SeventyTwoTrillion

Bluesky is currently at 5.3 million users and climbing, while Twitter is at 335 million monthly active users and falling. difficult to extrapolate given that Twitter's userbase has only been falling since 2022 but a back-of-the-envelope calculation assuming a linear downfall says that Twitter will reach 0 users in about 20 years. This almost certainly won't happen; sudden events will probably cause periodic exoduses that then form a positive feedback loop of having less content to look at on Twitter and more content on other websites. My personal inkling is that the crossover point between Twitter and Bluesky will be in 2030, give or take a couple years

still no viable alternatives to Twitter, so I think it's just another straw on the camel's back and not the final one. definitely fucked long-term but the monopoly it possesses will shield it from the natural decay cycle for longer than would be usual in a more genuinely free market situation and its use as a propaganda dissemination device for America will also prop it up

a website isn't dying when a substantial portion of its activity (and thus profit) comes from people saying that the website is screwed and dead; it's dying when nobody even cares to post that it's dying anymore and are all somewhere else, posting shitty memes or whatever the average person does on social media

part of the big cope complex being manufactured

the Copium-Industrial Complex

can't wait until we do this yet again if China retakes Taiwan. dipshits online going "hm, I think China used all their missiles in that one barrage yesterday" when talking about the single largest manufacturer on the planet

trying to prove that there's a media ban on talking about a place via media sites is pretty difficult, so there's not gonna be much more than rumours

yeah, there could be a single Zionist left alive with a pedal-propelled flying machine and their immediate instinct would be to gather rocks to drop on Gaza. committing atrocities is as natural to them as eating. if they haven't killed a few innocent children in a few days then they start getting withdrawal shivers

My official professional analysis:

Iran blowing up Israeli airfields is fun and cool

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Next megathread here.

Simplicius also brings up the ultimate trump card - Israel's nuclear missiles.

While this is obviously a very, very big problem for Iran, Simplicius gives reasons why Iran's leadership might think the risk is worth it:

First, Israel is at an obvious asymmetry in terms of land area. If Iran decides to hit the Dimona nuclear power plant, this would be a catastrophic, Chernobyl-esque event which would render much of Israel uninhabitable for varying amounts of time depending on the distance from it, but very possibly centuries or millennia. The radiation would also hit Gaza and the West Bank, so it's not a very good solution, but it is a sort of version of MAD. And if we're at the point where Israel is nuking Iran, then I don't see what would stop them from nuking Gaza anyway. Meanwhile, Iran is much larger and its population spread out more, so while a massive nuclear attack on Iran would indeed be the worst catastrophe the world has seen in a long time and would kill millions directly and indirectly, it isn't unrecoverable from in ensuing decades; it also helps that modern nuclear missiles don't release nearly as much radiation as a nuclear power plant being vaporized would.

In addition, Iran could threaten a specter of the Iraq War. Saddam was accused of possessing missiles with chemical, biological, or radioactive warheads inside. Iran could very easily create these dirty bombs if they wanted - they have plenty of uranium for it, and they've just demonstrated that they have the ability to strike Israel if they need to, regardless of how many jets and missile defense systems stand in their way. So, again, the potential for nuclear MAD is there and it's not totally asymmetrical.

Simplicius's latest piece is on the Iranian strike on Israel. It's pretty long so here's my summary of the thing:

Iran has stated that its goals for the attack were to strike the Ramon and Nevatim airbases, which have both strategic and symbolic significance as they are the attacks from which the Israeli attack on the consulate was conducted from. They also wished to hit the Israeli Air Force intelligence HQ where the attack was planned. More generally, they wanted to understand and degrade their air defence.

Both the airbases are in the south of Israel. The HQ is in the north of the Golan Heights.

The Intelligence HQ was hit and seemingly levelled. Ramon was "badly hit", Nevatim was hit by over 7 missiles. There is probably more damage to other installations but their distance from civilians who could record them means that the extent of the damage is only something the military commands know via satellite images. In short, Iran was very successful in their strikes.

This attack was historic because it was an attack directly from Iran, but also because it was the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer exchanges in history, crossing several countries over 1000-2000 kilometers with not only hundreds of drones and missiles, but also hypersonic weapons possibly involved in some capacity. This attack seems to have drawn inspiration from Russia's campaigns in Ukraine, first sending in drones to be shot down and deplete Israeli air defense and then sending in low-flying cruise missiles, and then finally the ballistic missiles - all timed such that they would arrive at the appropriate time to best exploit Israeli defenses.

The US scrambled the combined power of themselves, Israel, the UK, France, and Jordan to try and intercept as many drones and missiles as possible. This seems to have not been successful, with several images online of "intercepted" ballistic missiles actually just being the ejected booster stages of two-stage rockets. There is evidence that the ballistic missiles were largely not shot down and sliced through the dense Israeli defenses like butter. The videos that suggested interceptions were occurring may have in fact been the stage separation of Israel's Arrow missiles. As Iran's ballistic missiles hit their targets, they seem to have been moving at approximately Mach 3.5 to 5.

While Iran has definitely hit the airbases, it's not terribly clear what precisely on those airbases they hit, with satellite images being unclear, though a hangar may have been directly hit. Israel has coped by releasing images and footage that are meant to imply (but don't really show) that the airbase was unharmed; at least one of these videos (of an F-35 landing) is possibly old footage based on reverse searching, and Israel more generally released confirmed old footage (from 7 years ago, even) throughout the attack.

There is controversy about whether the Iranians used hypersonic missiles - there is no definite proof that they did, but there is some speculation for the missile nerds in the piece.

Iran has warned that they will respond to further Israeli attacks in a similar and expanded manner; even 10 times more than the previous level of strikes, which would be about a thousand ballistic missiles at once.

This failure of Western interception demonstrates that the excuses made during the Ukraine War about how Russian strikes were only getting through due to Ukrainian inexperience were false. Iran penetrated several layers of the absolute cutting edge of Western interception technology and made them spend over a billion dollars, with Iran spending ten times less or even less than that. It demonstrates that Iran is indeed perfectly capable of hitting any target they wish in the Middle East, and Iran actually has an advantage that they alone hold in the world. Russia and the US were beholden to the Intermediate Ballistic Missile Treaty until 2019 when Trump withdrew from it (and Russia did in turn), meaning they have less experience in creating the kinds of ballistic missiles that Iran possesses; Russia has instead generally focussed their cutting edge on cruise missiles, which are more expensive and slower.

The main problem that Iran might now experience is accuracy, depending on their technology. They have demonstrated they can get missiles through Israel's defenses, but due to a lack of real evidence (which Israel will obviously never release unless somehow forced), it's hard to say how precise Iran's missiles truly were either way. It's entirely possible that they hit every single target exactly, but it's entirely possible that only a few managed to hit something of value. We simply do not know, beyond vibes. Israel has leaned into that with their propaganda, which is neither here nor there as Israel is a compulsive liar.

holy shit lmao, the Zionists released images like this as proof that their airbase is fine:

extremely obvious that they quickly dug a hole in a ground and they're so stupid that they forgot to not include the mound of material that they unearthed. I guess this is indirect proof that the airbase truly has been fucked or they'd release something of substance instead