Doesn’t the president have to convince a certain group of US higher ups in order to do actions like these?

No

I don’t doubt for a nanosecond that Trump might invade Cuba, why do you doubt Trump would commit to it? I think that is a really quite dangerous belief.

It just comes down to which way his brain rots, if there is anything stopping him it is that it is actually difficult to do it in a way that Cuba could provide enough organized military resistance to be an invasion and not just a bunch of attack helicopters strafing starving people without access to consistent electricity who just want help or maybe some fuel like the fuel being used in the helicopters to pointlessly kill them. Note: there would absolutely be violent resistance, that is not what I am saying.

Cuba is in a human rights crisis or very near it, far nearer than it should be for being right off the coast of one of the wealthiest nations on earth, and I think the brutality of that makes the basic logic of invasion feel disjointed even when put through immense political spin.

They know this of course, the dream is quite blatant that is trying to be brought to life here --> cause so much violence, loss and suffering that Cuba is pushed into getting more and more help from China at which point FINALLY Cuba can be narrativized with a straight face as the scary communist bogeyman and warhawks fearmongering about China to rationalize the dumbest shit will be empowered.

This is all a stupid preamble to the ruling class of warhawks declaring condescendingly to the rest of us “See, we ignored the China problem way too long and now the enemy is at our doorstep! We must become far more rightwing now and go to war with China before they go to war with us and it is too late!!!”

Ughh my nation is a monster.

Well… that was the world we used to live in, but the reason this is happening now is precisely because the US military no longer has complete dominance, many nations have figured out how to fight a combined arms conflict with modern technology and drones and so now all of a sudden having this rule might actually mean something…

VR is an actual technology, AI is just a weapon the ruling class is using to encode a set of cultural norms that further dehumanize workers.

Yes well we can’t have indepth, critical and thought out analysis about war if we want to keep turning a blind eye to the Palestinian Genocide (we also can’t keep pretending the airpower we have can enact political change in the Iran War and elsewhere if we admit that the air power our enemy has cannot enact political change in a different context) so we had to get rid of all that stuff and now the result is otherwise extremely competent journalism continually undermining itself with silly misunderstandings of the mechanics of war and Ukraine has suffered immensely… not that many in power in the west wanted to help Ukraine that badly… shamefully enough… but still the “western” press pretty much accepts at face value the propaganda of strength that russia sells, and it is laughable how little they question what is deemed inevitable and what isn’t about the Ukraine War by russia.

My immediate reaction to this article was not that any of it is necessarily wrong or that the current and coming hardships are not brutal, but that nonetheless in order for russia to win this war it must truly make Kyiv a frontline city… by moving a damn land army close to it that threatens a realistic possibility of encirclement or direct capture… and because russia has shown itself incapable of that it is even more existentially necessary that russia create a commonly accepted sense that Kyiv is a frontline city through bullshitting and propaganda.

There is no reason a major percentage of people couldn’t one day find usefulness or enjoyment out of VR, the devices are simply an order of magnitude too expensive right now and inherently it isn’t an experience you can share easily but it is a genuinely new experience for people and that is indisputable.

AI on the otherhand is a cancerous process of stealing (legally or not) well curated large datasets, throwing them into a woodchipper, creating an extremely lossy compression of all that data that is fed to people through a device that constantly hallucinates and then using the sometimes decent output of all of that to rationalize austerity for the humans and institutions that created the datasets and true value in the first place.

VR is an exciting new technology with tenuous and awkward beginnings, AI is a process of self immolation of knowledge and the practices and values that safeguard and maintain it for the public benefit, it is not just unsustainable, it is a process of extraction done by the ruling class to diminish and enclose public resources that leaves a diminished wasteland of byproducts in its wake…like mountaintop removal but applied to knowledge and learning itself.

Imagine if all that money, time, resources and trust had been put in the control of actual game developers?

Everybody who defends the idea that capitalism is the natural and right order of things and cannot be improved upon with an alternate more socialist arrangement of societal resources?

Costs only count if we say they do!

So much money burned in the name of efficiency and wise investment of resources for absolutely fucking nothing but an eventual pathetic, quiet retreat from pushing a future that has already consumed incomprehensible amounts of money with even less to show for it than the VR bubble (though VR is actually cool and an actual technology that works so bad comparison).

Tell me again how capitalism is so efficient and is effective at lucidly designing tools and services for society that people desire and need… I won’t listen to a word you say as I keep using my open source tools.

Violence at this scale can only ever be erasure for the sake of the violence of erasure itself, and you are right all it takes is looking at these pictures to see that immediately.

Forgot “Always lands on its feet”.

dumb autonomous murder drones

You mean like techbros or MAGA but in a robotic form?!

That sounds terrifying!

All fascist movements share the same essential DNA of hate, they are all reproductively compatible no matter how ideologically disparate they might seem, all that is necessary in the end is the idolation of strength and purity.

It is the same reason why in the present day russia finds almost all of its support in europe from the rightwing.

…and your input about centering everything around a grand narrative of “China Bad” is often completely unrelated to the issues truly at hand, you appear terminally unable to process information about geopolitics without fitting it into a reductive and forced cold war style dichotomy of us vs. China… so again you only encourage me to listen to others in this thread the more you raise your voice about geopolitical matters.

…and looking at your comment/post history the only thing you bring to the table 99% of the time is lazy, endless and highly repetitive fearmongering about China, so I take your negative read on these comments as a good indicator not a bad one.

The US navy owns the undersea in this war, Iran can try but the further they reach underneath the sea the farther up their arm will be bitten off.

If asymmetric, littoral forces cannot operate on the surface relatively unopposed there is little they can do against a blue water navy because they never can be sure what is below them or how long ago it already detected them.

You wanna try to hit a moving ship with a ballistic missile?

Okay, you better have extremely good, live intel and for that you need eyes on your target which means something or someone has to push off from the shore or post up on extremely exposed coast line and maintain a live communication with the missile truck hidden somewhere inland.

…the problem with trying to do that is once the US deployed attack helicopters for littoral and air defense that are in communication with naval assets and fixed wing assets Iran became pretty hopeless in trying to get eyes on target and then relay targetting data in a timely manner. Pre-emptively flying drones out to attempt to get close enough to a passing ship doesn’t work that great either as it is a recipe for AH-64E target practice.

People mistake the unforced idiocy of Trump, Hegseth and crew with the idea that taking on the US military in the ocean is as easy as playing tricks on an old blind and deaf man. They also mistake Iran’s decisive ability to strike static targets in the gulf using drones in overwhelming bursts with the ability to fight a littoral naval war against a dynamic opponent.

Iran controls the surface of the Strait Of Hormuz and not 1cm deeper.

The collapse of a livable, stable climate.

WW3’s? Yes.