Pooter

Thought the media was being alarmist about it and then I read the text of the bill. Literally outlines basing B-2s and MOPs in Israel and a contingency plan to transfer custody of them to the Israelis. YGBSM

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-could-arm-israel-us-134559013.html real doozy of an idea here from the Israe.. *ahem* America First crowd. They're not even hiding the ball at this point "“I’m honored to introduce the Bunker Buster Act with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a bipartisan stand to protect Israel and stop Iran’s nuclear threat. Iran’s uranium stockpile makes clear that the danger is real. This bill gives the President the authority to equip Israel with the tools and training they need to deter Tehran and make the world a safer place,” said Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17)."

Yeah sorry I was mostly being tongue in cheek about the E-3 and how broken they are. I've flown with a wedgetail in integrations with the aussies and it was shit hot. Mostly I have just completely lost faith that we can actually acquire and field new airplanes on a reasonable timeframe, so even if we did get the E-7 I'm skeptical it would make it to IOC before the big fight where we need it.

Cutting the F-35 buys in this bill bothers me a lot more than anything about the E-7. Maybe it's because across the 4 red flags I've done, the E-3s GAB'd every vul except 3 so I struggle to understand what airborne C2 could even provide me. But slowing production of our most advanced fighter on the promise of some silver bullet dominance platform that is just boeing renderings at this point feels like we're falling into the same trap that netted us 20% as many B-2s and F-22s as we should have right now. We've got 400 F-35s out of a planned order of 1,763. Less than a quarter of the way there and we're cutting F-35 production already for future promises from a company that can't produce a single engine trainer plane on time or a narrow body airliner without band-aid fixes. Long story short: if something doesn't change we are fucked. If we can't tighten the turn circle on making new stuff we at least need to have the patience to produce the stuff we've already developed in significant numbers.

Don’t worry Ellsworth is building sunshades for the B-21s, we’re g2g

@lloyd christmas sorry my post wasn't meant to be a spear at you, more at Crenshaw. He comes off really holier than thou like he's cracked some code of critical thinking and is now immune to groupthink. Except he only seems capable of identifying groupthink when it occurs among the people he already disagrees with. As for the examples I provided, yes obviously there is a whole world of context surrounding each one. I would argue the same applies for BLM, trans, and all the woke left punchlines the right likes to oversimplify. My point was simply that at some time or another, the entire right wing in America was completely fixated on the issues I listed in a mass hysteria just like the left was with BLM or #metoo. And it was 100% due to the right wing media whipping them up into a lather about it. You think some republican in Kansas would have known a single thing about Benghazi if fox hadn't been shoving it down their throat every night for weeks straight? Of course not. 99.9% of people probably couldn't even tell you what country or even continent Benghazi is in. So reiterating my point here, if anyone is going to have a conversation about identifying and preventing groupthink and media programming, they need to do better than just listing all the crazy shit their political opponents do. The hardest groupthink to sniff out is the one happening on your own side, and only once people can do that have they actually obtained any level of critical thinking.

Interesting that the only “manias” listed are the ones the left succumbed to. Conveniently absent are: stop the steal, Obama birtherism, Benghazi, but her emails, pizza gate, qanon, vaccines cause autism, wind turbines cause cancer, the great replacement, white genocide, the war on Christmas, satanic panic, immigrants eating dogs in Ohio.. to name just a few of the right’s greatest hits. Turns out, sniffing out manufactured manias and herd mentality is only hard when the propaganda aligns with your pre-existing biases. It’s actually super easy to tell when the “other side” is acting crazy. These guys haven’t discovered anything or improved their BS detection skills at all. Any discussion of groupthink that doesn’t acknowledge it going in both directions is fundamentally un-serious.

Well the Oct 7th attacks might have been avoided if Netanyahu hadn’t propped Hamas up for years specifically so that he could keep a belligerent bad actor in charge to preclude a two state solution. Conveniently no one has managed to address this argument yet or the sources I posted (up to 4 now) Waiting with bated breath for @Lord Ratner to make it make sense to my stupid childish brain.

Well thank goodness the estimates were halved. What a relief. Only 4,959 dead women and 7,797 dead children now. And here I was worried something bad was going on.

Ok perhaps you’d like these sources more. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/amp/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/tnamp/ I’m sure these are somehow also bad and not worth consideration because how could Israel do anything bad right? But to your broader point, my position is actually really coherent. And very simple: killing civilians is bad. I don’t buy the BS justifications when Hamas does it and I don’t buy the BS justifications when Israel does it.

I'm not suggesting equivalence. Israel kills civilians in far higher numbers and with far more efficiency than hamas could ever dream of. I used to buy the Daily Wire line of thinking too but after the 40th hospital/school/refugee camp got bombed I stopped buying the "they hide behind the civilian population" line. I won't tell you guys what to think but when I took off the "Israel good, palestinians bad" blinders it became easy to see that an atrocity of historic magnitude is happening right now. Also, a lot of your arguments are undercut by years of Netanyahu's covert strategy of indirect support for hamas to ensure the Palestinian government remained divided and dysfunctional. It also likely contributed to October 7th. https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-hamas-october-7-adam-raz/

Thank you for the productive disagreement. I agree that Hamas hasn’t done a single thing in good faith ever but I would argue those actions aren’t in a vacuum and Israel hasn’t behaved in a productive manner toward Gaza/Hamas either. It’s really easy to point to how radicalized Hamas is but the nuance comes from coming to terms with the conditions those people have been subjected to that contributed to their radicalization. Also AIPAC is just an objectively very powerful lobbying group. I don’t think it’s invoking some grand anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to say that US and Israel interests are not always aligned and AIPAC more often than not lobbies for the Israeli interest.

See this analogy fails because it does what tons of Israel fans do by assuming Oct 7th is the first and only important event to consider when thinking about this conflict. A more apt analogy here is as follows: You’ve been neighbors for 70 years. You’ve been trading tit for tat dog attacks for that entire time. You have blockaded your neighbor’s house and won’t let him go to the grocery store, receive mail, or otherwise interact with the outside world. You randomly encroach on his property claiming portions of his yard as your own. THEN his dogs get out and kill your kid. So you go kill his dogs, his wife, his kids, him, burn down his house, and burn down every surrounding house in a 2 mile radius.

Guys I think the only logical solution here is to forcibly displace these people from their claimed ancestral and religious homeland and then re-settle them into like-minded Muslim countries. Definitely won’t result in fertile ground for more terrorist cells surrounding Israel on all sides. If I’ve learned anything from 20 years of terror wars it’s that it super easy peasy to squash Islamic fundamentalism and imposing our will on them never blows up in our face. Guess we just really have to make a middle eastern Monaco in Gaza. It’s literally the only logical thing to do 🤷🏻‍♂️

I would exert political pressure on that ally (Israel) to knock it off in Gaza. They have more than retaliated for Oct 7 and gone orders of magnitude past that. The stated position of the houthis is that they are attacking Israeli ships "in support of their muslim brethren in gaza." Which I actually believe because so far the only time the houthis have stopped shooting was during the short lived Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. I would immediately stop any talks of a Gaza riviera developed by us and Israel. The gaza riviera is a bad idea of biblical proportions that will have Israel cemented as a permanent pariah state, with us as the enablers. Of course all of this assumes im king for a day and not completely beholden to AIPAC like the current admin and most of the left are. edit: The other biggest problem with the gaza riviera plan is that it's the stumbling block preventing any meaningful negotiations from happening to get back the remaining hostages. Think about it from the perspective of hamas. Once you give up the hostages you've given up your last card, then israel is free to completely bulldoze the place. So what incentive do you have to negotiate a cease fire and return hostages if the only thing looming on the horizon afterward is complete displacement?

Two things can be true at once. Biden pier = really fucking dumb idea This houthi debacle = also really fucking dumb idea 😂 yeah you might be waiting for that confirmation a while.. Administration: "my fellow Americans, after talks with the houthis we can now confidently confirm our strategy was completely pointless and we are now back to square one."

lol and now we "negotiate" a cease fire between the US and the Houthis that doesn't include Israel. YGBSM https://allisrael.com/houthi-rebels-clarify-that-ceasefire-with-u-s-does-not-include-israel-will-continue-to-act-in-support-of-gaza you guys are right, this isn't rocket surgery. It's just complete stupidity. We spent 1 billion https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-operation-houthis-cost-1-billion-rcna205333 striking the houthis, didn't dislodge them in any meaningful way, dumped 3 super hornets into the red sea, pulled back with our tail between our legs, and Israeli ships are still going to be shot at. Maybe a 'real operator' can explain it to me but this looks almost as successful as our Afghanistan withdrawal

Jesus the things that go over you guys' heads sometimes. The entire point of saying "baddie brown people" is that is how the government views them: just the latest group of troublemaker muslims that we're going to dehumanize and bomb into oblivion.. because reasons. So much so that in the signal chat operation Pete so generously shared with us, we leveled an entire apartment building to get one guy (show me where that is on the CDE tables.) And is the irony lost on literally everyone that to debunk my claim we've been bombing the Houthis to no avail for years @GKinnear says: (paraphrasing) "actually Obama was bombing the dudes on the other side of the gang war." ... and that makes it better how? If anything that proves the strategy is even more incoherent than we thought if we're bombing both sides of a gang war separated by only a few years. Ultimately, I'm not here trying to claim the Houthis are model citizens of the world or that disrupting global shipping is okay. But I'm seeing a lot of the "rah rah rah LFG rah rah rah fuck with my boats and get ready to find out" energy that has gotten us into multiple previous middle east boondoggles, so I think it's valuable to have some pushback against that mentality to balance the conversation. Especially when so far they seem to be fucking with our boats rather effectively. I'm not sure why we seem so intent on parking our boats within "fuck with me" range, handing the Houthis and Iran massive PR wins with each hornet that goes into the drink.

So asking why we’re bombing people makes me the racist? I just want someone.. anyone to tell me wtf the plan is here. I see a lot of cheerleading in this thread as if our policies in the Middle East haven’t been a continuous string of political and ethical disasters for at least 20 years.

Biden (and coalition) bombing the houthis for the fifth time in January of this year https://apnews.com/article/biden-houthis-yemen-shipping-attacks-fc5c1ed40f4e370bed81670bfdda0899# Obama - my mistake.. hard to keep track of which group of baddie brown people are the latest hotness. So I ask again, how is it going to be different this time and why is the president pursuing a strategy he actively mocked as stupid and futile during the campaign.

Maybe im just the dirty hippy around here but Obama, Biden, and the Saudis bombed the houthis for the better part of two decades (which Trump called stupid during the campaign) so what exactly is gonna be different this time? Actually I know what’s different.. we’re taking significantly more losses this time

Not sure if I'm missing something or this is just self-contradictory: so we had a tech boom coinciding with offshoring but we can re-shore everything and it will go amazing and be affordable? What am I missing here? What parts of the supply chain do we get to re-claim for our own, saddle with environmental regulations, and then magically have it be affordable?

I think he muddles two ideas in this article, one good and one bad. Idea 1: it's important to maintain some domestic manufacturing capacity for national security purposes. Definitely a good argument. We don't want to be reliant on Chinese supply chains to build our military hardware and critical national defense infrastructure. Idea 2: We need to claw back manufacturing from overseas to provide jobs for the American people. This one is complete nonsense. This argument presumes we have a big unemployment problem in the form of a huge pool of factory-qualified people who are out of work, just waiting for a new steel plant in Pittsburgh or Detroit to be opened up. The article consistently references these cheap polluters overseas are "costing us jobs" so one would expect that as manufacturing declined in the US, so has American employment. The only problem is, that's not true. Since the US manufacturing jobs peak in 1979, manufacturing in the US has steadily declined as we've transitioned to a more tech-centric, service-based economy. But jobs have not declined, they've grown massively in absolute numbers and unemployment rates are actually better now than they were at peak manufacturing periods. Unemployment today is 4.2%. Unemployment in 1979 was 6%. Unemployment now is also lower than it was every single year from 1970 to 1998. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/historical-us-unemployment-rate-by-year-7495494 Unemployment fluctuates for a wide variety of reasons, but I was genuinely surprised to find it's actually better now than the heavily romanticized eras of peak American manufacturing. The truth is, moving manufacturing overseas has not robbed the American people of jobs, it just changed the kinds of jobs people have. The other funny wrinkle in this argument is that when we were at peak manufacturing in the US, we didn't have all of the environmental regulations in place we do today. Our own industrial revolution was famously pollution-heavy, so I'm not convinced you get to have it both ways. I think the equation goes something like this: -robust domestic manufacturing -feel good about yourself environmentally -affordable goods Choose two.

Trump admin every minute of every day: The right, when you point it out: "what are you some kind of trade expert"