Yeah, we often say stuff like "wow my cyberpunk dystopia has none of the cool parts of a cyberpunk dystopia", but if you are creative, and you think about it long enough, there are definitely some cool parts.

It's just hard to enjoy them what with us basically being in a shooting war with a fascist state while everyone tries their hardest to pretend we aren't.

I sense something in the air. Something much much bigger than the BLM protests. If we had not already crossed the line before, I think the back to back shootings of Good and the couple in Oregon will make for what historians will trace the roots of the second American Civil War.

The thing is, as TankieTanuki pointed out, they have their transponders on. They are letting it be known on purpose.

This is just ADS-B, which aircraft can turn off at any time by switching off the XPDR. The US is absolutely capable of moving planes in secret (at least relative to the general public, as KC-135s show up on radar). Whenever you see military aircraft show up on a flight tracker, they either don't care about being seen, or are saber rattling. The Trump USAF loves to show off when it repositions aircraft though, so I imagine the coming forward deployment of a B-2 to Diego Garcia or Al-Udeid will be done with XPDRs on, parking in open air, and a Twitter post to accompany the flight.

Agreed.

Thing is America's economy is cooked. It's AI grifts, crypto scams, and gambling all the way down. The only actual wing of the economy is the military industrial complex and washing the dollar through other countries via warfare and asset seizure.

We're fully into the newest Lebensraum era of the US where, as the generals kept saying to Hitler, 'the war will pay for itself'.

The only problem for the US is that it usually doesn't as the targets get harder and the ROI of plundering countries gets thinner. I mean, look at Trump's meeting with the oil execs for an early example; they don't even want to invest $100bn for oil extraction in Venezuela because they don't think the US can keep control of it long-term.

What is so unfathomable is how there are thousands of these nameless ghouls working in the in the bowels of government who have so much energy and drive to fuck up the world. A lot of them are literally sacrificing their lives and devoting all their worldly energies to it.

Yea I guess John McCain is already dead.

It's been up for quite a number of days now.

Dominos +137%

Pizzato +278%

.

But yesterday

Dominos >+1000%

Pizzato +294%

Maybe the Pentagon got together to game it out yesterday? I remember waiting for the 12 day war a day early because of the Pizza Index.

People are reacting as if the Pizza Index spiked just now. Idk if psy op, or if there is an actual short term spike.

https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&q=pizza+index&since=&until=&min_faves=

its a tactic to broadcast in public shit like this. ''oh look where we are'' and then turn them off to go ''oh now you dont, guess what we're doing haha''. before the venezuela air campaign they spent months flying around them with the transponders on

The goal isnt to rule Iran, it's to kneecap it before it becomes a danger. Just like Libya and Syria, if they can start a civil war or just royally fuck the economy until its irrelevant to geopolitical events (eg. blocking Hormuz).

Maybe there's some stretch goals for controlling the oil, but even denying the oil to someone else is a good start. Most importantly, none of this necessitiates a ground invasion.

I think what we've seen since the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles is a pivot towards a "de-development" strategy. The goal is simply to just collapse, sew chaos, and generally destroy the state capacity of enemy nation states as much as possible, with no pretense of trying to transition the government to a friendly regime. One reason to do that is that you don't need an occupation, with the corresponding risk of high casualties and the risk that the whole endeavor be perceived as a failure.

We see a complete version of this strategy being employed against Iran: air strikes, special forces operations, clandestine operations, cyber warfare, and economic warfare. It's incredibly devastating to the whole society, there's very little risk of casualties, and there's very little risk of it being perceived as a "failure" on the political stage (even when the regime doesn't collapse).

More limited versions of this are applied to other countries, notably Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela. We see the results of it completely collapsing a state in Libya. We see examples of other countries doing it; I think the best example being Israel and Lebanon.

Nah, if US and Iran bludgeon each other, there's a chance Israel is left free to do what it wants with the rest of the region.

The saving grace is that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have a defense treaty - so maybe even with Iran out of the picture - these guys can mount a good fight against Israel.

And without US patronage, Egypt could possibly flip.

Good point, but we should also remember that war "games" can just as easily pivot directly into actual war. They are not harmless exercises.