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[Egan_BW]

Technically I set down I own goalposts a ways from PTTG's.

[wierd]

I will admit that the old-guard DNC was much more moderate than the frontline liberal left they claimed to be representing.

I will put forward that one of the big reasons why Hillary was not such a "shoe in", was because of this very fact, and that the actual liberal population is more radical than its elected leadership finds comfortable with, resulting in disfavor among the electorate.

Similar song and dance to the GOP and how it (electorate) found absurd outlet in Trump.

After the DNC restructures and reconsiders itself after this 4 years of hell, I will expect radicalized left politics to be far more normal. It isn't that it does not exist, it is that you do not see it *YET*.

[Reelya]

"Polarized" by itself doesn't tell you who is more extreme or in the right/wrong. After all, any war is about two side that are polarized. e.g. if people weren't polarized they don't fight back they go "sure take the land, no problem".

After all, the Allies were polarized against Hitler - violently polarized to the point they were actually killing people over the issue. Aren't they all just as bad as each other?

[wierd]

Conflating fighting for survival, with fighting for favoritism, is disingenuous reelya.

AND, from a purely dispassionate POV-- war is never profitable, compared to peaceful resolution. It is only valid as an option when one side forces the issue to the point where a peaceful resolution is fundamentally impossible.  At which point, it becomes fight for survival, rather than fight for favor. The side fighting for favor, using war as the tool, is ALWAYS in the wrong.

[PTTG??]

Look at that goal post move! Golly!

Now show me how many of those people are running for office. Or, say, the current president of the united states of america?

Until a president gets elected with a campaign promise of unilateral nuclear disarmament and shutting down the military, liberals aren't remotely extreme compared to the right.

The unstated assertion in my initial rant is that idiots don't count until they've managed to climb the party ranks. The liberal wing of American politics is remarkably staid, regardless of what weird special cases you might find. We aren't talking about that. Were talking about people with power.

[wierd]

Look at that goal post move! Golly!

Now show me how many of those people are running for office. Or, say, the current president of the united states of america?

Until a president gets elected with a campaign promise of unilateral nuclear disarmament and shutting down the military, liberals aren't remotely extreme compared to the right.

The unstated assertion in my initial rant is that idiots don't count until they've managed to climb the party ranks. The liberal wing of American politics is remarkably staid, regardless of what weird special cases you might find. We aren't talking about that. Were talking about people with power.

There is a hypothetical "insane left" that simply doesn't exist in practice, unlike the extant and terrifying insane right. The leftward equivalent of a border wall is not "no wall," it would be "no borders." The extreme left alternative to tax cuts isn't moderate tax increases, it's seizing the wealth of the corporate plutocrats and distributing it to the people.

I pointed out how it does in fact exist, and is causing real problems, right now, with a fairly recently brought up example.  I then elaborated that your prior goalpost (a president that is radical left) is likely just 4 years away, and why.

[Reelya]

Conflating fighting for survival, with fighting for favoritism, is disingenuous reelya.

But that's a false idea too. Hitler wasn't massacring the French, English, Dutch etc. They were fighting to maintain separate governments, not "survival". In fact, probably less people would have died in the war if the Allies didn't fight at all. After all, if you look at the Madagascar Plan etc and the actual history of the holocaust, they only decided on the "Final Solution" instead of just exiling the Jews after it was pretty clear they weren't actually going to win in Russia.

[wierd]

"lebensraum".

What Germany was appropriating by force: EG, seeking a more favorable position using war as the tool. Exactly what I condemned.

Nobody was invading Germany.  Germany *was* suffering from severe economic sanction, and suffering miserably-- but going to war is not the appropriate response there. Peaceful resolution was.  They chose not to, chose to militarize, chose to invade their neighbors for living space, and then went on some wild crazy tangent about murdering Jews to better justify why Germany was in the economic position it was in from the start.

[Reelya]

My point was that wars aren't inevitable even if another country wants something you have. You can always give it to them instead of fighting, we're just so indoctrinated into the notion that you have to fight back, that the concept of not fighting back seems utterly alien to us. But it's always one option, maybe not even the worst. I mean, Vichy France is reviled for surrendering, but the alternative was perhaps to draft the entire French male population (plus women maybe) and send them in kamikaze attacks against the German Panzer divisions. Which would have 100% guaranteed the deaths of a significant percentage of everyone in France, and probably not even have worked. Even the worst the Germans could do might not have been as bad as e.g. 30% of all the French dead from fighting back.

Wars are only a necessary thing when both sides want to fight it out, e.g. they require both sides to have a clearly polarized opinion about the matter you're fighting over (which is the context I made this point in). Actually rather than "we have to fight to survive" wars actually end when one side decide "shit if we don't stop fighting back we won't survive", which puts in doubt the "war of survival" argument, at least a little. After all, Poland could in theory have fought on and on until literal babies were in the trenches firing pistols at the Germans. But then there would be no Polish people today.

Jean Paul Satre talks about that in terms of phrases you hear like "I had no choice" when justifying something. It's almost never actually true in a literal sense. There are always choices, the person just rejected all the other choices.

[TempAcc]

Surely there's no radicalism going on in the murican left, right?

We really do need the old thread title back.

[Cheeetar]

Surely there's no radicalism going on in the murican left, right?

We really do need the old thread title back.

Both sides!

[Starver]

On hefting a bomb (conventional or nuclear, of whatever size you might wish) into the likes of Times Square, there are so many options. I wouldn't really want to state them¹, but I don't need to.  Some of the capability (give or take the actual bomb, which is perhaps going to be the big breadcrumb trail, whether it's of the Enola Gay or Timothy McVeigh type of payload) has been around for decades, for some variations on the themes there's been recent developments that could now be used in the plan.

Many plans don't even have to work perfectly (like did the 9/11ers think that they, and not their improperly protected-from fires, would collapse the WTCs?), that'd just be a bonus, and near-miss collateral is often as good a message (like when checkpoint guards and queues suffer the fate they'd have really wanted to bring to bear upon the heart of the protected Green Zone), especially if you're already combining the word "over" with the word "kill".

But anything I've thought about, anyone:
a) Thinking about actually doing something, or
b) Trying to anticipate and guard against those others who would try to do something
...are likely to have already considered and possibly put into their 'possibilities, given the opportunity' tray.

And the (a) group has the advantage (including real-flag, false-flag and probably even false-false-flag actors if you're really paranoid), because they only need to do what they do the once, sufficiently successfully...


I don't think it'll go as far as many of the scenarios (mainly because the lesser ones are easier to make happen, and also because the first plan that ever happens means that there's no need/ability to repeat an attack against the same target in a different way), but in exploring the phase-space I'd be hard-pressed to rule any of them out.  Even the more (apparently) outlandish ones.


None of this helps discussion, though.  So let's ignore that all and go on about those wacky North Koreans, instead, at least insofar as wbat that does to AmeriPol stuff...  (I'm sure that was last night's news, yet that version's only an hour old...)

¹

Spoiler: This sounds like classic Conspiracy Theorist, I know, but (click to show/hide)

If I could get Google Groups to surrender up what I know I read on alt.(books|fan).tom-clancy in August 2001, maybe slightly earlier, maybe the first week of September... But between X-No-Archive, the possibility of conscious sensitivity behind the scenes, and Advanced Search being awful, I'd have to dig up the old HDD I was using at the time and look for the local download I may yet have.

[Dorsidwarf]

-Lots of very important statistics about nuclear weapons-

I'm not saying that there's a real threat of backpack nukes! Like you said, the US and maybe the USSR are the only nations known to have ever developed one of these ultra-compact systems.

I was just responding to the nonsensical statement that somehow a theoretical high-yield miniature nuclear device would be less dangerous/destructive than the airliners on 9/11

And even the absolute smallest yield (10t up to 1kt) of the W-54 backpack nuke (which actually was backpack-sized and is the device people are thinking of when they say backpack nuke) would still be a vast disaster if set off during New years festivities, or a similarly large concentration of people. (20t is instant death to everyone at the Times Square crowd, and probbably the destruction of most nearby skyscrapers)

However just because something is the ultimate fear of the counter-terrorist organisations worldwide, doesn't mean it has even the slightest chance of actually happening. Which is doesn't, because Russia is really the only non-US power that could possibly carry out a strike like that, and they really, really, don't have a reason. Hopefully.

[Reelya]

Also, state actors who don't have nukes now, if they acquire nukes aren't likely to just give them away to blow up something random. The whole point of a state possessing the nuke is basically Civ 1: "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS". e.g. if Saddam had blown up Time's Square straight after managing to produce one nuke, it wouldn't achieve any sort of reasonable goal that he'd have in mind. This isn't DC Comics, it's real world.

That's also the real thing they're worried about with Iran. e.g. the 2010 Dept of Defense report on Iran that had the the boilerplate language at the top: "Iran ICBM by 2015, with 'sufficient foreign assistance' " which was the headline people ran with, basically says not a single word more about any hypothetical Iranian nuclear program, and instead goes on to describe in detail about how the entire Iranian military is structured around threat deterrence and forcing any invader to negotiate instead of attack, and that they're spreading their malicious influence by sending diplomats to nearby nations. This is the Pentagon's own report BTW. You'd think if there was an imminent threat of Iran raining nuclear destruction on the USA it would get more than one sentence of boilerplate text that hadn't changes since the 1990s in a fairly lengthy report. Nope, what USA is worried about is Iran gaining better deterrence which just owning a nuke would provide (but firing a nuke is not deterrence), because then you can't push them around so easily. That's why the entire report is actually about Iranian deterrence systems instead of their nuclear program.

BTW, what they're really saying is that Iran doesn't invest in "force projection" which is the military doctrine of aggressive defense by being able to attack your neighbors. Iran instead invests heavily in defense systems and promotes friendly groups in nearby nations so that the risk of being invaded is lower.
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/exclusive/middle-east/irans-maritime-mirage-power-projection-through-conventional-means
For example this article points out that Iran is spreading it's power through unconventional means such as "arms proliferation" and funding proxies (the article itself should be taken with a grain of salt, the point is that even harsh critics of Iran don't claim they've developed offensive weaponry). Except that Iran's military spending per GDP is actually quite low compared to most in the region, it's almost all defensive spending, so that leaves extremely little for "arms proliferation". Basically they support regional allies so that they don't have to spend so much on weapons in the first place. There's very little evidence that everyone else being gun-happy over there is because of Iran.

[Starver]

What's that quote from the film, '90s, maybe? ...oh, let's google. "Peacemaker", 1997

"I'm not afraid of the man who wants ten nuclear weapons, Colonel. I'm terrified of the man who only wants one."

Of course, from True Lies (film) to Sum Of All Fears (book, please!), there's been different attitudes towards quantity...