I’m saying the Solemani thing ended up getting overshadowed by COVID happening shortly after. That’s part of why it had no effect on the election.
For context, Ukraine's 'antagonisation' consisted of existing as a sovereign state that wasn't under the Russian boot.
What do you think would have happened to Mexico in 1983 if they had decided that they just had to be a member of the Warsaw Pact, and host Soviet military bases and SCUD missile installations? What do you think is happening to Venezuela now?
I don’t know if you’ve read many of my other posts, but I’ve criticized US policies of needlessly antagonizing Russia and China a lot specifically because it increases the likelihood of that happening for no particular gain.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
For a bizarrely chronologically similar parallel, reference the Soleimani raid over New Years in 2020. How did that go for Trump's re-election?
It’s a difficult comparison to make, given that the combination of the ‘Ronavirus and the George Floyd riots was such an unexpected and overwhelming black swan that quickly swallowed up everything else. It’s easy to look back at it and declare it a big nothingburger, but it was basically an order of magnitude bigger than 9/11 and the LA riots combined.
I think it’s a few things.
•The first likely window for an invasion was the Cold War. Kennedy’s handshake deal not to invade Cuba meant that Cuba wasn’t going to be invaded for the last 30 years of the Cold War. Even if Washington doesn’t value honor, nobody wanted to pick at that scab after the nuclear near miss in ‘62, and several other fronts of the Cold War were more important anyway.
•The next likely window for an invasion would have been in the 90s, after the USSR fell. But no one had any appetite for major military action in the 90s, and Cuba wasn’t engaging in any particularly theatrical genocides that would have moved the US to action.
•The third likely window for an invasion would have been during the post-9/11 paranoia spiral. But Cheney’s priority list was Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and the Iraq boondoggle meant that he never even managed to finish the top five, much less cleaning up the D-listers.
•After that there was a pretty big phobia of wading into regime change, and Cuba just kind of kept lumbering on due to inertia.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
That’s because of Cuban exiles in Miami-Dade County. Florida was a critical swing state in American electoral politics and Miami-Dade county was critical for winning Florida. Any party that normalized relations with Cuba would have lost the White House for the next 25 years.
The United States of America is now at war with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Dozens of Venezuelan military targets have been bombed in the last few minutes, including a major army base just outside the capital. American Chinooks have been seen flying across the Caracas skyline.
This could be the most important geopolitical happening since the Ukraine War. We do it yet know if this will be a limited run of bombing like the Kosovo strikes, or a full on Iraq style invasion and regime change. If it is the latter, it will be an important test of America’s military might, and failure could very well be America’s Suez moment. I have speculated here several times that I thought the US would have difficulty conducting a thunder run of a non-peer or near-peer adversary in its current state, and it looks as though my theory may be put to the test. On a geopolitical and moral level though, I have little sympathy for Venezuela, for the same reason I have little sympathy for Ukraine. If you repeatedly antagonize your neighboring superpower, you get what you get.
This will also no doubt further fracture the Republican base in a major way, as interventionist neocons clash with America-First isolationists.
This is also adds to an intensifying pattern of conflict in multiple theaters that could lead to global war. It also increases the likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan as American asserts are entangled in multiple theaters.
I will post more information as I hear it.
source?
A true gentleman scholar post “inb4 source” and is vindicated in the light of history.
Edit:
There are now multiple airstrikes occurring within Caracas. The United States FAA has issued a NOTAM warning that civilian aircraft should avoid overflying the entire territory of Venezuela.
Reuters is now reporting that there are US ground troops active within the capital of Venezuela.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
HAPPENING NOW: Fort Tiuna near Caracas Venezuela has just been bombed. Multiple other sites in the capital have been bombed as well.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Sure and twenty years ago you could get the same result with some skill and two hours in Photoshop. The major problems arise when you make the tool easy and powerful enough for a large pool of idiots to use.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
How’s a guy from England going to conquer Africa if standing in the sun for two hours gives him second degree burns, and doing that for a few years gives him cancer?
I also think Westerners tend to overestimate the seriousness of these things because they apply a western metric towards the number of deaths. The military opening fire on a crowd of demonstrators and killing a couple hundred people would be a big fucking deal if it happened in Paris or Portland. In Iran that’s fairly standard.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I suspect there was something stopping a lot of the radiation until pretty recently, I don’t see how European colonization of Africa and Latin America would have been possible otherwise. Maybe the ozone layer.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
True, but it’s also not exactly fun to be the local baker who gets his bread forcibly requisitioned by a Wehrmacht unit and then gets taken out to a ditch by La Resistance and shot for it when the war is over. If these articles had been a serious examination of the difficulties of living in an occupied country I would not have minded, but it was just the same special pleading you see over and over again. And the fact that these ran during the height of punch-a-Nazi hysteria made it even more grating.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
@CapitalRoom
The report I just filed with the Moderators lists me, my men, and Dr. Alexander here, but only one of you! First one to talk gets to stay on my message board!
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
The water situation is difficult, their currency value is falling, the regime is losing support for not being able to ensure basic economic and infrastructural function. And the liberals in Tehran continue to not like their theocratic government. The question is whether the people out in the streets fall into group A or group B. If it’s just group B it’s probably a nothingburger. If it’s group A it could be a happening.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
I don’t mean legal process for living Nazi collaborators. I mean the wave of drippy articles about how the French and Belgians shaving the heads of Nazi collaborators (female) was terrible because living in an occupied country is hard and stuff. Shooting Nazi collaborators (male) is ok though.
There are some very large protests/rioting in Tehran. Potentially veering towards an attempted revolution. As I said in my post in the last TT thread, I’m pretty sure these are organized and coordinated by Burgerland/Israeli intelligence. Probably not much will come out of it, but something to keep an eye on.
Edit: Starting to see some armed anti-government paramilitaries popping up on the street in videos. Not necessarily a huge deal, these groups have been conducting attacks for years. But perhaps a sign of an escalation.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
This reminds me of that sudden coordinated media blitz a few years ago to politically rehabilitate Nazi collaborators (female).
I think it’s less a reaction to the anachronism of it, or wokeness generally, and more that the trope has just become so heavily overused that it’s an automatic eye-roll moment. Even for viewers who aren’t particularly conservative. We’ve basically been doing this once per show since Buffy the Vampire Slayer
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout We’ve been talkin’ ’bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out
Ironically that was a common tactic back when most marriages could only be dissolved for fault. You’d move to a state with no-fault divorce long enough to establish residency and then get divorced. Everything that’s old is new again.
A completely real, non-astroturfed revolution that is in no way shape or form affiliated with any foreign intelligence agencies has broken out in Tehran. The people have taken to the streets (in Tehran) demanding the return of Reza Pahlavi, the scion of great man who despite his single-digit approval ratings in Iran, is extremely popular with foreign intelligence agencies. This is quite possibly the single most important event for world freedom that has happened since the last three failed color revolutions in Iran.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment
That’s the way the Rolex brand is now. For a long time Rolex was what was called a “tool watch”. That is, just a good accurate watch that you would wear because you were in a profession where you needed to be precise about time. Che Guevara wore a Rolex when he was tramping through the jungle, because you don’t want to whiff an attack because your watch lost eight minutes and you sent the reserve element in at the wrong time. Divers would use them a lot too, because when you’re calaculating oxygen reserves you need to be accurate.
Over time that reputation for good quality gave Rolex some cachet, and it gradually morphed into the gaudy status symbol it is now.
Even if it is that’s not normal. In previous generations it wasn’t just taken as a given that old people would become enormously fat as a matter of course.
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