• 0 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: December 9th, 2023
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoWorld News@lemmy.world•Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to LoseEnglish
    4·
    8 days ago

    The US was unwilling to go full scorched earth, the potential effect of the US bomber fleet using just conventional munitions was described as having the potential to do almost as much devastation as a nuclear strike, despite the warcrimes the US still held back.

    Look I want to live in a universe with a version of the US without Henry Kissinger too, but this just doesn’t seem like an honest view of the history here.

    I don’t understand in what sense the U.S. held back from bombing. Fuck, one of the major criticisms of U.S. military strategy in the Vietnam war was the idea that if they just bombed them hard enough, over and over and over again carpet bombing with B-52s loaded to the brim with conventional bombs, than that would magically win the war all by itself.

    Along the way, Rolling Thunder also fell prey to the same dysfunctional managerial attitudes as did the rest of the American military effort in Southeast Asia. The process of the campaign became an end unto itself, with sortie generation as the standard by which progress was measured.[129] Sortie rates and the number of bombs dropped, however, equaled efficiency, not effectiveness.[130]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder

    https://renewvn.org/the-most-bombed-place-on-earth/

    https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390bba4735cdb#%3A~%3Atext=Between+1965+and+1975%2C+the%2Caerial+bombardment+in+human+history.

    https://www.maginternational.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/laos/

    To be clear, I don’t think this makes the illegal Russian invasion and war in Ukraine okay. I am against the war and support arming Ukrainians, fuck Putin, but I think it is important to be realistic about things as we discuss this. I am not even sure the Russian military could even approach a conventional bombing campaign on the same scale, I certainly don’t think they could do it without getting absolutely chewed up by AA since most of the munitions would have to be likely delivered by ground attack aircraft like the su-25 or even more vulnerable strategic bombers.

    A bombing campaign of that size is essentially impossible to do in a near peer conflict like the war in Ukraine which is an environment where both sides have extensive missiles armaments, radar and electronic warfare capabilities.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What do you believe that most people of your political creed don't?
    31·
    9 days ago

    I think things become much more chaotic and prone to quickly escalating to lethal applications of violence if there is the constant threat that anybody could be concealed carrying and more importantly that if someone felt the need to carry a firearm that they would likely conceal it.

    Bringing a large visible rifle into a situation still escalates the threat of violence, but at least it does it in a clear and unambiguous way. There is no excuse to shoot the teenager dressed in basketball shorts and a wifebeater with absolutely no where to hide a rifle because you saw somebody else nearby with a rifle and you think the unarmed teenager might be concealing one. (There really is almost never an excuse to shoot anybody unless they are holding a gun and aiming it at you, and maybe even not then if you are on the one antagonizing them).

    The US is a country where police not unregularly shoot innocent people, often unarmed black men or other minorities, and handwave away any responsibility for the needless violence by suggesting there might have been a handgun…

    With a hunting rifle or shotgun there is no ambiguity about your intentions in a space or how you will potentially react to lethal threats of violence. There is no conveniently conflating other innocent and unarmed people with the people holding rifles or shotguns and easily getting away with it. On the other hand there is no surprising people by entering a space under false pretexts about your capacity or intentions around violence with a rifle or shotgun, since carrying a large weapon immediately identifies you as someone carrying a large weapon.

    My point is, concealed carry is only effectively a right or privilege if society gives you the permission to arbitrarily carry around the means to end many peoples’ lives in your pocket, which is something really only extended willingly and consistently to white, christian conservative men. Carrying around a hunting rifle or a shotgun is a different story.

    Look at the way handguns are used in US media, they are treated as status symbols of power and righteosness. Shows and movies constantly rely on the revealing, obtaining and losing of handguns to portray changes in the power of characters (lazy fucking writing but that is another rant…). To US culture the handgun is the ultimate object of empowerment and of personally distributed justice and that says everything you need to know about handguns really.

    (also, if you are someone who actually needs to protect yourself with a handgun, you already know who you are, this conversation is irrelevant)

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What do you believe that most people of your political creed don't?
    123·
    9 days ago

    As a USian, while I think gun violence is a preventable mass tragedy that unfolds daily here I also think that when minorities, indigenous people, women, queer people or really anybody who isn’t a white christian rightwing man talks about wanting to own a gun to protect themselves while living in this country I can’t disagree. If you don’t understand the very real threat of police violence that you can’t resist or stop, and the very real threat of other kinds of violence that police will NOT step in to stop because of who you are, you can’t really argue against owning guns in the US to people that have no other choice than to take this kind of thing seriously.

    I think handguns should be made much much much more illegal, since the handgun is actually the tool of state violence and oppression, it is the tool of surprise murder and intimidation. On the other hand if you carry a rifle you have to state your capacity for lethal violence, there is no hiding it or revealing it like a powertrip or gotcha card, which isn’t to downplay the terror and violence that evil rightwing terrorists have wrought upon the US with assault rifles, but at this point I don’t think owning a hunting style rifle or a shotgun as somebody who lives in the US is an unreasonable idea, especially if you have become a convenient political and literal target for the right.

    To be clear, the whole stupid idea that owning an ar15 with a 30 roung mag, bumpstock and quick change mags somehow makes you safe to a home defender that breaks into your house at 3am when you pull it out and proceed to shoot 30 rounds erratically in the general direction of something you hear, sending bullets careening through the walls of your neighborhood and more likely killing somebody’s kid sleeping in their bedroom than doing anything to make you safer IS pathetic and spits on actual real gun culture.

    Also I want to note that people who roleplay as mil-sim types by spending actual thousands of dollars on pseudo-military equipment to live powertrip fantasies are by and large hilariously pathetic, especially because they are usually completely and utterly blind to (or worse directly supportive of) forms of authoritarian violence (state or otherwise). See lots of loser white dudes showing up in 24k worth of weekend warrior dress up GI Joe gear to defend the incredible threat to civil liberties that society expecting people to wear masks during a pandemic represented… Good job chuds! You saved the day!

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoNonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.works•The eternal debate over the M10 Booker (by @EODHappyCaptain)English
    6·
    10 days ago

    It only counts as a tank if it can deliver a pineapple unscathed to the center of enemy territory.

    An IFV/AFV is designed to make it very difficult for an enemy to bring a pineapple unscathed to the center of your territory, presenting a dynamic defensive capacity that takes concentrated antiarmor capability to neutralize or deny.

    These things are almost the same but the differences end up mattering a whole lot… but sometimes they don’t. The movement and precise location of the line between “IFV/AFV” and “MBT” is a question answered in conversations about geopolitics, shipping capacity, railways (is it really a tank if you can move it with an airplane? not just the tank but everything else you need with it) and access to Anti-Pineapple equipment. Answers are defined in terms of “theaters” of war.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com•One dayEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    Fuck double basin sinks with shallow af basins.

    I am convinced they are an architecture designed by men to hurt women and make them IMMEDIATELY do the dishes like a good wife because otherwise making a receptacle for dirty dishes that can only hold a tiny amount of dirty dishes is utterly insane.

    lemme say it again FUCK DOUBLE BASIN SINKS