ricecake @ ricecake @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Don't get me wrong, it should be illegal to do a preemptive nuclear strike, it just sadly isn't.

It might not be feasible for the entire chain to have the information needed to make that call, but there is definitely someone in military authority positioned to know if it's defensive or offensive, and that person should be both allowed and obligated to refuse the order if it's an offensive strike.

Morality and the law may not be equivalent, but it would certainly be more convenient if they were closer.

Upfront: it should be obvious that no sane person wants us to drop a nuke or thinks there's any connotation of "okay" to any aspect of it.

Why do you think it would be an illegal order? There are very clear rules on what makes an order legal or not and, horribly, attacking a nation that poses no real threat isn't on the list. What nations we attack is a policy matter, and the rules are very clear that the military doesn't get a say in policy.
Explicitly targeting civilians for a strike on a city is where the line would be. Targeting something else in the city and deciding the civilians are acceptable collateral damage is right on the line. Legally, it's entirely unambiguously evil morally.

There are checks that keep the president from unilaterally launching a nuke. Unfortunately, the intent of those is to ensure the president is legally competent and actually the president, not to ensure he's wise or rational.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering

The system has been explicitly designed to minimize the risk of conscience preventing a launch. Issue training orders where the firing crews have no idea if it's real or not. Keep them on two week rotations where they don't have access to the outside world so they wouldn't know. Specifically select for people who will follow the order because it's validcand legal, without considering the greater context. People who are legitimately confused but ultimately unconcerned with protests against them specifically doing what they do, including clergy from their own religion. (Actual story of an ICBM operators reaction to nuns protesting and attempting to block access to the missile site he was stationed at)

There is no doubt in my mind that if the order were given and the VP and cabinet didn't remove him, that the order would be followed.

Fell. They fall out of windows. Usually after shooting themselves in the back of the head.

... You seem to be forgetting about the difference between the width of the projectile and the actual force that it imparts.

A 5.56 round is comparable width, but it's also moving significantly faster due to the "it's a rifle round do I really need to explain this?" factor. It was designed and selected with criteria like "can enter a steel military helmet at 500 yards".
Less recoil at high rates of fire with equivalent lethality are other criteria.

A rifle having ease of use doesn't somehow make it safer than one that's harder to maintain. I'm honestly not even sure what you're thinking with that point. In your mind is a flintlock more dangerous because it's tricky to use?

Yes, it's a small bore military rifle designed with military lethality criteria with the requirement of easy operation and high accuracy at increased rates of fire.

What do you get out of trying to pretend there's no real difference between a pistol and a rifle?

This is entirely it. A corporation can't care about people, but the people in the corporation can.

Business interests have forced a lot of companies to avoid doing things that would offend the right, lest they pull government contracts for appearing to support people.
The people in the businesses who give a shit aren't going to expend energy defending something that ultimately doesn't matter, like the logo being rainbow colored.

The company I work for is one of the ones that didn't change it's logo, and it was explicitly communicated to be because it would risk stupid amounts of money from government contracts.

More efforts were put into things that actually matter. Instead of eliminating DEI, it was relabeled EEOC compliance and left unchanged, without much fanfare. ("Jen is transitioning from head of our DEI office to leading our office of EEOC compliance. Her responsibilities and reports remain the same"). Our benefits were quietly extended to cover a few more cases for relocation assistance to "cover new sources of employee relocation interest". Travel expenses related to reproductive healthcare became covered by the health plan, as well as for gender identity related care.

The company is a heartless profit seeking beast. The people in them have the ability to find a way to do the right thing while appeasing the beast, but it takes effort to push for things so they just don't push for the symbolic gestures.

It's shitty, and I have to imagine that it kinda stings to have token support deemed non-viable, but the world is also shit right now. :(

Multiple people is significantly more force than even a knife.

Proportional force means the force must be proportional to the threat, not to the force the other person is using. If someone threatens death with their hands, you can use deadly force to defend against a deadly threat.

One would be reasonable in concluding that masked people trying to force you or someone else into a van is an imminent threat of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault.

You can't use deadly force to defend against harassment, or theft because that's disproportionate.

Well, there actually wouldn't be a much larger explosion, that's just not how nukes work.
A nuclear explosion is an incredibly delicate process, and the material just won't go critical because there's another detonation nearby. It's not like dropping a bomb on a dynamite warehouse. There's not a great analogy for what it is like though. Expecting a satellite launch to happen because you blew up a tank of rocket fuel next to it? Not quite there.

Additional contamination from onsite material is a different matter. Most nukes detonate above their target since that maximizes damage, but it also reduces fallout. There would, however, be vaporized material that would be sucked into the air by the vacuum created by the detonation. It's not clear if the presence of radioactive material would make it significantly worse than the general "radioactive dust and molten sand" that would normally be sent into the air.

In general, if you nuke something there's going to be radioactive issues afterwards, and you shouldn't do it. Adding a nuclear facility to the mix is kinda just throwing rocks at the windows on 9/11.

unlike Democrat and Republican voters have morals and will not tolerate genocide no matter how hard they fearmonger.

And yet their principled opposition not only did nothing, it's very clearly made things worse for basically everyone. The genocide didn't stop, but now there's not even token opposition. Iran is being bombed. Civil rights are being rolled back across the country, food aid is being taken from millions, and it's just starting.

The Democrats were never "doing genocide", just like the Republicans aren't now. The Democrats weren't saying they would do enough to stop someone else from doing it, and the Republicans were saying they would encourage them to do it harder.

Red MAGA ... Blue MAGA...Democratic party is a bigger cult than Republicans

Congratulations on being an unwitting mouthpiece for the RNC. "Maga is just a rude word to call someone! It's not literally what we have on our hats!” "staunch opposition to fascism is closed minded and just as prejudicial as wanting to eliminate trans people!”

I hope your movement does stop Trump and cause effective change and reform. I'm not holding my breath, because I don't think they were counting on your votes in the first place and the next time they think about you will be when they want you to be mad at the Democrats again to keep you from voting for them.

And then Jill Stein won, and the genocide stopped, right?

Like I said, I don't question the intention or code of ethics for the people involved, but there's a reason they and people like them get a lot of support from the RNC.
They aren't voters who are realistically going to vote Republican, so the best they can do is be diverted to a spoiler candidate.

Thinking that that translates to political leverage against the Republicans is just naive though. They didn't vote for them in the first place, so it's an empty threat.

The people who might opt to not vote for Biden or Harris aren't people who would have voted for trump in the first place, so I don't see them having a lot of leverage.

I can't tell you what code to follow, but the whole thing reeks of people who didn't get the memo that trump doesn't need them to bleed votes from the Dems anymore.

"no propensity" is still equal. :)

My take is that 6-7 is the "kids can be pretty great sometimes", with room for "I have one or more that I really care about". 8 is for those people who just get legitimate pure joy out of kids. Usually grandparents or certain types of educators. 9 is creepy, and 10 is vile.

It's likely phrased in the law as closer to while serving on a swat team, as in they're actively wearing a ballistic face shield and gas mask for legitimate reasons.

It's a prime opportunity for things to get lost in translation between the law, the person talking to the press, and the report.

Showing up isn't arguing against them, it's sending a message to other people (amongst other things).

Arguing with fascists is pointless. Showing that not everyone agrees with them is different though, and has value. They may not have a singular static narrative, but they rely on the perception that dissent is a minority position.

All the other benefits of a non-violent protest aside, there's also immense value is reminding people that they're not as singular in their viewpoint as they feel.

For a lot of people, it's been very easy to feel like everyone else must be in board with this.

I'm not sure what you're looking for to codify the implicit threat. A couple million people calling you a king at an event called "no kings day" in a country whose founding narrative is "violently rebel against kings" seems pretty implicit to me.

Also, I just realized that there's a red coat/red hat parallel I haven't seen leveraged yet that has a lot of potential.

While money is used to by goods and services, it isn't those goods and services. It's essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

People don't go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they'll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it's cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there's intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There's also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren't relevant to this.

To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it's given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn't cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

That being said, while they can't solve it they're certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we'd be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
One person doesn't have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn't exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.

Yes, I understand what you're saying, it's not a complicated position.
Your position is that national reputation matters more than anything else. And most pointedly, the national reputation of your allies matters more than any other argument.

What I'm saying is, is that the actions the US, or any other nation, took before the people currently running things were even born have no bearing on current events. Nations aren't people, and they don't possess a national character that you can use to try to predict their behavior or judge them.

Would the world be justified in concluding that it's only a matter of time before Germany does some more genocide? Before Japan unleashes atrocities across Asia?

If you're getting down to it, the US can't control other nations, beyond stick and carrot means. And the US has the same right to try to keep Iran from getting nukes as Iran does in trying to get them. Because again, nations aren't people. They don't have rights, they have capabilities.

And all of that's irrelevant! Because the question is, is Israel justified in attacking Iran? The perception of hypocrisy in US foreign policy isn't relevant to that question.

No, what I don't understand is what relevance that has to this situation. The US using nukes on Japan 80 years ago doesn't make Iran making nukes justified. It doesn't validate Iran not having nukes. It neither strengthens nor weakens Israeli claims of an Iranian weapons program, and it doesn't make a preemptive strike to purportedly disable them just or unjust.

It seems like you're arguing that the US nuked Japan and therefore Iran, a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, is allowed to have nukes. Israel is falsely characterizing their civilian energy program, and we know this because of their backing by the US.
It's just a non-sequitor, particularly when there's relevant reasons why US involvement complicated matters. .

What does that even mean? How is what a nation did generations ago relevant to two different nations in a totally different scenario?

The USs actions in world war two are an odd thing to bring up in this context. It was a radically different set of circumstances, 80 years ago, and none of the people involved are alive anymore.
It's entirely irrelevant.

May as well point out that the US was the driver for the creation of those watchdog groups and is a leading force in nuclear disarmament. It's just as relevant to if Iran has a nuclear weapons program or Israels justification for attacking.

Iranian opposition to US strategic interests in the region giving the US a strong motivation to let anything that makes them weaker happen is a perfectly good thing to mention.

So, my question when I run into that argument is: who do you think people would rally behind?

There's always this assumption that the party has someone that they know would be super popular but they then make a conscious choice to run the most conservative person to the left of the Republican.

There are primaries. They're made up of people who can get enough support. The local parties are closer to voters, and it's much easier for people to join.
Somehow the people who consistently get elected are the sort of people they keep fielding as candidates.

So I'd love it if we had a great inspiring candidate. But literally who are they?