Not only do you have to cut that number in half and then by 75% for what would actually be war ready at any given moment. The F-35 is not a bomber, it's a multi-role combat aircraft, and a stealth strike fighter, which means they're a one and done type of air to surface attack. JDAMs, JSTOWs, Paveways, and some laser guided Cluster Munitions that can fit on the F-35 can be intercepted with easier than the plane itself which is a choice. JDAMs and JSTOWs cannot aimed while in flight, they're pre-aimed. So if you have mobile air defense it's pointless. The laser guided stuff is very slow. In practice F-35s would be used to maintain air superiority to protect MQ-9 Reapers from air to air interception. Reapers are extremely vulnerable to SAM missiles, the Houthis have taken them down.

The reason that America is mad about Iskander is because mid-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles which Russia has spent more time developing are emerging as a way to breach air defenses in modern warfare as well as loitering drones. America doesn't have enough cheap swarm tech ready to go because we get milked by the MIC so we don't have anything to pad out missile barrages to attempt to get enemies to make unforced errors in targetting. That's precisely how Russia is getting past the magical Patriots impervious air defense shield in Ukraine.

America would have trouble maintaining NATO bases in Europe as a springboard because Russia would throw meat at every country it was at war with. Also Putin would 100% pull the trigger on launching ICBMs with MIRVs if an overwhelming conventional force was at his doorstep.

Beyond that the trick to defeating Americans is to take out their range extension which at "bombing Russia distances" is typically gigantic refueling planes. Russia or China out of all countries would be best equipped for this task.

It's been the opposite for me, the older I get the more support I need. I was unmedicated until I was 30 and gave up the ghost.

Thanks Regan.

You don't think permanent removal is at least part of the point of prisons/jails? Seems like there are quite a few people who think of prisons as a way to get rid of "undesirables" and there has been a constant push to speed up death penalty proceedings. The entire probation/parole system seems like a way to keep people coming back.

I agree that in a microcosm and at the individual level it's a removal of undesirables, and it works that way in rich locales, but there are way more poor people than there are rich people, and way more poor prisoners than rich prisoners.

The problem is that prison industrial complex needs bodies. The other extractive bit of this is that the revolving door of US jails justify the thin blue line's enormous extraction of local resources. The majority of the imprisoned in the US are in jails waiting arraignment. It's a revolving door. These people end up being locked out of a real life because the system is punitive, and feeds itself. So while it does control where populations of people are, it is not a permanent removal in the same way where you empty San Francisco of all Japanese people and move them all to empty land.

Plus the entire system was built around putting black people in prison to continue slavery. How is that not permanent removal? The US has basically just been making baby steps towards prison reform for 100+ years so it isn't quite as blatant these days, but literally millions of people have been permanently removed by it

Remember that slavery is not removal. Death is not removal. Slavery is extraction. The US is not removing black people, it is trapping them. That's the history of slavery and anti-slave patrols that seeps into law enforcement. It's a strategic difference that implies a difference of intent. We are not removing communities, towns, neighborhoods etc, of the black population to force them into slavery. We are trapping individuals in the legal system which in aggregate affects those communities, towns, and neighborhoods but we are not "emptying the cities".

Notably the comparison falls apart a little because originally gulag were often seeded with mass population transfers, but towards the middle/end of the soviet union gulags had a stable enough rotating population to simply shard a larger camp into smaller camps at the periphery. By that time people were sentenced to gulags individually rather than transferred en-masse.

It's a fuzzy distinction for sure, but the main distinction is that we're moving bodies one by one, not street by street/neighborhood by neighborhood/town by town/etc.

"Winning a war" with Russia from the NATO perspective is a task that would require every NATO member to engage in a total war that would wipe out a large portion of Eastern Europe.

There are NATO members who would balk at this immediately such as Turkey. There are NATO members who would be blood thirsty and balk at this once the war started, and Russia became a real threat (rather than imagined) inside their borders, which is almost every Eastern European and Nordic Country.

I cannot see Norway going to war with it's neighbor at the behest of America.

Prisons are closer to a hybrid financialized gulag system than concentration camps. The ultimate goal of concentration camps is permanent removal. The ultimate goal of gulags was economic extraction. US Prisons and Jails function in this way in the sense that many governments in the US use prison labor. However this goes further in the sense that the bodies of prisoners are typically commodities in and of themselves when you're looking at the interplay between private for-profit prisons and the various governments they contract with.

But we've had actual concentration camps for immigrants along the Southern border for decades, these camps are also hybrid financialized systems because some of them are also run by for-profit companies.

America is simply the synthesis of the horrors of humanity with a financial twist!

find a way to initiate the whites-only rapture

Melanin is too heavy to be lifted by their Lord's Grace.

See I disagree, that's actually a good feature. Many "movies with a point" can only take on the perspective a sole protagonist as a totalizing force. The split protagonists in Barbie show that the actual antagonists are the systems under which the protagonists exist both in Barbieland and the real world. It's a true solidarity movie in the sense that Barbie not only does what is good for Barbie but she also learns to make space for Ken in a society that is a gender mirror of our own. Ironically Barbie in this way does have an apotheosis as an avatar of corporate feminism (woman savior) in but in aesthetic only, because in action she is showing solidarity along intersectional lines within her own society. Something that she ultimately wants to bring to the real world. Barbie doesn't start the movie with all the answers as an all knowing intersectional socialist, she develops that on screen by bouncing off her deuteragonist in Ken. Ultimately not only does this structure make a fun movie, it makes a good movie with a point. Very often I have a hard time watching movies with a point with other people because at one point the "fun" of the movie falls apart for the "point", something that doesn't happen with the complexities of Barbie.

I spent the entire other post being triggered by the EEAO comparison and the placement of EEAO as higher than Barbie, and I need to write about Barbie specifically and why I think it's better.

So first off, I really had 0 expectations for this movie. Greta Gerwig hasn't been my favorite screenwriter/director. Beyond her rework of Little Women, I've seen Ladybird and Frances Ha. To me many Greta Gerwig movies are really about the ennui of being a "girl" from a "serious perspective". I do like the "I'm just a girl" style memes, and I can appreciate the emotional valence of the "I'm just a girl", but attempting to paint it with a "serious" brush is a bit off putting for me because ultimately it's not serious by definition because it's a gendered impulse. I had this huge problem with Ladybird because it's effectively a "my life a movie" movie for any woman whose ever been a teenager and did the incredibly lame thing of having a huge crush on a guy who thinks People's History of the US is a "deep book". In essence Greta Gerwig movies to me up until Barbie and outside of Little Women (which she was a good director for), have been about modernizing the essence of Jane Austen in a serious way but without the discernment of a Jane Austen style society. In essence the follies of Ladybird are follies but they are never actually contrasted against the "serious" portions of Ladybird. To put it more bluntly there's never a serious arc for Ladybird where someone tells her to pull up her pants and her follies are filmed from a play stupid games win stupid prizes perspective -- the writing and camera forces us to take her seriously and take her agency seriously as if she knows what she's doing even if she doesn't. Tones of this appear in Frances Ha, but Ladybird is a much better and more in your face example.

With this in mind, Barbie was a real fucking treat. Immediately I understood the setup. Barbie lives in a gendered society that's a corporate feminist matriarchy. It skewers corporate feminism essentially as a "top dog" style system where the in-gender is women instead of men. Barbies can do anything, Kens are defined through Barbies, and the tertiary characters are the LGBTQ and minority accessories that cosmopolitan women (e.g. Barbies their avatar) wear to show their virtue. I think Ken learning "patriarchy" as a turn of the century / mid century masculinity from Will Farrel as a caricature of a modern CEO was extremely well done. I think the tying of women in the real world to Kens and not Barbies was a great idea. I think reifying Barbie as a real world woman at the end where she has to contend not just with the gendered place in society as a Ken but with the specific forms of how society polices women as also really well done. Contrasting this with the political issue at Barbieland is great because Ken's aren't policed as much as women in the real world but the main point is that they are only seen as people through the dominant gender (Kens to Barbies, women to men). I think the movie could have been a little harder on Barbie in terms of the treatment of the LBGTQ and minority coded characters, but "i guess" there's limited run time. It's still disappointing that that conflict is introduced and resolved within the scope of like a 5-10 minute scene. Ultimately this has an extremely pleasant amount of depth for what should have been a "fun" and empty headed movie about a toy line.

The other thing that's extremely well done is the story structure. You can split out Barbie and Ken into their own movies and they work, but they're in the same movie! And it's possible because Barbie and Ken are both protagonists (Ken in practice is actually a deuteragonist), but the antagonists in the movie are the systems in Barbieland and the Real world. We know this because both Ken and Barbie have their own hero's (don't take hero literally I just don't wanna say monomyth for ease of understaanding) journey that intersects. The hero in the story is clearly Barbie who saves Barbieland, defeats the CEO of Matel and emanicpates the Kens. The villain is actually the CEO of Mattel, who not only attempts to capture Barbie/Ken in the real world but take over Barbieland by misleading Ken.

I really think that Greta Gerwig should stick with comedy or dramady because prior to this watching her movies was like watching Paul Giamatti in a serious role, and then he slips on a banana peel and you're not supposed to laugh at it, you're supposed to cry.

I disliked EEAO because its message is a hugbox that doesn't give realistic examples of healthy conflict resolution. The ironic dissonance between the action of the movie and the message don't mesh because the action is supposed to be showing familial/cultural strife and the message is about being kind due to unknown unknowns. However it doesn't actually resolve a significant dispute outside of a familial dynamic. As an immigrant I feel like this movie targeted me but the "lessons" I'm supposed to take home are completely trite compared to my real life interaction with cultural differences in my family. It's essentially a fantasy that pretends that your immigrant grandma will gleefully learn your American cultural boundaries after a difficult talk, something that my inter-generational immigrant family has no real experience with (and neither do many of my friends who are also immigrants and even more targeted by this movie because they're Asian).

Likewise outside a family dynamic this movie falls entirely flat, because despite all her flaws my grandmother is my family and I still have to take care of her. The American version of this is cutting your family out when they're annoying. Ironically the movie is also pick and choose about what properties of assimilation its characters take which feels very pidgeon holed in terms of its messaging. But beyond the family the movie doesn't really take a real stance on conflict resolution because of it's Looney Toons/Stephen Chow style approach. The martial arts are a metaphor for familial conflict, but by using that visual metaphor there is nowhere to escalate if the movie were to have a real villain rather than a metaphor for a teenager with a tantrum. I'm sorry in the real world you're not going to fight "hate" with "love" at the level of physical conflict.

Barbie becoming a real woman in the real world is supposed be a humorous peripeteia to the fact that she has had an aristocratic experience of being the dominant gender/sexual orientation in Barbieland. She has never actually been culturally policed in the way that real women are.

Same as the joke about being called a tankie, Barbie despite being an icon of feminism cannot actually navigate the real world's complex social structures. Which is also paralleled to real world events like when libs get upset at Chappel Roan for her politics or her reclamation of her own personal experience, rather than being defined by the whims of her fans.

good bit