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Basil Rathbone's avatar

Americans won't organize to do one goddamn thing about this, any more than they will about anything else existentially threatening. We don't know how to do that. We're all afraid of each other. Everyone has guns so no one wants to make a big fuss over something as weird and abstract as nuclear war when we all know guns might be levelled against us at any moment, just to shut up the troublemaker.

The Biden/Congressional lunatics know they have nothing to fear from the somnolent consumers fictitiously referred to as "citizens." We don't even discuss these things unless it's with a family member or close confidant who we know feels the same way. We abdicated our responsibility as citizens of a mythic democracy long ago. Now, we're mere spectators awaiting the conflagration we did nothing to prevent.

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Andrew Thomas's avatar

The only saving grace here may be that F-16s are so different from the planes that Ukrainian pilots have flown before that they have no chance of being capable of retraining their minds to make the split-second decisions necessary to effectively operate them. The idea advertised is four months, which from what I have read is an absurd goal. However, if the NATO countries supplying these planes supply the pilots as well, that saving grace disappears.

It is astonishing that there is no recognition at all in the US mainstream media or amongst its political class that we have created a situation analogous to the two-week long Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The only differences that matter are that it has been going on for fifteen months, and that every action and pronouncement of the US government during that fifteen months has escalated the crisis. We are on the brink of nuclear Armageddon, and the only person who matters who recognizes it, and has said so publicly, is Donald J. Trump. Of course, he says he could end the conflict the day he becomes president again, so he is as ignorant and deluded as he has always been. But, still...

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