Very important to know the difference and be clear eyed about it

All that sounds Woke to me

It’s helpful to understand what you actually have control over, rather than confusing good fortune for savvy decision making.

So much of the joke is that they won’t need to.

唯一的制胜之策就是不参与

even when you do have a choice, how often do you actually read what you’re agreeing to?

You don’t bother precisely because it’s an enormous amount of work for no discernable benefit.

What are you doing to do? Not rent a car or fly on a plane? Not own any electronics or motorized vehicles? Not rent an apartment? Not use software?

We have the option to try to vote with our wallets

Do we? What good is money if we can’t spend it?

people agree to it

Hardly an agreement if it’s predicated on access to a service, particularly if the service is a utility, a monopoly, or a cartel.

If every vendor uses uniform language as a means of mitigating their own collective liability, the agreement is functionally coerced.

As a general rule, arbitration is a great tool for multiple parties to resolve a dispute without going all the way to trial.

The issue isn’t with arbitration on it’s face, but forced arbitration as dictated by a single party.

You really can’t figure out how an institution as large and complex as the US military might have a way to learn things

It’s a matter of thinking of them. You’re got to actually employ them, too.

Is the US actually doing this? Or is institutional memory getting shredded by DOGE, et al?

Van Riper only won by using “motorcycle messengers” that traveled at the speed of light

Van Riper used units designated as civilian material/personal to fill a gap in communications, in a war game that substituted certain functions of the combat as turn-based for expediency. They weren’t moving at the speed of light. They simply existed in the scenario, were used in a clever manner, and were able to function freely because the attacking US forces ignored them.

Van Riper used a few other tricks - toggling mobile radar stations so they won’t be easy to target by enemy artillery and using speedboats to harry American Navy - which the US leadership considered “cheating”.

But then… 24 years later… all of these tricks (and more) were used by the IRGC to devestating effect.

Americans learned absolutely nothing.

Really depends on the tanks and drones in question, the soldiers involved, the commanders running the operation, the actual objectives of the mission, yada yada.

Just straight off the bat, drones aren’t great at securing supply lines or moving large volumes of cargo long distances.

you learn a lot from losing.

What do you really think the Hegseth military is going to learn from this?

It should be noted that the U.S. military loses effectively on purpose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Weird to give all this up now

Taking a lighter sentence or gambling on the death penalty? I wouldn’t call that weird at all.

The point is that Greenland isn’t safe because the US has run out of interceptor missiles to deflect Iranian SCUDs.

Most militaries don’t have a very specific kind of anti-ballistic missile defense system that uses $15M/pop interceptors that need to be fired in clusters of 3-5 to be effective per incoming target.

The Americans aren’t running out of bullets or tanks or fighter-bombers. They’re running out of these specific suites of precision anti-air defense tools. And they’re running out because they’ve spread their arsenal across four continents, in an attempt to beat Russia and Iran in an active conflict, while still holding a gun on China and Pakistan.

These weapons shortages aren’t slowing down the Rubio/Hegseth campaign to blow up fishing boats in the Carribean and close off international waters around Cuba. It doesn’t stop them from arming militias in the Philippines and Indonesia, in their crusade to enslave the native peoples of the Pacific Rim. It won’t stop them from sending more special forces in to kidnap a president from Venezuela.

This is the difference between fighting a modern war with a rival industrial power and shoving an underdeveloped, largely rural country into the metaphorical locker.

Europe doing jack all is a whole different fucking problem

It’s very hard to get someone to stick their neck out if they know it’ll get chopped off.

Europe kowtowing to American Imperialism is the root of the problem.

Historically, it has worked more often than it hasn’t. The Big Lie of Vietnam is that it was The Rule rather than a glaring exception.

Most countries don’t mount a successful domestic defense. Most opposition groups don’t have a rival Superpower at their backs. Most insurgency and paramilitary efforts fail.

Meanwhile, the folks doing the imperialist terror campaign to seize control only ever profit, personally, from these military operations. And the public only ever gets fed some bullshit about how Americans are being greeted as liberators.

If US business interests come under attack, the US military has a cause to intervene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Grenada

Would go about as well

Like Europe called a foul in Gaza?

Say that the moment any US drill cuts Greenlandic soil, the shooting will start.

That ends with a whole lot of dead Greenlanders, while the rest of the EU stands back and does nothing.