More like Failamir amirite

It’s wild what an impact organizational politics can have on a codebase

I mean… if you don’t clock them as bad faith arguments, they are.

I think it’s low key telegraphing “I do not care about pissing off constituents anymore because I have a firm control on all the electoral machinery now”

Hope the baffling subset of gen Z dudes who voted for him thoroughly enjoy this punch in the dick

I mean, nominally, they don’t; it’s a legacy of the Cold War. But instead of drawing things down after the USSR fell, Russia held on to thousands and thousands of them, and the US felt it would be irresponsible to allow such a clear imbalance of power with a recent foe… that turned into a current foe. And China, being a neighbor of Russia, and also now a pretty clear adversary of the US, wasn’t about to let themselves get outpaced by strategic rivals either.

There was an opportunity in the 90s to just calm things down a ton, but that came and went.

TL;DR: a sound modern nuclear policy for a reasonably wealthy country is to have a reasonable enough number of weapons deployable via at least two vectors (one as sub-launched, if possible) to serve as a credible and ironclad second-strike force. That is the backstop that’ll keep your borders and sovereignty safe in the long run.

Ngl this is very credible defense

The problem that’s arising now is that all of the major nuclear powers (UK and France aren’t really “major”) are now run by authoritarian regimes. The obvious implication is that there’s a sharply increased risk that they’ll decide to start using nukes to get what they want, and that they’ll all be more or less on the same side.

The rest of the world DOES need to seriously start exploring nuclear arms programs. The complete and total abrogation of the Budapest Memorandum (flagrantly by Russia via invasion; passively by the US and UK for not doing much of anything in response to Russia invading in 2014, and not providing more direct and overt support in 2022) has laid bare that the security agreements therein were worth less than the paper it was signed on.

Our failure to do ANYTHING meaningful to defend Ukraine when they gave up thousands of Soviet nukes in the wake of the fall of the USSR has made it painfully clear that nuclear proliferation is coming back in a big way, by simple virtue of the fact that they are clearly the final word in terms of guaranteeing a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Russia would absolutely not have invaded Ukraine if one of the possible consequences was “Moscow and St Petersburg get turned to glass”.

hmmmm where have we seen this before… it’s on the tip of my tongue…

Yeah, honestly, I was about to start shifting a lot of my stuff to proton, and that episode made me do a complete about-face.

When and where exactly did she support genocide…? Cite your sources.

I’m appalled and aghast at what Israel is doing in Gaza. But as far as I’m aware, she’s been a staunch critic of Israel in this matter, not a supporter. And I have receipts for that. She’s literally been targeted by smear campaigns by other members of the Democratic party, over her stance of condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza, and not just from members of the establishment/gerontocracy.

If you’re trying to use her immediate contemporaneous response to the attack, on the day of the attack (which I believe essentially every single politician in the country also condemned), as the pivotal evidence that she “supports” genocide: you’re obviously arguing in bad faith.

Shrapnel from what…? Iirc there was a wood podium.

I’d amend “enemies” to “former allies”, but yeah

It’s not confusing. It’s a bad-faith argument.

What the actual fuck are you talking about

The fuck is your problem?

And I’m sure that’s by design 🫠

I’m pretty sure the subtext here is that they want to use it as a threat to the often very liberal and progressive residents of a major blue city that’s also one of the poster-child sanctuary cities.

Yep, exactly.

I remember the double-return of the first F9H boosters (that one-two sonic boom 🤯) and watching them land side-by-side. I remember watching the successive starship iterations get closer and closer to landing, then iterate on the reentry effort, and watching plasma partially eat through one of the stabilizers without fully wrecking it on a fucking livestream. THAT was wild. And it was the most excited I’ve been about science and engineering I’ve been in a long time.

And now I simply cannot separate the fact that the company is owned and run by the guy who did a seig heil to the fascist authoritarian when he took office, and who is now actively helping tear apart the very institutions that set SpaceX up for success - amongst fucking everything else in this country that has ever given us a competitive advantage. It’s heartbreaking and deeply infuriating.

Boy howdy, what a head scratcher!

I swear to fucking god the intentional obliviousness of the vast majority of our media apparatus is going to fucking kill us all