“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Considering the topics and posts you've made, nobody can take your complaints seriously.
Over the last year you've had 21 out of 25 topics closed. How many of these topics were you infracted for? How many of those posts did you get infracted for? I'm sure I've seen you banned more than once.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/search.p...rchid=42052701
Tell me again about how you're treated badly...
You're incapable of following forum rules. You flagrantly break them.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Thanks for the giggle, I'm done with you and your lack of reading comprehension. Did you, miss for the second time:
It says very clearly that the bill was sponsored by Rep. Alcee Hasting so take your bullshit elsewhere. Your inability to comprehend a very basic discussion, read source material, or even understand our civic system makes you appear as a complete joke. So thank you for your unique avatar, ill be sure to ignore whatever drivel you add to these forums from now on.
As a side note, (again with the lack of reading comprehension) interpreting what I wrote as "anti-american rhetoric" goes even deeper to show that you have no idea what you are talking about. Being against the US restarting its nuclear missile program does not make me "anti-american". What a joke, It only makes me anti-nuclear-holocaust.
But please, since I apparently "attend terrible college" (for fucks sake, can you for once, please put a single grammatically correct sentence together) would you mind tossing us a picture of your diploma from the incredibly high ranking institution you hail from? I have two sitting here from an Ivy that i could happily repost, but you are right, those are probably from when I "attend terrible college".
As a afterthought, don't bother, you are probably just a silly troll, you are not worth my time and I will not waste it by reading what you have to say.
Good luck trying to get support for the war.
Whoever loves let him flourish. / Let him perish who knows not love. / Let him perish twice who forbids love. - Pompeii
I've been hyper busy IRL the last few days, but I just wanted to chime in:
The United States going to War against Iran would be the single stupidest thing the United States can do strategically, in the world, today. Period.
It is worse than slapfight with China or Russia, or even North Korea. It will begin something the US would rapidly lose control over.
First and foremost, from a sheer readiness point of view, the absolute earliest the US Military will be ready for another large scale conflict is 2019. A stealthy cumulative $100 billion / year budget cut since the Budget Control Act of 2011 kicked into effect plus the realities of 16 years of continuous warfare and ongoing high tempo operations have taken a toll. Vehicles, ships and planes are all worn out. It's going to taken billions of dollars and years more to "reset" the force, on top of what has already been spent doing just that.
Delays to the F-35 and Ford Class carriers have also worsened that.
So basically, going to War against Iran would be going to war with the US Military at it's most under-prepared state relative to it's idea, in 40 years. Thanks Obama. If you've read my military policy posts, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Secondly, around all of that, the US is involved in a costly and protracted mass military modernization. All those legacy Cold War sytems - F-15s, F-16s, Los Angeles Class submarines, Wasp Class Amphibious Assault ships, M113s, etc - they're all worn out and it's time to retire them. Their successors are being slow rolled out. Why slow rolled? Money. We've actually ben here before. Back in the mid 2000s, the US had a grand vision for a tri-service military modernization. THe Future Combat System was the army component, the F-22 and the "2018 Bomber" was the Air Force, and Zumwalt class destroyers were the Navy's.
And then it was all massively cut back, delayed or canceled.
What happened? The Iraq War. We had pressing bills to pay and MRAPs to build. To the tun of $4 billion a month ($5 billion in today's dollars), Iraq was expensive. Basically, it wiped out a generation of military modernization and delayed it a decade. It cut our lead over Russia and China from about 25 years to about 12. We go to War against, Iran, we'll wipe out another generation of modernization and cut our lead in half, or worse, zero it.
Thirdly, the US needs to think about what it's priorities are. Military resources are finite. For example, it has a stockpile 8000 legacy Tomahawk Land attack missiles, but only 2500 modern ones. Those 8000 legacy tomahawks are largely due to be disposed of in years ahead, but because the modern Tomahawk is a good deal more sophisticated (and thus expensive), they'll be replaced at less than one to one. It took the US Navy 2.5 years and $2 billion to replace the several hundred Tomahawks they fired in the Libyan conflict, most of which were legacy Tomahawks, with modern ones, at less than one to one. To put it another way, and to extrapolate this to the larger resource pool (and considerign readiness above), going to War against Iran would deeply constrain the US's ability to respond to other crisises, for years to come. The US ability to produce munitions is at it's lowest point in the post-War era (something former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter began reversing) in large part because over the last 15 years, the Navy and Air Force have transitioned to a 100% Smart Bomb force, which increased the costs of bombs from around $5000 to $150,000+, often double or triple that. Furhtermore in preparation for a conflict in a non-permissive environement, they're increasingly being fitted with multi-modal seekers (laser, GPS, inertial guidance, optical) which add even more expensive.
Now getting back to that, what are the US military's defense priorities? (1) Defense of Europe from Russia, (2) Defense of Asia-Pacific from China. Everything else, including ISIS, is further down the list.
Expending the stockpile, committing forces, losing assets, and geopolitically, alienating our allies in yet another American War of choice, will vastly weaken our position versus Russia and China. We will be less able to respond to their challenges, across every spectrum.
Furthermore, unlike Iraq which couldn't retaliate, Iran would. They have Quuds and they have Hezbollah.
So the opportunity cost of a strike on Iran, in addition to the above is a mix of the following:
-Bombing international airliners.
-Bombing American-frequented "soft targets" in Europe
-Sucide swarm boat attacks in the Persian Gulf against shipping
Now that we've done that punitive strike, do we keep doing it? Because Iran will keep retaliating, which means the only way out of this mess is regime change, the one thing Donald Trump swore not to do to his base.
Furthermore what happens when an American War of choice that breaks a treaty our partners worked on, leads to deaths of nationals of one of those partners, say a retalitory sucide bombing against a German target that kills more German citizens than Americans? You can expect American-German relations to go back to the stone age (and rightfully so).
In a very fitting sense, Donald Trump going to War against Iran would be poetic justice to his deplorable supporters, who would be the ones chiefly responsible for such a catastrophe. But seeing as I value America as the world leader and as force for good, rather than a marauding thug, and I value our security, I can think of no more moronic thing the US can do.
I'll make this very simple. If the United States goes to war against Iran and expends substantial resources and / or incurs substantial civilian, military, economic or geopolitical losses, you can kiss US-Superpowerdom goodbye. What began in 1945 by stopping thugs will have ended by us becoming thugs, and have wiped out our decisive advantage over our real adversaries. A comment I made three years ago vis-a-vis Syria stands today: the US military will not be ready for another large scale ground conflict until the other end of 2025 at the earliest. Period. That is the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan.
What kind of insanity is it that people want a third helping of an indecisive Muslim-world conflict? Have the first two not been destructive enough to American interests?
Considering trump ran as an anti war candidate...