511–520 of 526 posts
This is third shoot down we’ve been told about. First was the Chinese balloon, second was the small less maneuverable vehicle off of Alaska, and this third one in Canadian airspace. Feels like some cold conflict we’ve been unaware of is heating up.
I think TikTok is probably the most successful weapon so far, and not because of spying or privacy concerns.
go on... why is that?
I think China erred by sending such a large balloon that was visible to the naked eye, causing the American public to demand it be shot down. There's no hard rule about where national airspace ends and space begins.. a lot of times they fly too high for planes to reach, and under certain circumstances balloons are allowed through national airspace.. so if the balloon isn't causing a problem (like being a hazard to ai…
We are totally clueless about the PRC's objective to say whether they erred. One plausible (though entirely speculative) explanation could be they wanted the US to react this way. Now we will waste our military resources responding to these balloons and they in turn will learn about our military readiness. They could be intentionally probing and start sending smaller and smaller balloons to figure out where our detec…
I suspect they won’t learn much other than how the US responds to balloons. It’s not like the US is revealing anything novel or secret. They’ve used already unclassified and publicly available aircraft and ordinance.
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Nah. I remember this went viral at a point when the first developer betas of iOS 14 (or was if 13?) came out and IOS started reporting clipboard accesses. For a while during those early betas, it seemed TikTok was accessing the clipboard every few minutes. Apparently it turned out to be innocuous—the app qas checking for TikTok links on the clipboard to show them to the user? Something like that. Other apps had the s…
Telegram doesn't do that, atleast not for me, since android reports (via toaster popup) clipboard access now too.
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Does it not? Or are you being sincere?
Sorry for the sarcasm, but, honestly, I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that an aerial, or even multiple aerials on a balloon does not rule out it being a weather balloon.
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They are now saying they don't know how it was staying airborne (no visible balloon or propulsion) and when they approached to observe it interfered with instrumentation. Source: https://twitter.com/ZaidSabah/status/1624527081026486274
"They" are definitely not speaking for the US government.
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>If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration. But we certainly _should_ have cared. People want to turn this in a purely objective moral game. "Well we've spied on China, so therefore this is fine." If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence…
> If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence: "Well, we've shot down their planes so it's fine that they shoot down ours." People make these equivalencies constantly . Fortunately I don't think either side has been dumb enough to kill an soldier from the other yet, but once we get that pot cooking, WWIII here we come!
Would like to point out something relevant: China and India kill each others soldiers fairly frequently. I find it rather remarkable their issues haven't escalated.
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China invades Taiwan and the entire free world beats it into submission, no contest whatsoever. Straight up steamroll. That’s why China wants to triple their Nuclear stockpile in less than 10 years. They know they don’t stand a chance otherwise. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/11/29/pentagon-china-...
There is some truth to this. We don't want to have to find out though since this will go nuclear as soon as military operations start to affect mainland China. They will launch first and then hope for the best. They know they will only have one shot at it. There will be no time for the "free world" to meet and decide how to respond since it will be every man for himself at that point. There will be no true winners. W…
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> I feel like I'm thrown back to the 80s, all this military and fear mongering and propaganda and war. I can't imagine what sort of lens you were using to view the last thirty years, such that those were the peaceful, propaganda-free times and all this shit with balloons is troubling.
The 80s is too far back, probably 2003 was the last peak, but since it became clear Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters the war propaganda complex was muted for years. Remember when Romney said Russia was the US's biggest threat in 2012, and Obama mocked him? Now both parties are back in on the war machine with Ukraine and Taiwan, and the propaganda's running at levels we haven't seen for twenty years.
Even Afghanistan wasn't a matter of propaganda so much as other flaws/isaues, such as overreactivity and hubris.
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The 80s is too far back, probably 2003 was the last peak, but since it became clear Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters the war propaganda complex was muted for years. Remember when Romney said Russia was the US's biggest threat in 2012, and Obama mocked him? Now both parties are back in on the war machine with Ukraine and Taiwan, and the propaganda's running at levels we haven't seen for twenty years.
> since it became clear Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters the war propaganda complex was muted for years If it weren't for propaganda, we would have found the will to exit those wars well over a decade ago.
As it is, we arguably owe it more.
You can see what the result of leaving Afghanistan has been. We should have devoted more resources to nation building there.