FaceDeer

It’s already a bit of a fairy tale to assume that one other NATO member is going to join the United States in this train wreck of a war. Most I would expect is some defensive help for Turkey if it gets caught in the splash zone.

Of course they could do it voluntarily. Anyone can decide to declare war on whomever. What would that have to do with being in NATO though?

This is not a NATO mission. This is not defense. The commitments of membership do not in any way require that NATO members have to lift a finger to help other NATO members prosecute unprovoked wars of aggression.

Not applicable here. NATO is a defensive pact, but America is the aggressor in this case. They can’t invoke Article 5 for this.

Strange times.

It’s serving the will of prudes, religious fruitcakes, inattentive parents, the technologically illiterate, and anyone dumb enough to be taken in by the “think of the children!” Rhetoric of the control-freaks.

Unfortunately this is a rather large constituency.

A British aircraft carrier won’t be enough to do that.

One can be certain that Trump will demand control over Iran’s oil trade, for starters.

Actually for finishers, too. That’s probably all he cares about.

Yeah, they’re just about finished with the original Gaza. They need new ones to replace it.

Yeah, but the fact that they were able to take out a big chunk of second-in-commands and potential successors at the same time doesn’t help the stability much.

That meeting they were having should really have been a Zoom call.

Surely the scorpion has learned its lesson and won’t sting this time.

I’m not talking about America’s goals, I’m talking about Iran’s goals. The issue is what a “win” is for Iran.

It’s unclear what a “win” is for America since they don’t see to have much of a long-term plan or goal here. If it’s simply “bomb the shit out of everything” I guess they could claim a win. But that’s just the proverbial pigeon knocking over all the chess pieces and shitting on the board.

For the current regime in Iran, a “win” will be simply surviving. It’s quite possible for them to do that, IMO. They’ve already taken the harshest hit that an autocracy can take, the leaders were killed. If they put new leaders in place then that will prove that this isn’t just a strong-man organization held together by personality and personal power - it consists of a whole sub-population who want it to continue existing.

At that point the only way you’re going to get rid of it is a very thorough boots-on-the-ground conquest. You can possibly do that through civil war instead of your own soldiers, but that depends on there being an opposition that’s at least somewhat organized and motivated by long-term intent. The US evidently hasn’t set one of those up, and I think Israel would have a hard time too. So yeah, this doesn’t look so great for the US.

You’ll note that I was asked.

This is going to be one of those “Torment Nexus” things, I take it?

Quite true.

Well, I guess the most games-oriented thing is that at the moment I’m generating some cover art for some music I generated earlier to use as part of a tabletop roleplaying campaign I’m in. Custom art, custom music, stuff that a few years ago would have cost me thousands of dollars to commission (and therefore that I would never have dreamed of commissioning - it’s just for me and a couple of friends). That’s pretty awesome, IMO.

As long as it isn’t in AI

Afraid I can’t help you, then.

It’s really quite ironic, this is the sort of tech that science fiction has been dreaming of for decades. And now it can’t even be mentioned in tech-oriented forums, can’t even be hinted at, without mobs of negative-nellies dumping on it.

Ah well. I continue to have fun with it, downvotes can’t stop that.

Ironically, there are a couple of things in the tech world right now that I’m extremely interested in. But you would likely downvote me if I mentioned them.

Back in his youth, my dad worked for a steel manufacturing company that sold materials to building contractors. Some of them were extremely shady and had a reputation for not paying what they owed so those ones were charged literally by the truckload and drivers were instructed not to offload a cargo at the construction site until they’d received confirmation that the load had been paid for. Something like that could work with Trump, I suppose.

Kind of amazing that the United States needs to be treated this way, but here we are.

I am quite sure that at some point - hopefully soon - the narrative will be “don’t blame us, it was all that awful Trump’s fault. It was just one rogue president!”

No, it wasn’t. This belongs to all of you.