A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands…
… The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
How long before a more serious power decides to call America’s bluff? Will historians decide it’d already happened in Iran?
It’s not a game of cards. This shit gets people killed, even when Americans (or our proxies) are going to war half-cocked.
Iraq is an absolute wasteland, over a decade after the US officially ended military operations. Iran has suffered something on the order of a trillion USD in domestic infrastructure losses. Nevermind the casualties, the ecological damage (Valdez-tier Oil spill in Oman just for starters), or the excess deaths downstream of a massive economic contraction. Afghanistan tossed off the US yoke only to enter a multi-year famine, as they scramble to restructure their economy absent international trade. These are Pyrrhic victories by any measure.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC Mid-East gang are absolutely eating shit as they squat on top of trillions of dollars of petroleum products they can no longer successfully export.
Russia is going down the same road in its proxy war with NATO in Ukraine. They can stubbornly say they haven’t been beaten, as an entire generation of young men is obliterated and the country’s biggest export industry gets blown up piece by piece. Even the USSR’s outright collapse pales in comparison to their modern day self-immolation.
Israelis are celebrating a genocide while their own country becomes a nightmare hellhole, through economic contractions and increased conscription and a steadily more paranoid and reactionary government turning on what’s left of a domestic opposition.
India and Pakistan keep butting heads, to the benefit of absolutely nobody. Kashmir is a wasteland almost as badly fucked up as Afghanistan, with one pogrom after another rendering some of the most fertile territory in Asia into a depopulated wasteland.
What sane person wants to live in a country at war? It’s horrible. We’re way beyond the point at which anyone “wins”. The only winning move is NOT TO PLAY. A lesson that only seems to sink into the human brain if you say it in Chinese.
Which of the Chinese languages?
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-says-it-will-not-renounce-use-force-over-taiwan-2024-10-16/
Because the reason it isn’t happening soon is Xi’s personal fears
https://thenightly.com.au/politics/xi-jinping-fears-taiwan-invasion-could-cost-him-power-never-raised-aukus-with-australia-says-former-envoy-c-22700238
They prefer to use their size to threaten over initiating wars. Which remains imperialistic.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-increased-military-activities-indo-pacific-2025/
The rest is on point but I don’t understand your exceptions for China
I don’t disagree with any of that, are you just venting right now or are you mad at me for not sounding angry enough? Hard to tell, but either way yeah agree.
Just venting.
All too often, I see people treat war as some kind of sporting event rather than a socially acceptable form of genocide.
Gotcha. I didn’t mean to sound glib or disinterested. In my head that was a sort of Dan Carlinish pronouncement of horror, laden with gravitas.
To me, it reads like they’re just venting.
Probably. It’s just hard to tell when the discourse is so overheated lately. I feel like everyone sane is mad enough to condone murder but too stricken with learned helplessness to do it themselves. And maybe a certain subset that are also cursed with enough conscience to believe that violence perpetuates violence. We all need to vent sometimes, but I almost feel like it’sa waste of good rage.
The only thing I’d say in defense of a good venting is that for change to happen, enough people have to decide that the consequences of taking action are less bad than not doing that, and a big part of that is online dialogue. The more of us that agree about these things, the more it leads to eventual action.
The problem is that getting to that point is difficult and often requires a catalyst that we haven’t yet had.
But all of our online angst does help build a foundation that future change can spring from. While that may sound hopeless - and it ain’t roses and daisies for sure - still, it will help. Eventually. Hopefully.
But I get it. I’ve mostly stopped reading the articles about The Latest Stupidity Trump Has Said Or Done because I’m exhausted by it. It feels useless, and some of it is demoralizing. But I think most of the discussion helps lay down that foundation that I hope we build a new society upon.
I just hate the feeling that we’re all just yelling at each other when we should be scaring billionaires.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Doing one does not prevent doing the other.
meanwhile, as all this chaos and destruction is happening, who is getting wildly rich?
around 3,000 families control wealth equal to 15-17% of global GDP.
add to that, billionaires are increasingly influencing global politics as governmental advisors or by tipping scales in elections… when they’re not getting rich directly off military contracts and reconstruction/real estate deals on the land they just got paid to help “liberate”.
the planet is being steered into apocalypse by a handful of madmen.
and with climate perma-crises on the horizon, “disaster capitalism” is going into overdrive.
Sort of. A competent leader would have been able to put Iran over a barrel through avenues other than wasting missiles on hard targets. But it’s certainly shown the weakness of the US when there are useful idiots in power. The US is supposed to be able to project power anywhere in the world, and we’re clearly unable to do that right now.
But even so, there’s no risk of actual boots on the ground invasion in the US. Even with an absolute moron in charge, the mere fact that we control the land coast to coast severely restricts any potential invader. They’d have to do a Normandy up and down both coasts, or convince Canada or Mexico to help them do a Belarus.
I dare to armchair general that it might be more than just incompetence.
Ukraine’s military has been saying for a few years that while NATO plans, strategies and tactics were useful at the start of the war, they have been irrelevant and even detrimental for a few years now, small drones have completely changed warfare.
In addition to a country that has been arguably preparing for an assymetrical war for maybe 40-60 years, Iran is one of four countries with the most knowledge of current drone tactics now; the other three being Ukraine, Russia and China.
Don’t forget Taiwan. They are in a similar position to Ukraine with China wanting to just take over. And China 100% would need a D-day style ambiguous assault. Except Taiwan obviously expects that, and can easily see the build up and launch. And weather in the region severely limits options for a successful assault for a lot of the year.
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of experience with using them, but OTOH they are collaborating with Ukraine. Supplying them with components and getting intel back on what works.
https://dset.tw/en/event-news-en/492-2/
The terrain makes it hard for China to try an invasion as well and if they do try, Taiwan is going to disable their crown jewels instead of letting China have them.
I love that ambiguous assault autocorrelation.
Oh gods, where is this attack coming from? What are they hoping to achieve? Who even are they?
Taiwan just needs the ability to take down one dam and PRC is in trouble
Taiwan won’t be able to send a drone flying 300 km over China, they aren’t gonna screw up air defense line Russia. Striking deep will require either smuggling things in or building weapons from inside their borders. If China expected a hot war to start I’d expect them to lead with heavy amplification of internal surveillance and hunting possible threats to remove as many internal threats as possible.
Honestly, that’s probably not completely off the table at this point.
I don’t think anyone’s invading the US. I think hundreds of years of pax Americana (wrt ocean trade) are ending though and it may mean a return to mercantilism and the mass poverty it creates.
I think Iran just did. I should invest in a popcorn supplier.
I’d invest in dried goods, buddy, I promise you we’ll stop getting food before the MIC stops getting bank
Canned goods: Am I joke to you?
Yeah I feel like it’s happening now with Iran, but I guess it is too soon to really assess
Who would be a “more serious power”? China just executed 3 of their “rocket generals” in the last year because they figured out more than half of the ICBMs were either filled with water with the fuel sold on the black market, or were cemented shut but made to look like they opened. Their new ships they’re building are catching fire at an insane rate. Their new generation whatever the fuck number they made up fighter is confirmed to be a flying tank.
Russia has military from when my grandpa was born with a handful of non ancient things to show off to the world. Plus Russian production is known for its quality /s.
Who’s left to be a “serious power”?
Israel just sicced the US on a mildly scrappy regional power and all they were able to do is make Iran less reasonable and now they’re looking like they’re running out of ammo.
So, literally whomever shows up to fight next I’ll withhold judgment until after… Let’s say the third time Trump declares victory.