mozz

The US is always at war in at least one place somewhere on earth, and has learned from painful experience how easy it is to ratchet a conflict up into a bigger deal than it needed to be and how difficult to ratchet it back down, so they pay close attention now to when they’re crossing certain lines especially when nuclear weapons are involved.

Put it another way, all the nations of the world all go to the same bar, and a lot of them have guns and split personalities, and they spend every night playing cards and cheating and there’s always at least one fist fight, and somehow it’s been about 75 years since anybody got shot.

https://sais.jhu.edu/kissinger/programs-and-projects/kissinger-center-papers/escalation-management-ukraine-response-russias-manipulation-risk

Dems have moved to the right for decades since Clinton's attacks on the working class with NAFTA. Obama called himself a moderate republican and governed like it.

So your assertion is that the arc Clinton -> Obama -> Biden represents an increasing rightward shift in the party, is it?

Do you know what would have happened to a self-described socialist who tried to get the nomination in 1996, or a Palestinian congresswoman who talked about "From the river to the sea" in 2008?

Read "Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank for a detailed description of this.

I genuinely started looking for this, because I was curious what it had to say, but then I reread how you summarized it and concluded I probably don't need to.

The percentage chance that the security council will do something about this is pretty much exactly 0.

The US vetoes anything the UN tries to do against whatever war-criminal shit Israel gets up to in any given year, the two of them often completely alone, but with the veto on the other foot, the other 99% of the world will I think be firmly on the side of simply telling Israel "my guy you must be joking with this."

Iran has stated that they now consider the matter closed from their perspective, and the US is for the most part pretty careful about escalation management. The only real wild card is what Israel wants to do, which God only knows, but I do hold out hope that their first action being to involve the UN means they're planning on a bunch of performative outrage and nothing else significant.

It was always thus, in this as in many other contexts. If phase 1 is "You can't stop me, rules mean nothing, I will do as I please," it's a good bet that by phase 3 we'll arrive at "OMG what is happening now is against the rules, won't someone step in and make sure I come to no harm, we need justice."

Or that yes

Hopefully this means they're planning to take their L and whine a lot and not start a whole-region war

We need to start a bipartisan voting reform, and we need to vote. Voting right now will fix short term fascism. But only for the period of about 4 years, then we have no immediate guarantee anymore.

Yeah, 100% agreed. How do I advocate for voting reform? The big thing I'm coming to talking about all this stuff is, I should be doing something besides just bullshitting about it on the internet.

That's not what i said.

Sounds like I misinterpreted "WE have to make this a ballot problem, WE need to incentivize these fucks to care." -- all good. It kinda sounds to me like we're saying the same thing (and I would add reforming a bunch of things besides the voting system, too). How can I help to make that happen?

I love this so much

Ok, so we have a large tank of pyrophoric and highly corrosive metal at 300C which we hope to convert to a metal fire. A metal fire is scary enough. A metal fire in pure oxygen would be worse. But...we can do better.

You have my interest yes

Oxygen isn't the best oxidiser.

Why is there heroic orchestra music in my mind now

No worries: Youtube link

It has been 0️⃣ days since our last big fluorine fire

Sand Won't Save You This Time, which somehow isn't in the official listing despite it being one of the better ones of "Things I Won't Work With," comes with an accompanying video of chlorine triflouride doing its thing and setting quite a few normally-not-flammable things on fire, back from the era of Youtube when Youtube was good.

I was watching TV during the early days of the Ukraine war, showing rockets slamming into an apartment building and blowing big fiery chunks out of it to fall down in fragments through the air. I was watching this in the company of somebody who was familiar with that exact neighborhood and had traveled there.

To say she was upset by it is an understatement.

Second story: In the late late days of World War 2, everyone in Germany knew it was lost. They were trying to negotiate with the oncoming armies, trying to spare villages and bridges and infrastructure from destruction, keep everybody fed and safe, just make as soft a landing as they could since the operation was going to go inevitably down in flames regardless. Some hard-line Nazi local administrators out in the country were adamant that they had to resist to the last man, they could make no quarter with the oncoming army even if that meant they had to fight them with like 2-3 pistols and nothing else, they needed to destroy their bridges and crops and to hell with what it meant for the future. And so on.

When the army actually arrived, almost invariably, those exact same officials fled in the night, leaving the townspeople alone and without either organized defense or a representative who could negotiate with the incoming army for safety.

I feel like with a few Patriot-Front exceptions, that's exactly how it's going to be with all the oldish white men who post on Facebook about how they can't wait for a civil war to be able to kill Democrats. Once there's no turning back from the unfolding horror, it's all of a sudden going to be a crisis that they're in a moderate level of danger, and they're going to start demanding that special exceptions to what's going on be made for them.