• Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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    19 days ago

    This is why we don’t have healthcare! So we can indiscriminately kill people only trying to defend themselves on the other side of the planet!

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        19 days ago

        It’s so… like there aren’t adjectives for this. Obama, Trump, Biden, and Harris have spent a decade attempting to exterminate Yemenis, they’ve killed hundreds of thousands and horribly injured millions, and the Yemenis, far from being cowed, defeated the US Navy in order to stop a genocide. And all we can conceive of is sending more bombs, killing and maiming more people. It’s incomprehensible. “Evil” isn’t sufficient.

        • Palacegalleryratio [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          19 days ago

          It’s incredible isn’t it. If you made a film with a plot as an allegory for Americas actions in Yemen like Star Wars was for Vietnam it would be impossible to get the average American to identify America as their stand in because the actions are so on the nose evil it would break their narrative too much. America is so antithetical to moral, honourable, ethical and just behaviour that it’s a caricature of what it is to be evil.

          • NPa [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            A second, bigger Empire has shown up to shoot down known terrorist Luke Skywalker and a squadron of illegal X-wing fighters. Reportedly the terrorist group was attempting to sabotage the newly built Tactical Defensive Moonlet (only used for defensive planetary disintegration)

            • Coruscant Times

            Grand Emperor Bai-Den reportedly ‘very displeased’ with Emperor Palpatine, urges the Empire to stop blowing up planets within 6-8 years or he’ll be ‘big mad’.

            • Outer Rim Gazette

            The Grand Emperor allocates 800 quintillion credits in military aid to Palpatine.

            • Galaxy Central News Network
          • CleverOleg [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            it would be impossible to get the average American to identify America as their stand in because the actions are so on the nose evil it would break their narrative too much.

            It should be pointed out that despite the incredible decades-long popularity of Star Wars, very few Americans know about the connection the movie has to the Vietnam War and fewer still could figure out that America is not the Rebels but Empire.

        • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          19 days ago

          The Yemenis also had the first communist-led government, the first socialist state in West Asia after they ousted the Brits and then won out over the Nasserists for power. There are still remnants in the regular people and in political actors of both socialist and non-socialist groups who were against reunification with the north just as there are newer trends and groups against foreign domination in general like and including the Houthi movement and other nationalist-islamic groups (over support of whom various left-wing and social democrat groups had their own splits over. A lot of different social trends and also different political factions with differing politics from that history, including some active secessionist groups involved in various sides in the civil-and-proxy-war.

          Which all of this certainly doesn’t help the region and its peoples which used to be occupied by the anglosphere stay out of the sights of, led by the US, the largest most violent empire in history whose interests shape global politics, as the apex of capitalist-imperialism grown to its highest stage in the form of global neo-colonialism. It’s more of a neo-colonial involvement in an otherwise imperialist-driven regional power struggle for exploitation of resources (Southern Yemen was a big British Petroleum hub), inherited from the previous history, rather than a specific extermination plan of Yemenis in general. And in that it makes more cynical-bourgeois sense.

          This is also all why the US previously, as always and many times in other countries and regions, sided with the royalists, compradors, jihadist fundamentalist terrorists, western-friendly regional imperialist powers, and general counter-revolutionary and opportunist forces against any and all Yemeni socialists and any and all national-oriented or geopolitical-rival-oriented social-democrats in every political struggle and conflict and civil war eruption they had. Unsurprising for the neo-colonials to target, alongside their regional imperialist allies, that which had previously for a century been a British colony.

      • christian [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        19 days ago

        It’s still much worse than what you’ve written here! You used the word “while” when the word “because” is much more accurate.

    • Cummunism [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      19 days ago

      that’s one reason. The other reason is that the healthcare industry is for profit, and profits are good. If we don’t profit off healthcare, the economy will suffer! what a stronk economy.

  • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netM
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    19 days ago

    Wish someone would knock one of these things out of the sky as highly unlikely as that would be.

    Each B-2 Spirit bomber costs ~$2 Billion dollars

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      There’s a reason these things are only ever fielded against inferior air defence networks.

      All stealth aircraft have small radar signatures, not invisible, and an enemy with an active air defence network and enough time and knowledge can use ambush tactics to destroy them. This is exactly how the F-117 was downed by Yugoslavian Serbs:

      1. They observed the area where the bomber was regularly approaching from for bombing missions. NATO complacency assumed using different aerial routes wasn’t necessary.

      2. Yugoslav missile systems were modified for quick redeployment, allowing them to operate despite heavy NATO air cover.

      3. They explicitly calibrated early warning radars to detect the incoming stealth aircraft, reducing its range from 200km to just 24km. This gave an express warning of when to activate more precise tracking radars.

      4. The ambush tactics, alongside the express warning given by the early warning radar, meant they were tracking the F-117 in question at the moment it was opening its bomb bay doors, allowing for a precise targeting lock by the S-125 radars.

      5. Luck would have it that electronic warfare planes were grounded due to poor weather. This was known by Yugoslav commanders who had penetrated NATO communications and had sympathetic civilians revealing info on sorties. This helped the S-125 targeting radars to work more effectively and for longer (knowing they were unlikely to be detected) which ensured the kill.

      An enemy that is complacent, gives up operational intelligence, and otherwise ignores basic operational procedures will never be totally invisible to the right combination of luck, planning, and cunning.

  • culpritus [any]@hexbear.net
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    19 days ago

    Spending 10s of billions trying to break a blockade that probably has cost less than 10 million. Ansar Allah and Iran are ~1000x more cost effective and still winning.

    • pastalicious [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      19 days ago

      Aww I enjoyed the movie. Yes it was telegraphing its morals so hard it came off like a kid movie at times and some of the internal logic is incredibly silly, but they got a bunch of dumb American meat heads to watch a movie where America was unequivocally the bad guy and they showed what these horrifying conflicts look like from the perspective of regular people just trying to survive

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      19 days ago

      Ansar-Allah has killed like a dozen MQ-9 predator drone bomber planes in the last year. The fash are likely sending B-2 Spirits partially to curb losses of MQ-9s.

    • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      19 days ago

      The B-2 is one of the last remaining “carpet bomb” style bombers left in the US arsenal. If you imagine bombing in your head as just a plane dropping a massive torrent of bombs over a large area, that’s the B-2. The US still has the B-52 of course, but it’s ancient in comparison, so that leaves this. One of them can drop 80 500kg bombs on a civilian population in a single pass

      They’re using it not for the stealth value, but the pure terror value of carpet bombing civilians. It being stealthy is just ensuring they can’t be reprised against

      • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        19 days ago

        I was under the impression that the b-2 had a smallish payload due to it stealth constraints but maybe that was just in comparison to the B-52.

        Jesus this is grim they’re resorting to tactics they haven’t used since Vietnam.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      They have MANPADS (Russian, Iranian, Chinese), and a few Repurposed R-27 (Soviet Sidewinder copy) missiles ripped off some MiGs that weren’t airworthy following the blockade and bombing by Saudi forces.

      Most of their static radar systems were either destroyed or not operational for air defence when they were seized from the Yemeni army. A lot of them were repurposed as artillery missiles.

      They’ve taken down a bunch of reaper drones (as others have said) but also damaged/destroyed at least half a dozen F-16/F-15 fighters using the ground-launched R-27s in ambushes.

  • Tofu_Lewis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    19 days ago

    The success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be understated (see Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism).

    After a supposed victory over an ideological opponent (USSR), the US engaged in building the “rules based international order” and, after a frenzy of neoliberal export (Bosnia), began to show rot. The cultural angst of the late 90’s - unintentionally enunciated in Fukiyama’s “End of History” - reflected the hollow promise of the capitalist vision.

    The 9/11 attacks forced the contradictions of this aimless and self-destructive impulse into overdrive and spawned an unfocused frenzy of jingoism which served to mask the profound disquiet festering at the core of the American psyche.

    That ideological bankruptcy has forced into focus the fundamental inability of capitalism to build a resonant faith in structural stability and justice.