They are! And it’s one of the nice things to know in times like this.

There’s a town in eastern Canada where sometimes pufflings get lost on their inaugural flight. The entire town goes out during the season to round them up, take them to a rehab facility to make sure they aren’t hurt.

In the morning, the families take the healthy pufflings to a cliff and hurl them into the sea.

This sounds awful until you recall that puffins are aquatic birds who live on cliffs, so it’s really just the first step towards breakfast for them.

They were persnickety enough that their pole arms eventually became a unit of measurement.
Not too weird, until you learn that we still use it to an extent.

Girl is a child. Woman is an adult. Young woman if it’s vaguely in between.

Female if you’re doing medicine or science.

The girl lost her doll. The woman paid her taxes. The young women got dropped off at the movies. The female puffin lays one egg per season and shares the burden of caring for the puffling equally with their mate.

That’s not bullying, that’s enforcing social mores.

There’s hardware required to shunt the display out the USB port and since it’s not a super in demand feature they usually don’t implement it. As such the software for looking nice while doing it isn’t as developed.

But yes, it’s been in developer settings for years, and was usable if your hardware supported it.

Yes. And now it’s native in all android! Samsung helped make it!

It’s good when things get better.

So, not agreeing with the premise but: this article is from 2014, written by a legit historian, and is specifically not discussing the short term.
Their premise is effectively that war consolidates power and minimizes violence at scale inside the unified territory afterwards. Further, the things nations do to be ready for conflict, like build roads, administrative statates and all the social structures that accompany a standing army facilitate trade and prosperity.

It’s less that he’s arguing for war, and more just … Describing the historical consequences of war in aggregate.

It was certainly only titled the way it was because he was publishing a book and this is more eye catching.

The official story is that it’s mobile general surveillance to deter crime.

They’re very open that it’s a surveillance system that watches everyone and records everything.

https://www.lvt.com/

They’re a little less open about how open they are with police or exactly how much they can correlate everything with other data. Most people don’t have an intuitive feel for how easy it is to piece together a lot about their lives from some small measurements when tied to everyone else’s, so they just stop at being annoyed by the lights and sometimes fucking commercials.

I mean, I’m here so my politics are predictably best described as “complicated”, but you can elevator pitch it as “human rights; morality and utility are different; context is everything”. France does more to improve the human condition than north Korea, so I much prefer France, although some of their actions are also not great.
I do know the type you’re talking about. Quite frustrating indeed.

Most of the point of my comments was purely to say that that type of hawkish mindset exists, initially for the purpose of clarifying things for the original comments question.
Beyond that, I just don’t feel I have reason to doubt his words on the subject, including beyond the speech.
They’re consistent with his actions, not particularly uncommon, and stubborn in the face of reason since it views the reasonable opinion as specifically weak.

I can’t speak for the veracity of the claim that it was intentional itself, since I don’t have the information.

… What are you even talking about anymore?
Nothing I said has anything to do with the world not being as it seems or being controlled by a small group of people.
Acknowledging that some public figures have expressed the belief that we’ve been insufficiently aggressive in wars and foreign policy over the past decades is hardly conspiratorial thinking.

Shill is still a skilled job

What does that even mean in this context?

I didn’t ask you to prove anything. You were reassured that the people in Afghanistan being in charge here meant there was someone who would cut off any of the idiocy certain types of people think make a good war. I wondered why, given the administrations rhetoric, their willingness to fire people who might push back, who they’ve put in charge, and what those people have done.

What specific conspiratorial world view do you think I’m going to express?
I think some people think we could have won in Vietnam or Afghanistan if we just hadn’t “held back”. They’re not secretive about that opinion. I think those people have political power right now because I see no reason not to believe them when they say so and they seem to be behaving in line with that belief.

I’m unsure why you think him having no relevant experience makes him less likely to hold a profoundly awful opinion. If he had experience I’d be more likely to think it was just talk, but given the lack of experience, being a talking head, and the company he keeps I see no reason to think he’s secretly holding different opinions.

There’s no precedent at all. Precedent implies that it happened, which it didn’t.
Something being thought of and dismissed is just not evidence for that thing being done.

It’s not like it was even that original of an idea. There had been two plane hijackings by cubans in the past year. Proposing “what if a third went wrong” is hardly a masterclasses in outside the box thinking.

We’ve done other false flag operations. Other terrible things to domestic civilians.
Using that time we didn’t actually do anything as an example is just odd.

Personally, I think people like it just because it has a cooler name. “Mongoose” just doesn’t have the same ring.

I mean, they’re already replaced people with people like I was describing. That’s not a hypothetical.

“he” referred to hegseth, who you seemed to be assuming probably didn’t believe the rhetoric he was using.

No one asked you to prove a negative. You expressed that the war being waged by the people who were in Afghanistan was a reassurance that they cared about the optics of brutality. I asked why you think that, given the things that happened in Afghanistan. “Things they’ve done” aren’t somehow irrelevant anecdotes.

We’re talking about the distinction between people who think civilian casualties are justifiable as opposed to those who think it’s a tool.

Sure. Unless they were fired for being “woke” and replaced by people who think bombing Iran will help usher in Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.

What has he done to make you think he deserves the benefit of the doubt? What in this administration makes you remain confident that somewhere deep down there’s a responsible adult who’ll calm things down? They bragged about letting Elon musk fire all those people.

Why do you think the people who ran Afghanistan wouldn’t bomb a school? They bombed weddings. Hospitals. Shot children.

You say that, but also… They specifically said this wasn’t going to be a “politically correct war” with “rules of engagement”.

https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4418959/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-gen-dan/

This is the generational turning point America has waited for since 1979 and since the rudderless wars of hubris

No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win

Remember that while sensible people know optics matter, there are people who think the problem with Vietnam was that we were too soft on them, and too soft on domestic political dissident.
Those are the people currently in power. They are not competent military thinkers. They view strength the same way the people who were blindsided by our loss in Vietnam viewed it. We can’t lose because we have more weapons. If the enemy is still fighting it’s because we haven’t bombed hard enough. Anyone who wants to hold back is weak.

It actually didn’t. The carpet bombing and flattening of cities didn’t make the population want to give up or turn on the military.
The first nuclear weapon didn’t either.
The second made the emperor inclined to surrender, when paired with a declaration of war by the Soviet Union.

The civilian population never posed a significant threat to the stability of the military or imperial rule.

People aren’t generally idiots, and will lean towards supporting the people fighting the people who are hurting them. You may not like them, and you may want them to do something else, but you’re unlikely to trust the party that is currently trying to kill you.

“Take off your armor and we’ll stop shooting” just isn’t a compelling argument.

A common belief amongst some people, right or wrong, is that if you hurt someone badly enough they’ll do what you want because that path becomes less painful.
Those people believe that sending the message “war with the US means all your children die” will result in people furiously demanding that their military stop fighting to prevent the killing.

It’s quite literally the abuser mindset but applied to nations. “I wouldn’t have to hurt you if you had just done what I said”.
This fits with who’s in power.

And? What happened next? Did they do an operation Northwoods? Did we go to war with Cuba? Was Johnson more aggressive on Cuba than Kennedy, or was he actually more engaged on diplomatic fronts?

I’m not forgetting anything. It just doesn’t fit with any narrative that makes a lick of goddamned sense. Like, Kennedy rejected Northwoods because he was worried the troops might be needed in Europe, so starting a war in Cuba would be a bad move.
He was strongly in favor of every other operation they proposed as part of the larger plan.

Why would a massive conspiracy exist to kill Kennedy for rejecting a plan and then… Not do the plan?

I agree, and feel similarly about the inclusion of operation Northwoods.
It’s most prominently a horrifying plan that was rejected and remained classified, with the proposer being replaced shortly afterwards (it’s entirely possible that’s a coincidence).

Someone thinking of something horrible and then not doing it isn’t evidence that they would do something similar. There’s no particular reason to think they hid evidence because they admitted in the same deeply classified documents to doing far worse things.

Nah, it’s cool. We’re clearly talking at cross purposes. Have a good one.