Lord Ratner

Just had to hit this one since it's the funniest part of your post. Was the pandemic not a... global calamity? You think after approximately 30 years of our advanced microchip manufacturing ability declining to zero, it's a coincidence that we suddenly decided we want to make chips in America at the same time a pandemic crushes supply chains and Russia invades Ukraine?

All? I'm just talking to you. You haven't presented one particularly interesting thought in months. If there's a spectrum of intelligent, novel thinking, Clark Griswold is all the way on the right side of the spectrum, and you are fairly close to the far left side. You wonder why nobody responds to you positively, yet you don't seem to realize that the "cheerleaders" on this forum (CH, brabus, Fourfans, viperman, me, etc.) aren't here to beat the other team. We're here to discuss with similarly experienced humans with similarly matching values things that are going on in the world. If our goal was to prove our own intelligence to ourselves by going up against a couple dozen antagonists, we wouldn't be here on a mostly conservative leaning forum of mostly old vets. It's also why guys like negatory and Day man and NS player and 17D Guy end up rage quitting in a huff. They didn't see a bunch of like-minded people discussing issues from different perspectives in the same neighborhood, they saw some sort of den of conservative malignancy and made it their righteous duty to stand on behalf of "the other side." Bottom line, they were here to prove people wrong. Sure, Cleared Hot gets a little Fox Newsish from time to time, and I use big words that Boomer6 has to sound out each syllable to understand, but none of the conservatives come to this site thinking it's time to prove you or the other token liberals wrong. Hell, it's not like you've said anything that you believe that anyone can address, but even if you had, I'm not particularly interested proving you wrong. You say you don't understand my view, and so I explain. I never said you had to agree with me, and like I said you're obviously not at a point yet where you can accept the existence of a philosophy that might disprove your own. I don't mind wasting the time because my daughter is taking a nap and I have nothing to do right now. It would be nice if baseops was what it used to be, a repository forum primarily for military flyers to get information about life and work in the military. But technology evolved and web forums that aren't hyper-specialized hobbyist groups are basically dead, so a few dozen Ghosts of Air Force Past come here to chat amongst themselves, show off their guns, and occasionally respond to one of you guys who seem to have decided that of all the places on the internet you can go to battle with people of the opposite ideology, this is where you'll make your last stand. I mean my God, look at Negatory. The dude is still here with a new username that reminds you every time you look at it that he literally could not pry himself away from fighting with a bunch of online strangers. It's an addiction. 🤷‍♂️

This is really the Crux of the whole thing. No, we can't. We hypothetically can do all of those things without doing the things you find illogical, but history and reality suggest otherwise. You still seem to be in the part of your ideological journey where you think societies and the politicians they produce will make hard choices without going through hard times. I do not. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the generation that endured world war II started to lose political power, we started making all the same mistakes that lead towards the conflict I believe to be inevitable. This isn't some wacky theory I came up with on my own. You've heard it before in one of its many various wrappers. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. Hard times create hard men. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create...

To be clear, this sentence, read fully, says that bombing Kharg Island wouldn't start a war. You might call it: So... Anyways Because it doesn't matter about what you do with the munitions you have right now. All that matters is how many munitions you can continue to produce/source. In a perfect world we wouldn't need these wars and catastrophes to motivate future-oriented behavior. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a human world. If it hasn't become abundantly clear that the developed nations of the West will absolutely not maintain their industrial or military capacities, then you simply aren't paying attention. Jesus just look at what they've done to pilot training. And the only way that it could have been done without war/disaster was with international trade policy that incentivized "reshoring" and "friendshoring," But everybody lost their fucking minds when Trump tried to put just a fraction of the tariffs that will be required to get it done. So instead, we're going to use government spending and the inflation tax to end up with the very same effect. To be fair, Trump went about that tariff policy about as stupidly and childishly and erratically as you could possibly imagine, but stupid childish erratic leaders are just a fact of life these days (Gavin Newsom, Ken Paxton, Mandami, MTG, etc). I did not invent the Fourth Turning framework. Ray Dalio calls it the Big Cycle. Niall Ferguson says it already started as Cold War II. Even Jaime Dimon is calling for rearmament. Anyways. After Russian oil and gas was permanently disrupted thanks to the war in Ukraine, the Europeans reclassified nuclear power as green energy after decades of championing decommissioning. They adapt like everyone else, they just do it slowly and they lie through their teeth about the justification. I've said it plenty 🤷‍♂️. Look I wish anything you would do was possible. I'd love to see America stay out of messy wars, increase spending on military readiness, ensure that critical business sectors like drug production, semiconductor manufacturing, and resource mining were domestically stable, control unproductive spending on social programs for the elderly, enforce immigration policy without rioting and chaos, stop spending at deficit levels measured in trillions rather than billions, etc. As I've said before, I can't wait to see your candidacy for public office. We need someone who's smarter than Trump and knows exactly how to fix all this. Please, we need you. But that's not the world we live in. We live in the one where we will destroy ourselves for cheap TVs and the dream of global peace. Removing Iran from the chess board would be a solid enhancement for Team America. And it hasn't escalated yet, despite your suggestions. It has simply dragged-on. It definitely hasn't gone the way the administration hoped (or how I hoped, for that matter), but there's been no escalation.

This was back in March, when we did not yet know whether or not the regime would collapse under the weight of a bombing only campaign. Now that that's clear, just blowing it all up is a more viable option. That said, I still think taking the island over would be the best answer, but politically it would probably result in a few American deaths so outright destroying it is the easier, even though less correct answer. So yeah, I've been pretty consistent. As far as depleting military resources, countries at peace that are expecting further peace do not build up their military, and they do not maintain it. Some places let it collapse faster than others, but the trend is always downward. This is a point I've made before that many of the "obviously I believe there's going to be a war again I'm just remiss to say where or when or why or if it will happen while I'm alive or while my kids are alive or while my grandkids are alive" crowd just sees as warmongering, because ultimately they believe in something I do not. A peaceful world. I want the inevitable war to start while America can still win it. There's a paradox there, because your enemies will not start a war when it is obvious that you can win. Obviously our capabilities/willpower have deteriorated to the point that some of our traditional adversaries have gotten feistier. That's not going to get better. We're not going back into the peace of the '90s. A chain of events has initiated that is going to eventually lead to a another Total war. If I had godlike powers and could control the timeline precisely, I would try to push that Total war off for about 10-15 years, while using a series of regional wars and catastrophes to continually Hammer the global supply chain in an effort to motivate Europe and the Americas to continue this brand new project of rapid de-globalization. We need to rebuild some level of industrial capacity, because that's where you make the drones and the missiles and the bombs and the ships and the planes, we need to secure enough chip fabrication capacity, which is still going to take another decade before we're caught up with Taiwan, and we need a mining Renaissance between Canada and the United States and Mexico, stripping every ounce of critical minerals that we can from the many many isolated and barren parts of our country. Then, send up the flare. Many Americans (and Europeans) are doing with China what Europe did with Germany in the late thirties. Just squeeze your eyes shut and deny the obvious message being sent by those who are not even shy about calling you their enemy. America was in a very similar cultural and political moment back then, with the Americans completely uninterested in participating in foreign affairs and large swaths of the population sympathetic to the fascists and Communists who were by any objective measure immoral governments that created misery for their people. Unfortunately for Germany and Japan, the United States was the largest manufacturing center in the world at the time, so it didn't matter that we kept our head in the sand too long and joined the fight too late. We cranked out 300,000 planes and 50,000 tanks. Who wins the war of production today? Anything that slows down the Chinese industrial machine is a win in my book.

Well to be fair, you're just here to scream into the void, so your questions are usually not particular consistent or honest. My "justifications" for this war are not going to be the same as the administration's, or Brabus's, or anyone else. What and who exactly are you referring to? And yeah, I'm totally crazy for thinking that we just happened to be the generation that figured out how to solve war (just like every society felt right before total war broke out). We did it, team! No big wars ever again. Don't mind the 4 year long land war in Europe or the biggest manufacturing economy building out a humongous and advancing military, they're doing all that because of peace 😂🤣

If it sets off a war immediately, probably not. If it doesn't start an immediate war, but forces Europe into regaining control over their energy resources before the inevitable war comes (and it neutralizes the largest destabilizing force in the middle east), then probably so.

Not quite. But yes, ours will be most insulated. It would be more appropriate to say that the mismanagement of their own economies at the shrine of globalization has put most of these countries in the position that any disruption can be a catastrophe. Because of this, we can't just smash the country that has been a sworn event for decades. Well, we can, but it'll be ugly.

I just read the summary, but didn't the police leave him to his protest?

Dibs on the trash can, or on the orange and blue corrugated metal mesh waste receptacle?

We're making two different points. I agree with you entirely that focusing only on military targets will not destroy the regime, because the regime is not motivated purely by a capacity of the wage war. Assuming that we are not going to occupy the country and implement regime change that way, which we aren't, then the only other option is to create the conditions by which the Iranian people overthrow the current leadership. Obviously they hoped that by weakening the irgc militarily and by killing the entire leadership chain, that would give the Iranian people enough motivation to re-attempt a coup. That failed, at least for the time being. So that leaves the only other means by which the Iranian people can be "motivated." Economic catastrophe. Bombing Kharg Island effectively ends the economic capacity of Iran. Whether or not the irgc is overthrown at that point is irrelevant. Iran has no way to generate money outside of its production of fossil fuels. No money, no government. It's happened many times in the past and it will happen happen many more times in the future. We could do this by continuing the blockade indefinitely, but that leaves the strategy up to the whims of the politicians. Destroying something that can't be rebuilt for years is rather final. However doing so would probably result in the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great depression, for Europe and Asia, and probably Africa too. I'm of the mind that this economic event cannot be forestalled indefinitely, but destroying Kharg Island would start it immediately in all likelihood. It would be enough to start a war between the US and China if it wasn't for the fact that China is so reliant on Iranian oil that they wouldn't be able to afford the war until they secured other sources. Obviously the Trump administration doesn't want this, maybe because of the mid terms, maybe because they have other international ambitions. I don't know and it's possible they don't even know. Trump is mercurial at best .

If our president wasn't obsessed with using the stock market as his favorite indicator of his administration's success, we could end the Iranian problem forever. Just a few sorties to Kharg Island and it won't matter anymore. We keep trying to avoid a global economic catastrophe that is unavoidable, but the longer we push it off, the weaker our allies become through their own suicidal policies.

Read, boy. Read!

Shack. 4 definitely, 5 maybe, and 2 exacerbating the whole thing.

Maybe you should read the actual debates the framers of the 14th amendment had. Neither the declaration of Independence nor the original Constitution addresses this situation, which is exactly why the 14th amendment had to be written. Thank God the founding fathers knew that we would one day have you to be the sole interpreter of their wisdom 🤣😂 I'm not sure how you can have an ad hominem against a political group, but okay. It also happens to be true. As far as the forum for identifying yourself as a citizen, I will accept the least formal and most rapid forum that results in a negligible number of improper citizen deportations. Since you've been unable to identify a single recent case of an American citizen being improperly deported, we could just assume that it hasn't happened. As for the historical cases, those all sound about right. I especially liked the part where the deported citizens got hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for the government screw up. I'd be happy to 10x that penalty for any citizen involved in a similar miscarriage of Justice. That's not justification to tear it all down. There will always be fuck ups. Until then, from the time you are approached by the authorities (first opportunity), to the time you spend in a detention center awaiting processing with translators available (second opportunity), to an informal meeting with an immigration officer where you are allowed to make your case with phone and Internet access (third opportunity), to the time it takes to board your deportation flight (fourth opportunity), that would be plenty. But again this is all just an exercise false ignorance. You know damn well that proving citizenship isn't a problem. This is functionally identical to the voter ID debates that have been held in such bad faith by the left that it is almost beyond comprehension. It takes the same level of fake stupidity to believe that black people in America don't have access to identification as it does to believe that immigrants don't have access to proof of legal status. Do you have any immigrants in your family? My mother still has her green card number memorized. This just isn't a thing.