leicsmac

It's all part of the ridiculous dance that nation states appear to have to undergo. Of course they know. And we know they know. And they know we know they know. Like you said, the outrage here appears really performative. That's what the press regulator is supposed to be for, but seeing what the Mail, Telegraph and Express can print without apparently being pulled up for it, they don't seem to want to do much actual regulating.

Oh and, once again, the Chinese must be pissing themselves laughing at all this as the US continue to hand them the global primacy for the future pretty much on a silver platter.

I'm reminded of one of Boris Johnsons anecdotes about some American going on about how medieval wind power is, and then him responding by saying that if that's medieval, then burning stuff to make power is Paleolithic. It might have been made up, and the man may have been wrong on so much else, but in terms of thoughts on energy policy he was right.

At least the Operative had the honesty of purpose to explicity admit he was a monster.

"Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God." - Mal Reynolds, Firefly.

That's right, but the truth is that people can make whatever geopolitical or economic arguments regarding oil and gas that they like; either fossil fuels used for energy generation and the "nationalism" that the current US administration seem keen to export become a thing of the past or human civilisation does. Rather quickly. The current geopolitical games that people like Trump enjoy playing while ignoring the very human cost of them cannot and will not survive the way the world is changing.

Fair enough. Personally, I think that among that class with power and money there is a rather obvious distinction between those who want to use that power to guarantee a future for themselves and everyone else, and those who simply want it to abuse it at the expense of everyone else until the world burns. And rather than accept that abuse of power as a seeming fait accompli, rather people might seek to resist it in whatever way they can, however small, as opposed to simply stating it as a fact of life and so making the doom of us all a certainty rather than a probability. I think this is an entirely possible motivation. Let's hope as much of the rest of the world sees it for what it is - crude Might Makes Right abusive behaviour - and chooses to leave both him, and such behaviour, back with in such knuckle-dragging times with such knuckle-draggers, where it and they belong.

I'm pretty sure @Dunge would agree that, having seen me play, putting me as a centre forward would be about the only thing capable of driving the club further into the mire than it already is.

Begging pardon, but this whole post has the tone of the bolded being absolutely justifiable, if not outright acceptably good.

Peter Mandelson would be proud of that level of spin.

People lamenting low birth rates in various places around the world are totally misguided in one of two ways: either intolerant enough to just want more babies of one particular ethnicity (rather than more wholesale), and/or not acquainted enough with the problem to know that the incoming problems resulting from such a gradual decline are in fact the best bad option and all the other options are worse for the future.

Also, I wonder which one of Trump's buddies made an absolute killing on Polymarket betting on oil prices just before the announcement?

But overall, looks like we're pretty much back to where we started in terms of overall geopolitical situation, only with a rather large economic shock and quite a few people killed. All seems very much worth it, right?

Castro had over six hundred documented attempts on his life by the US. He didn't throw his toys out of the pram as a result. But then it was always obvious that the current incumbent in the White House has skin as thin as it is orange.

Which at the present time and place is an impossible task, and Trump knows that as well as anyone. So we're back to the idea that he and his view the lives of the Iranian people as totally dispensable in a way that suits no clear objective, which comes back to the sadism.

Yep, we should never have turned away in the first place. Imagine where we'd be now if we hadn't. Instead, we're playing catchup and have barely got to where we were a half century ago.

If this is true (and it may well be), then it obviously serves no geopolitical or strategic utility whatsoever. Which only tends to leave motivations based mostly on pure sadism.

Speaking personally I've thought for a long time that any directly attributable use of a nuclear weapon in this day and age, no matter the method of delivery, would cross a threshold it is not possible to come back from. Hopefully we won't have to rely on a "rogue" general or other officer in a launch command centre willing to sacrifice everything to ensure that doesn't happen.

Firing from a SSBN would certainly be playing with armageddon unless the right people were told explicity what, where and how things were going to happen. And even then it would still have some of that risk.

Mentioned this on the cvnts thread, too. There were quite a few folks about here going on about overreaction, "he won't be that bad" and "the world didn't end in his first term".

Could use an SSBN rather than a land-launched ICBM, with the aforementioned warning to other nuclear armed parties. But I really don't think it's going to come to that.

As much as I'd like to see it happen, it would need widespread support from within the UEFA and CONMEBOL nations, at the very least. Not really sure how likely that is.

It won't be nuclear weapons. It could well be a withering conventional strike that devastates the infrastructure that 90 million people require to survive. Both are unacceptable and the latter could, in the long run, exact as much death and suffering as the former. Terrestrial perspective is something far too many people with power lack. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to teach such people that lesson in a way that really works.

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

They did talk to him not long either before or after loss of signal going round the Moon (can't remember which), though.