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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour 3mo ago · Edited 3mo ago

You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico.

You send stealthy long-loiter-time surveillance drones over mexico. You use them to ID organized Cartel activity, cross-referencing electronic intel from the NSA. When you locate a concentration of Cartel activity, a stealthy plane drops a container from 35,000 feet, which pops open at 30,000 feet and spills out a hundred small anti-personnel drones. These drones fly down to the target area and messily unalive selected targets in the strike zone, recording high-quality video of exactly who they splatter in the process. No hellfires, no demolished buildings; half-pound directional frag charges, with close range and wide-angle video record of exactly who was hit and what they were doing.

You might not even need the planes; I bet we could rig a tomahawk or a reasonably stealthy cargo drone to deliver the payload. Make a supercut compilation of the footage, slap on an ISIS flag gif at the front and back, dub in a banging nasheed medley and sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar's at appropriate moments, then upload the videos to 4chan and shrug and Who, me? when anyone asks. That's how I'd aim to do it, were I God-Emperor.

You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share.

This is the actual problem, but the Cartels are sufficiently odious that cutting the grass, in the Israeli parlance, holds considerable appeal. Realistically, the goal would not be to eliminate all narcotics cartels forever, but to add selective pressure against their worst excesses. Make it clear that when they, for example, haul a bunch of people off a bus and make them fight to the death with sledgehammers, they and their bosses stand a significant chance experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly as a direct consequence.

Maybe it's still not worth the effort. I am a fairly committed non-interventionist, and there is certainly a strong non-interventionist argument to be made here. But these are in fact some of the most vile people on earth, the harm they cause is considerable, and they're right fucking there. Maybe we really do have to just put up with them indefinitely as they rape and murder and torture and poison and corrupt both our biggest neighbor and our own citizens. But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?

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