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Trump seems to just get a hard on from angering Europeans for no reason whatsoever.
He apparently felt the need to say on Fox news that NATO troops contributed nothing of value to the war in Afghanistan. Which is just incredibly disrespectful. The very mention of a "front" also seems to indicate that he doesn't even understand how the war in Afghanistan was fought. There was maybe a front for the first week or so. But after that, all of Afghanistan was nominally conquered. The problem wasn't a front, it was guerilla resistance doing raids and ambushes. And there were plenty of non-US groups stationed all over the east and north, where battles with the Taliban (and Al'Quaeda and IS) flared up repeatedly.
But even if we accept the little bit of the war where there was still a front, there were British and German (special forces) in almost equal numbers to US troops involved in rooting the Taliban out of their cave strongholds in Tora Bora, which was probably the hottest part of the conventional war with an actual front.
So, ETisME and other Trump whisperers, what is the point of telling an incredibly obvious lie that only serves to disrespect and anger allies?
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I'd like to talk about this Golden Dome thing from a different perspective, to show why it is a uniquely bad idea.
Let's assume it works. Let's say that in 2-3 years, the US will have a 100% effective defense against all ICBMs and SLBMs. Sounds awesome, now what is the problem with that?
Well, it isn't in 3 years, it is now. And it breaks MAD. View this from the perspective of Russia or China. You know that in 3 years, the US will be immune to your nukes. Mutually Assured Destruction will become One Sided Assured Destruction (OSAD).
What does this mean?
It means you now have exactly 4 options:
1) Hope that the US will be nice forever
2) Surrender to the US on any issue they may have forever.
3) Get your own Dome up on exactly the same day (See below)
4) Launch everything now while it still works.
Because from that point onward, the US can always destroy you whenever they want, and you have no retaliation. Our current theory of nuclear war is that MAD stabilizes things. If MAD becomes OSAD, the superior side can always threaten to nuke the other to get whatever they want.
I think it is very clear that 1-2 may look very unattractive to Russia or China (If you suck at taking other viewpoints, just imagines it is China who gets their 100% Dome and OSAD.), and 3 probably doesn't sound very possible. Thus, you are left with starting total nuclear annihilation or complete surrender as your only options. Probably not a position you want to put someone in.
(Why does it have to be on the exact same day? Because if one side gets theirs up even one day earlier, they can then threaten nuclear annihilation if the other side doesn't immediately dismantle theirs.)
And what if the Dome isn't 100%, but 90%? Firstly, then it is basically pointless, because if 10% of nuclear missiles get through, the US is still a wasteland. And even worse, others may assume that it will gradually improve to 100%. At which point we are once again left with "launch everything now" being the best move.
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Counter: so Trump makes the world go from a MAD scenario to a MAS (mutually assured survival) scenario? Nobel peace prize forever and ever. Checkmate, TDSers
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When the Fallout series and reality are suddenly not that far apart...
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Regardind the Greenland situation: I'm really surprised that Greenland has not yet offered to join the USA if USA implements: paid vacation time, universal healthcare and maternity leave.
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On January 23 2026 22:40 dankobanana wrote:
Regardind the Greenland situation: I'm really surprised that Greenland has not yet offered to join the USA if USA implements: paid vacation time, universal healthcare and maternity leave.
And while they are at it they give every new US citizen 1 million dollar?
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1000 rare minerals. They're full of it!
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We've officially withdrawn from the WHO. I'd like to offer my hearty thanks to the "both sides are the same" crowd for letting the lunatics take over the asylum in a much more literal sense than that idiom is usually used. No doubt some of them will be here any moment to proudly insinuate in their willful ignorance that the WHO doesn't do anything useful, or to advance some hilarious theory about how Kamala Harris had plans to do something equally stupid or bad.
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Didn't you know that COVID is, to this day, a hoax perpetuated by the elite so that they can reduce you to cattle and/or mass murder the proletariat so that they can live in their automation paradise?
I've received my microchip personally by Bill Gates himself and he patted me on the back when I ingested it.
Ironically, Musk's Neuralink will actually be dystopian without the need for conspiracy.
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On January 23 2026 21:23 Simberto wrote:
I'd like to talk about this Golden Dome thing from a different perspective, to show why it is a uniquely bad idea.
Let's assume it works. Let's say that in 2-3 years, the US will have a 100% effective defense against all ICBMs and SLBMs. Sounds awesome, now what is the problem with that?
Well, it isn't in 3 years, it is now. And it breaks MAD. View this from the perspective of Russia or China. You know that in 3 years, the US will be immune to your nukes. Mutually Assured Destruction will become One Sided Assured Destruction (OSAD).
What does this mean?
It means you now have exactly 4 options:
1) Hope that the US will be nice forever
2) Surrender to the US on any issue they may have forever.
3) Get your own Dome up on exactly the same day (See below)
4) Launch everything now while it still works.
Because from that point onward, the US can always destroy you whenever they want, and you have no retaliation. Our current theory of nuclear war is that MAD stabilizes things. If MAD becomes OSAD, the superior side can always threaten to nuke the other to get whatever they want.
I think it is very clear that 1-2 may look very unattractive to Russia or China (If you suck at taking other viewpoints, just imagines it is China who gets their 100% Dome and OSAD.), and 3 probably doesn't sound very possible. Thus, you are left with starting total nuclear annihilation or complete surrender as your only options. Probably not a position you want to put someone in.
(Why does it have to be on the exact same day? Because if one side gets theirs up even one day earlier, they can then threaten nuclear annihilation if the other side doesn't immediately dismantle theirs.)
And what if the Dome isn't 100%, but 90%? Firstly, then it is basically pointless, because if 10% of nuclear missiles get through, the US is still a wasteland. And even worse, others may assume that it will gradually improve to 100%. At which point we are once again left with "launch everything now" being the best move.
Even if everything besides the US gets hit, you get nuclear meltdowns in countries with nuclear power plants etc. What does he think he's going to do, shoot at the radioactive rain when it comes from another country?
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On January 23 2026 22:57 Uldridge wrote:
Didn't you know that COVID is, to this day, a hoax perpetuated by the elite so that they can reduce you to cattle and/or mass murder the proletariat so that they can live in their automation paradise?
I've received my microchip personally by Bill Gates himself and he patted me on the back when I ingested it.
Ironically, Musk's Neuralink will actually be dystopian without the need for conspiracy.
COVID was a hoax to destroy America and institute Marxism. That's why I will never vote for Republicans, under whom it started, and will always have a portrait of Joe Biden in my house because he ended it 💪
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It's all just so, so stupid.
During the Iran - Israel flare up last year USA and Israel employed all the best and greatest Anti air defenses, including atmospherics interceptors, plus other countries like UK, Jordan and a few others I believe contributed in shooting down Iran's missiles and drones. Iran telegraphed their strikes and everyone knew to be prepared.
Out of the serious, medium range missiles shoot from Iran more then 30 of them hit Israel proper, that is with all these high technology powers focusing it's defense, including USA moving it's best systems to Israel prior to these strikes. Apparently, according to the sources I can find the intercept rate was 80-90 %.
Those missiles had very small payloads and there was only about 350 of them used, the largest barrage of ballistic missiles was apparently between 60 and 70 of them.
Now, Israel is tiny, roughly the size of New Jersey, a smaller target is easier to defend then a huge one like USA, and despite all of the above the success rate was only between 80 and 90 %.
If anyone ever decides to shoot at USA, they won't fire 60-70 missiles, they will fire in the thousands, with technology far superior to Iran's, with decoys and flares and multiple re-entry vehicles that split into more as they reach the terminal stage.
This all seems like yet another way that someone around Trump wants to make incredible amounts of money off of selling him on an idea that he is too stupid to recognize is stupid, so he bites and none of the sycophants he surrounds himself with would ever tell him that he fell for a stupid idea, so now billions are going to be invested in something that is never going to work.
Hopefully it's also never going to be tested in any real way, but Jesus, it's so dumb and exhausting that this moron rules the world...
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On January 23 2026 19:01 Uldridge wrote:
I feel like the entire idea premise of looking at politics like some sort of market hustle buy is completely absurd. Diplomacy isn't common bartering. You don't need to go to a ridiculous take initially because people are usually reasonable and if you ask 20% initially to end up at 10%, you could've fought for the 10% in the first place. It's all just bully tactics that are simply disrespectful and wasting every one's time. The one thing it does do is show to morons what a big strong bad ass he is, whkle he's showing to everyone else what a moronic bully he is.
Not that the premise is not bad, but even within the premise what Trump is doing is particularly awful negotiation because it is all extremely public. Not only do all the stores know his schtick but so do all the other customers. What I business would actually do is jack the prices when he came in (double) offer him 10% off, then when he demands 30% and they crumble at 25% he wins and they make way more profit off him. Once he leaves the store all the customers and employees laugh and they lower the prices back down and they all get good deals and are happy.
The US is actually losing the most in all these scenarios. Take Canada US relations, it was under a decade ago where we hurt our own economy and got our citizens arrested to support the US. Now we are making trade deals with their enemy. Our citizens have stopped going down and spending money there. We are the verge of canceling a 14 Bn arms deal and swapping it to countries we are trying to build the relationship we used to have with the US. Our Prime Minister is making public speeches about how the US can't be trusted and the rest of the world needs to stand together, and getting standing ovations.
Trump is losing on his deals, claiming victory and destroying what the US built since WW2. ET doesn't seem to realize that he is not going from 0 to 5% he is going from 0 to -35%. No good can come from having a clinical narcist bafoon running your country. Anyone telling you the US is winning is lying to you for their own benefit because its obviously untrue. Trump only cares about his own networth, his golfing and the price tag alone should give a good idea of that.
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On January 23 2026 22:57 Vivax wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2026 21:23 Simberto wrote:
I'd like to talk about this Golden Dome thing from a different perspective, to show why it is a uniquely bad idea.
Let's assume it works. Let's say that in 2-3 years, the US will have a 100% effective defense against all ICBMs and SLBMs. Sounds awesome, now what is the problem with that?
Well, it isn't in 3 years, it is now. And it breaks MAD. View this from the perspective of Russia or China. You know that in 3 years, the US will be immune to your nukes. Mutually Assured Destruction will become One Sided Assured Destruction (OSAD).
What does this mean?
It means you now have exactly 4 options:
1) Hope that the US will be nice forever
2) Surrender to the US on any issue they may have forever.
3) Get your own Dome up on exactly the same day (See below)
4) Launch everything now while it still works.
Because from that point onward, the US can always destroy you whenever they want, and you have no retaliation. Our current theory of nuclear war is that MAD stabilizes things. If MAD becomes OSAD, the superior side can always threaten to nuke the other to get whatever they want.
I think it is very clear that 1-2 may look very unattractive to Russia or China (If you suck at taking other viewpoints, just imagines it is China who gets their 100% Dome and OSAD.), and 3 probably doesn't sound very possible. Thus, you are left with starting total nuclear annihilation or complete surrender as your only options. Probably not a position you want to put someone in.
(Why does it have to be on the exact same day? Because if one side gets theirs up even one day earlier, they can then threaten nuclear annihilation if the other side doesn't immediately dismantle theirs.)
And what if the Dome isn't 100%, but 90%? Firstly, then it is basically pointless, because if 10% of nuclear missiles get through, the US is still a wasteland. And even worse, others may assume that it will gradually improve to 100%. At which point we are once again left with "launch everything now" being the best move. Even if everything besides the US gets hit, you get nuclear meltdowns in countries with nuclear power plants etc. What does he think he's going to do, shoot at the radioactive rain when it comes from another country?
Your talking about the guy that wanted to nuke a hurricane.
Just after redirecting it with a sharpy didn't work...
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On January 23 2026 22:50 LightSpectra wrote:
We've officially withdrawn from the WHO. I'd like to offer my hearty thanks to the "both sides are the same" crowd for letting the lunatics take over the asylum in a much more literal sense than that idiom is usually used. No doubt some of them will be here any moment to proudly insinuate in their willful ignorance that the WHO doesn't do anything useful, or to advance some hilarious theory about how Kamala Harris had plans to do something equally stupid or bad.
round #2 of something akin to the CHINA VIRUS™ would not go down so well I feel like. then again it did not go so well the last time anyway. though things are blurry regarding those couple years that felt like a decade and more.
so let' use that blur and amplify it to reach the one and only correct conclusion presented by benevolent voices on the internet that the WHO and Gate's 5G chip vaccine are to blame. the other part is Democrats and China.
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On January 23 2026 22:57 Uldridge wrote:
Didn't you know that COVID is, to this day, a hoax perpetuated by the elite so that they can reduce you to cattle and/or mass murder the proletariat so that they can live in their automation paradise?
I've received my microchip personally by Bill Gates himself and he patted me on the back when I ingested it.
Ironically, Musk's Neuralink will actually be dystopian without the need for conspiracy.
Having known several people who died from Covid. Fuck these people 
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I think it's a difficult social problem to think about. Living in a shared absolute reality - the one where our bodies abide by the laws of physics - where narrative reality pushes subsections to complete opposites but still having to cross each other in the streets, being serviced by each other, etc. I'm sury many friendships and family ties have been broken in the last few years and the social fabric is being stretched very thinly. The social contract we all abide by has more or less been ripped to shreds so who knows how it'll evolve?
Somehow we'll have to find a way to live with people who think the other side is delusional and practices doublethink like the best dystopian citizen, but it's not easy to make amends when the temperature keeps rising.
This feels like all the precursors to a societal divorce and not one that ends with: "we split up, but we're still friendly with each other"
Personally I don't like to voice the sentiment that these conspiratorial "polite in wording yet vile in principals" are a good riddance. They could have been a firefighter or an engineer or a contracter or whatever. They have their opinions. Social media let us enable to voice all our political ideologies in an echo chamber of cosmic proportions and emboldened people to let it out more publicly. Disastrous.
I like to think that these metasocial frameworks are usually the culprits (social media, religion, ..) and not the humans themselves, even if they're capable of doing heinous things. We're all programmable biobots in the end. Just try for a pragmatic: "I don't need to know your shit, you don't need to know mine, but let's agree we need to make this work" approach.
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On January 23 2026 21:23 Simberto wrote:
I'd like to talk about this Golden Dome thing from a different perspective, to show why it is a uniquely bad idea.
Let's assume it works. Let's say that in 2-3 years, the US will have a 100% effective defense against all ICBMs and SLBMs. Sounds awesome, now what is the problem with that?
Well, it isn't in 3 years, it is now. And it breaks MAD. View this from the perspective of Russia or China. You know that in 3 years, the US will be immune to your nukes. Mutually Assured Destruction will become One Sided Assured Destruction (OSAD).
What does this mean?
It means you now have exactly 4 options:
1) Hope that the US will be nice forever
2) Surrender to the US on any issue they may have forever.
3) Get your own Dome up on exactly the same day (See below)
4) Launch everything now while it still works.
Because from that point onward, the US can always destroy you whenever they want, and you have no retaliation. Our current theory of nuclear war is that MAD stabilizes things. If MAD becomes OSAD, the superior side can always threaten to nuke the other to get whatever they want.
I think it is very clear that 1-2 may look very unattractive to Russia or China (If you suck at taking other viewpoints, just imagines it is China who gets their 100% Dome and OSAD.), and 3 probably doesn't sound very possible. Thus, you are left with starting total nuclear annihilation or complete surrender as your only options. Probably not a position you want to put someone in.
(Why does it have to be on the exact same day? Because if one side gets theirs up even one day earlier, they can then threaten nuclear annihilation if the other side doesn't immediately dismantle theirs.)
And what if the Dome isn't 100%, but 90%? Firstly, then it is basically pointless, because if 10% of nuclear missiles get through, the US is still a wasteland. And even worse, others may assume that it will gradually improve to 100%. At which point we are once again left with "launch everything now" being the best move.
Disagree because the falsifiability of the claimed efficiency relies on attempting to overload it, which you can't go back from.
The chances of China getting glassed right now is ~0%, whereas "launch everything now" comes with a high likelihood of retaliation. This is true even in normal times, but especially with this administration which is incapable of moral dilemmas on whether the rest of the planet should survive if they don't.
By contrast, the scenario in which the shield gets built, and is very close to 100% efficiency, and cannot be copied, and the US has so much faith in it (without a real overload test) to start conventional attacks or using tactical nukes against nuclear powers, and they consider that to be economically/politically viable.. that's a long series of fuzzy assumptions never worth risking it all for.
But anyway, they'll probably just paint some Patriots gold and sell figurines of it, 20% off if you also order a Trump Phone.
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People hoping to eventually dismantle ICE need to find a way to convince people there isn't an enormous problem being solved by ICE. I feel like when you read between the lines, it becomes clear a lot of people who support Trump's ICE campaign genuinely believe they see no other option. When you bring up stuff about kids and other major ICE-related tragedies, its not that they don't care. Its that they believe there was such a big problem that Trump's ICE is the only way to solve it. They believe a major, devastating issue has been persistently harming not just our country, but their own wellbeing directly. They believe lots of presidents have tried various things to solve the problem, but fallen short because they weren't willing to do what is needed to fully resolve the problem. They view Trump's ICE as solving the problem. They see real, concrete results. The videos of violence and clashes show these people not just that ICE is cruel and poorly trained, but effective too. They show these people that something is genuinely happening. And because of that, they are overwhelmed with joy to realize this gigantic, critical, personally-relevant issue is finally being tackled in earnest.
I don't think there is a path to dismantling ICE without convincing people the problem ICE is trying to solve is not as critical as they currently believe. A lot of people try to draw attention to the cruelty in hopes their neighbors will be outraged enough to say "enough is enough". But their neighbors have been genuinely very scared and very angry about immigration-related issues for many years. They quietly view this similar to war-time tragedies where there's no non-tragic solution.
And yet, in this new age of "church riots" and "Jonathon Ross is fighting for his life in the hospital", supercharged by AI, I am not sure if that's possible. I think the ruling class have a new weapon to fight us with and its really, really powerful. I don't know how we overcome that.
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I think a bigger thing is when they say abolish ice people could assume it means dont enforce immigration at all. We still need imigration enforcememt in the country just not ICE as an org. Its more of a repeal and replace type thing.
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EPT
