• Taiwan’s east coast borders very deep ocean. If a port was built there, it would allow PLA Navy submarines to slip out into the Pacific almost undetected. Currently they have to maneuver through the coastal mainland waters, which are relatively shallow and easier to hunt for submarines in. Currently, the closest approach to deeper water is directly south of Hainan. The PLA Navy does maintain some submarine naval bases there already.

So their anti-drug stance is effectively more honest? That would be a pretty significant difference, yeah.

Beyond the basics, I’m really ignorant about this. Someone help me out (and assume good faith, I genuinely want to know):

• USA criminalizes drugs primarily to fuck over ethnic minorities. The War on Drugs is a colossal failure and everyone knows it. Penalizing drug users is widely considered to be ineffective at actually preventing drug use/abuse.
• China criminalizes drugs at least partially due to the Opium wars and crisis.

Is the stated cause the main difference in why America’s anti-drug policies are viewed as bad, and China’s are seen as good? I assumed drug use there was lower in part because society is better and there are fewer reasons to blot out the pain with various narcotics. Because the Chinese are also huge fucking nerds about drug use and I don’t honestly see a distinction between Sino or American anti-drug campaigning. What’s up?

Side note - sulfuric acid production is also considered a benchmark for economic development (see bottom of page).

So there is a shitton of oil now on the market that can’t be traded using dollars. Will this speed up de-dollarization by another increment?

Hitting them hard and hoping that this time Iran just shrugs and takes it? These fuckers know they’re escalating and are counting on it.

I really don’t know if that’s photoshop or not

I honestly don’t know what Iran could do about a cloud of B-52s firebombing their homes. I don’t know much about that plane’s capabilities and Iran’s high altitude air defenses

I missed that comment of yours. Sorry for shadow-boxing my inference of what you said! I’ll leave my post up because I’m proud of it tbh

Air superiority wins wars

Air superiority is a perquisite for winning, but it does not by itself win anything. Close to a decade of bombing Ansar Allah did nothing. Dropping enough ordinance to split the moon in half on top of Vietnamese civilians did not win that war. Glassing the Korean Peninsula did not win that war. Having complete air superiority over Afghanistan and Iraq for decades didn’t win us those conflicts. The Zionist entity has been bombing civilian infrastructure in Gaza for months and haven’t come close to defeating Hamas.

I suppose we need to get into the weeds a bit here and define “war” and “winning a war”. Is the goal regime change? Total occupation? We know that the US can launch airstrikes and missile strikes from its carriers and bases all over the region at Iran. It has zero capacity to invade and hold even a small fragment of that country. It doesn’t even have full air superiority. Iranian hypersonic missiles would skip right past naval defenses and sink a carrier in seconds. Even if it didn’t, there’s no way a carrier group could defend itself from the hundreds (or thousands) of missiles swarming it.

Because what wins wars, what really wins wars, is the populace. The masses of Vietnamese were sympathetic to the communist freedom fighters. Fidel Castro started his revolution with a few dozen dudes hiding in a swamp. But the masses, the people, supported him and his struggle. And they ultimately prevailed. The Bay of Pigs failed to do the same. To invade and hold a nation, the invader must get the populace on their side. There is no other way. The USA tried for years to hold Iraq and Afghanistan and it didn’t work because the people fucking hate us.

The people of Iran would absolutely never accept US occupation. Iran is a civilization-state, a fiercely proud people who would fight to the last breath to prevent the Great Satan from conquering their nation. The USA could (and possibly will) carpet bomb Tehran and the nation at large, reduce its state and people to a state of complete abjection. We’re seeing that happen in Gaza. That’s not “winning a war”, that’s “brutalizing civilians”. If you can’t (or don’t want to) win over the populace, the only other option is their removal. Forced relocation or mass murder.

No matter how many innocent corpses are created from muh superior jets, it won’t actually win a long-term military objective.

And why Iran feels confident enough to send hundreds of drones and missiles towards a nuclear-armed power

This last part really sums it all up IMO. If we accept that Iranian leadership are smart and capable (and all indications over the preceding decades is that they very much are), then the fact that they’re actually punching back at the genocidal, colonial, nuclear-armed state that has the Great Satan’s unconditional support really says something.

Ty comrade

Lol with that emote combo it looks like blowing up Rorschach

Where are you seeing this?? Please I’m stuck in a cubicle I need live feeds glued to my eyeballs

I was assuming they’ve been baiting Iran to openly attack in order to force the US to come save them.

Speaking of map, is anyone here brave enough to venture over to old.reddit.com/r/israel and report back?

I doubt it at this point. At least for the under - 35s. Even the most checked out, apolitical younger person would just see it as dragging us further into a regional clusterfuck

Every Muslim still praying, every Persian mother still smiling, every brown child looking to the future with hope in their eyes is an affront to his legacy.