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Nowhere is safe

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Re: Nowhere is safe

#111

Post by throw310822 »

some_random wrote: post #87
throw310822 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US are also the major enabler of Israel's colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This was clearly expressed by Bin Laden himself as one of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks. > Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".

Yeah, he also justified it by citing the US's acceptance of homosexuality so maybe it's more complicated than that.

No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question:

"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."

And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.

Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).

Re: Nowhere is safe

#113

Post by ACCount37 »

brandon272 wrote: post #100
ACCount37 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated". https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa... https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/sunday-shows-pre...

[flagged]

Re: Nowhere is safe

#114

Post by hypersoar »

ACCount37 wrote: post #44
firefoxd wrote: post #9

I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.

[flagged]

That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#115

Post by mikestorrent »

some_random wrote: post #85
TheGRS wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets. If nations can sol…

As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did…

One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.

In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.

Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#117

Post by chiph »

jmward01 wrote: post #110

"The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it." This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Diggin…

State actor, yes. But not a Tier-1 state actor anymore.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#118

Post by cucumber3732842 »

varjag wrote: post #92

A tunnel 15-30 feet underground is not "shallow" at all, it's a major earthworks undertaking.

In Reddit hand wringing land where your 3-gal homeowner air compressor gets called a bomb, yeah sure it's a major undertaking.

15-30ft holes in the ground can be constructed with bog standard earthmoving machinery that isn't even "wide load" so it's "within normal capabilities" by professional or military standards.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#119

Post by XorNot »

tmnvix wrote: post #81
ACCount37 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are major unresolved economic tensions between US and Iran or the likes. US isn't, somehow, mad because Iran or Venezuela are suddenly very rich and prosperous and independent - that simply isn't true. The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy…

One theory is that control over Venezuelan and Iranian oil is a means of constricting Chinese economic competition.

Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#120

Post by cladopa »

brianjlogan wrote: post #15

Hmm... Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free. The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people. Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peac…

Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.

Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.

Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.

The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.

That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.

The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.

The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.

If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.

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