Cunigulus [they/them]

Hard not to come to this conclusion tbh

Now that the original line in the Southwest part of Donetsk has fallen, the Russians have a straight shot right to the Zaporizhia Oblast border, all flat fields with 0 obstacles until Ivanivka, basically everything south of that green line is super vulnerable, putting the Russians in position to threaten to roll up the lines either to the West or the North. Logistics for a major offensive might be tough due to limited good roads, but we might be looking at the return of big arrows soon and maybe a precipitous collapse of Ukrainian lines, especially if the Russians are actually already in Kostyantynopil. We’ll see if they’re prepared to exploit their successes further. It’s hard to be optimistic watching this war, but this is the kind of action that might bring it to a more rapid close.

They didn’t even have the balls to send manned vessels there, they sent in this wimpy slow-ass USV and the Yemenis just chased it down and grabbed it. Now Yemen’s got the goods on whatever this probably billion-dollar project is.

They wanted to prove he was dead. Did they think Hamas will respond like the Nazis defending Berlin when Hitler died? Let’s hope Netanyahu tries to use this as an excuse to wrap things up in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah.

Meanwhile China has reached the cutting edge of microprocessor fabrication science and is planning a superfab utilizing a particle accelerator to try to get down to 2nm. Was this maybe coming eventually anyway? Sure, but I think these sanctions have made the Chinese double-down. They might have temporarily lost some market share by not being able to scale as fast at the cutting edge for the last few years, but these sanctions forced them to move up the supply chain to the kind of fabrication technology ASML had been supplying before sanctions and now they will outcompete the western monopolists. They wanted a quick fix to keep the Chinese behind in semiconductors for another decade, but no one thought to ask, “Well what happens after that? How will the Chinese respond?”

If things really do heat up there it’s a clear tell Taiwan is about to pop off imo. Light too many fires for the empire to put out and there’s no way they’ll be able to square up with the world’s dominant industrial power.

That said, I don’t think Korea is going to heat up too much. There have been much more siginificant flare-ups in the past.

Another option for Iran would be to try to crater the runways after the strike, maybe combine it with one of those slow drone wave attacks to get as much of the Israeli airforce in the air as possible. These missions are at the absolute limit of F-35’s range, even if you don’t force the planes to ditch you can force them to air fields that can’t support them and get them out of action for a few days. There’s a lot you can do to an air force if you can strike their air bases.

If I’m in the Iranian war room I’m pounding my fist on the table right now demanding a pre-emptive strike. They just hit the airbases they’re going to have to launch an attack from, roll out some missiles and hit them again when the aircraft are fueling up and getting ready to go. Then follow it up with a wave of those drones once their air assets are indisposed. That’s how you do deterrence and shut down the escalation ladder.

Honestly this debate probably slightly hurts Kamala, just by virtue of people having to watch her more. She didn’t do a great job of rebutting Trump. Her response to him just lying his ass off the whole time just wasn’t sharp enough, and there was so little substance in her responses - it’s just not going to move the needle for anyone. My lib boyfriend just gave up watching it after 30 minutes or so and was laughing at Trump half the time. It just made me depressed and less interested in giving a fuck about this election.

Their derangement grows deeper as the cognitive dissonance builds. It’s like a giant cult at this point. They’ll snap at some point and go full nazi, just watch.

Nah, looks like they lit a tire fire inside the cooling tower or something. Maybe as some kind of distraction? It’s hard to understand why they would do that. It shouldn’t really damage the cooling tower, and the cooling tower isn’t the part to be worried about. It’s possible it was being used as storage and saboteurs or special forces lit it on fire.

It’s one thing to agree to transit through the country, it’s another to simply not forcefully oppose it. Would Iraqis die to defend Israel?

Iran can deploy over land, they just have to go through Iraq and Syria to do so.

You can also go through Iraq and Syria.

These things go slowly, slowly then all at once. There’s been a lot more movement on the front these last few months, and the Ukrainian army is pretty depleted. At some point Russia is going to wind up for a big kick at an open door and we’ll see things starting to look more like Afghanistan in 2021 or the final months of the Third Reich. A negotiated peace is the only thing that can prevent this kind of outcome, and Ukraine might be smart enough to go in for it before things really start to deteriorate. Even so it’s hard to imagine the Russians crossing back over the Dnieper and even harder imagining them taking a defended Odessa. If they get Odessa it will be in a peace treaty, not by military force.

The crazy thing about the prison abuse stories coming out now, on the eve of the planned Hezbollah operation, is that it suggests a rift in Israeli and American politics and it looks like the American side is using this to heavily lean on the Israeli side to not escalate. I think the US election angle is significant here as well. Bidenworld has been trying to keep some kind of a lid on this thing so it doesn’t blow up, while Netanyahu - maybe in coalition with Trump just wants to escalate to keep his grip on power. Now that Harris is taking the reigns, suddenly we get some more muscular moves - in the form of a nod to the propaganda media to touch this abuse scandal - necessarily coordinated with some sector of Israeli politics that’s trying to avert a war with Hezbollah. If Netanyahu gets his war Israel goes into survival mode and the gloves are off - historical genocide, mass missile and drone attacks from the resistance axis, large scale resistance military formations moving to Lebanon and the Golan, political instability across the Middle East - Iraq will be a mess. It’s a disaster that probably ends in Israeli conventional defeat and a high chance of nuclear weapons use.

Unless you only hear the lie intended for you. Trump is a master at this sort of thing. Maybe Harris is a better politician than we think.

It’s a real outsider’s take. Their ideas really can simply be contradictory and shallow. They just have to convince an army of brainwormed Pillow salesmen to chip in 10k here and there by vaguely referencing something Ben Stein taught them in their High School economics class.

I’ll probably vote for her tbh. I know she did some bad shit as a prosecutor, and I don’t like her, but she hasn’t to my knowledge done anything completely unacceptable like vote for the Iraq War or preside over the Gaza genocide. She’s almost certainly a one-term president who will give up the office to whoever the Republicans run in 2028. I just kind of expect the crazy shit going on right now to be wrapped up by then, probably Taiwan too. A sock-puppet for California money seems less likely to blow up the world over American decline than whoever will be pulling the strings in a second Trump administration.

The shooter was actually in the Ad, but it was highlighting some kind of retirement program for teachers or something, so it was just a random coincidence that he was in the front row of the class when they were shooting the ad highlighting one of his teachers.