Not surprising. This would be the moment to do it.

If they want to destroy America, the Bin Laden gambit is proven to work.

Do they ever wonder if they might be the badguys, when they’re going to a meeting about how to put ultranationalists in charge of Germany?

In the third world you see people selling VPN access in person at markets. At this point junior can probably just download it themselves, but at some point maybe that opens up as a career opportunity.

Spoiler alert: because it hurts.

I guess turning it into a mystery gets more clicks than “check out how many times this exact molecule has evolved in parallel”, even if that’s the actual interesting part.

Yeah. Surveillance is covered already.

Overkill. Just find the illegal no-age-collection ISO. Installing with your middle finger raised is optional, but recommended.

Nobody really looks at the past decades that way here, and even in the third world there’s plenty of America fans.

You tried to hedge that, but you’re basically just agreeing with QAnon, on grounds of a different conspiracy theory.

Alright. Hopefully he’s good and not awful.

It’s not a given. Once whoever gets in, they have the same incentives as the last regime. Look at what happened with Sheikh Hasina.

That seems a bit premature.

I mean, that’s not how geopolitics ever worked. “You break it you bought it” is a system you sometimes see when there’s actual enforced laws to rely on, not at all in the affairs of sovereign powers in an international state of anarchy.

Well-off people in the West seem to think human laws are physics.

Exactly.

To save someone a click, they’re worried about the hypothetical of way too much being taken from one local area. Although I have to wonder which predator couldn’t just move on; most of them are fast and have pretty huge ranges.

There’s so ridiculously much krill the limited human uses for it are a drop in the ocean, and there’s no worry of depletion more generally.

Might as well clean up the rest of Egypt as well at that point.

100% chance that if they did this, they’d find a reason to invade the squishy but obscenely rich Gulf to the east as well.

So how much territory could they actually effectively hold and control?

Wow, that’s new, I’m pretty sure the coverage from before explicitly said no nuke loans. Or did that just mean permanently?

Hey, off topic, but do you know any good ways I could get back in touch with the community, as an anti-Zionist atheist?

Yeah, sorry. If you hadn’t responded yet I was going to add an edit. Not my best work.

I think Pete Hegseth is a reasonably intelligent person, and any reasonably intelligent person who spends time talking to Western military experts is going to learn something. The whole “we should have hit them harder in 'nam” thing is for people who don’t know an AFV from a tank and think Rambo is a documentary. If you talk to people who are right wing but actually learned on the subject you get different narratives from that.

It’s possible he believes some of what he’s selling. He knows for sure he started the war, contrary to the statement, because he did that. If he wanted to rack up as many casualties as possible, he has better ways to do that, so most likely some degree of targetedness is intended. Is he very worried about legality, or civilian casualties beyond the PR effect? Maybe not.

Acknowledging that some public figures have expressed the belief that we’ve been insufficiently aggressive in wars and foreign policy over the past decades is hardly conspiratorial thinking.

No, it’s not. If you’re not the kind of person who prefers North Korea over France I apologise for cutting you off. It’s just there’s so many people like that on here, and I don’t love spending time on it.

I think sh.itjust.works blocks the big “anti-imperialist” instances, but you’ve been around for three years, so you would definitely be aware of it at the very least.

What specific conspiratorial world view do you think I’m going to express?

The Lemmy one. The other 5% is that you’re just a pacifist or something.

Maybe they don’t think of themselves that way, but if you believe that the whole world is not as it seems and being kept that way by a small group of evil people, and have made a movement around it, that counts.

I’m unsure why you think him having no relevant experience makes him less likely to hold a profoundly awful opinion. If he had experience I’d be more likely to think it was just talk, but given the lack of experience, being a talking head, and the company he keeps I see no reason to think he’s secretly holding different opinions.

Shill is still a skilled job.

For big decisions, it always boils down to MICE. Money, identity, coercion and ego. One can think of exceptions, but you basically have to look at medical pathologies.

For little decisions, what about empathy? People will genuinely show it when confronted by something on the spot.