U.S. President Donald Trump said in a social media post this morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” as his threatened attacks on Iranian infrastructure loom ahead of an 8 p.m. ET deadline.

Iran has rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and says it wants a permanent end to the war.

UN Secretary General António Guterres warned the U.S. that attacking civilian infrastructure is banned under international law.

The death toll so far includes more than 1,900 people in Iran, 1,400 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel, about two dozen in other countries in the region, 13 U.S. service members and 11 Israeli soldiers.

The TruthSocial Post:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116363336033995961

UPDATE (5:32 PM EST / UTC-04:00):

Motherfucking TACO Tuesday.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116365796713313030

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    13·
    19 hours ago

    Yeah this is the whole problem with the ‘madman’ strategy, when applied to nuclear armed states.

    Its … arguably much worse when the person employing the madman strategy… is literally a demented madman with a cult of personality atound him.

    Hope you got your pip boy in working order.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      Intrusive thought of the day:

      Simulations suggest that evenly a relatively modest India/Pakistan exchange (modest by the standards of a full nuclear exchange between Russia and the US, you’re still talking millions dead) would produce enough dust and soot into the air to seriously affect the climate of the planet.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modeling

      But that also implies nuclear winter exists on a scale. Even one H-bomb will have some affect. In principle, it would be possible to determine the precise level of nuclear winter required to combat global warming. Then, if the target country doesn’t have nukes of their own to retaliate with, a nuclear power could drop just enough nukes to cause just enough nuclear winter to cancel out global warming. As long as they’re the only one releasing any nukes, they could precisely control the scale of the resulting nuclear winter effect. Literally designing an act of mass genocide as a means of combating climate change.

      :/

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        It is kind of darkly hilarious that concievably, some specific amount of nuclear warfare would theoretically cancel out at least some processes that are currently already running away in global warming.

        The… problem of course is that no one knows the specifics of this with any degree of certainty… and if you do not know the specifics, well the potential downsides are essentially infinite.

        But, if you have the brain of a religious extremist, or malignant narcissist… well, nuance doesn’t compute so well for these people, but they are also, somewhat paradoxically, uncommonly good at asserting their own will and power.

        In summary… if God is real, they’re a trickster God.

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          15 hours ago

          Yeah, and I think that anyone knowledgeable enough to model nuclear winter accurately would refuse to participate in that kind of military planning. If you go to a climate researcher, put a gun to their head and said, “help us calculate just the amount of nuked cities needed to cancel out the temperature increases of climate change or we’ll shoot you,” I think most would just say, “fine. Do it.”

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
            4·
            14 hours ago

            You’d be broadly wrong about your assumption, plenty of extremely bright people have historically, and are currently, working in or for the military industrial complex.

            … Literally everyone involved in the Manhattan Project, Werner Von Braun, Mengele, just off the top of my head.

            Facebook got its massive grant that kickstarted it… on the same day that the CIA/NSA discontinued a major planned project to develop digital espionage capabilities.

            The internet itself was born out of ARPA/DARPA research grants.

            I have a cousin with an engineering degree, used to work for probably Skunkworks, he did have to move to roughly the area that Skunkworks has facilities, his speciality was ceramics, things that can go get really hot without breaking, he joked when he said he’d have to kill me if he answered ‘were you working on the sr-72?’

            He couldn’t answer that, but he did say he quit because of the racist and toxic political environment… he went on to work for BlueOrigin…

            …you know yeah cool spaceflight, but also, Amazon is a military industrial complex member as well, their servers currently run comms and likely AI assisted kill chain target analysis/delineation, which is probably a good part of why Iran is blowing up regional Amazon data centers.

            Bezos is very much personally in bed with Trump.

            Nah.

            Plenty of bright people will work for evil entities, often without too much coaxing.