No. 98241Anonymous 29th December 2023 Friday 11:41 pm98241This man is going to be President again and ir's going to be awesome
14rh amendment -
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I've bought a few different defence stocks as a hedge against the market going down if The Orange actually attacks Iran and it becomes a far bigger cunt off. Namely Northrop Grumman and Lockheed.
>>102146 Only if it's Turkey doing the shooting over all that natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean or you get a wave of Sudanese refugees. I'd be more concerned with how hot it's going to get and the risk of fires.
>Trump was told that dropping the GBU-57s, a 13.6-tonne (30,000lb) bomb would effectively eliminate Fordow but he does not appear to be fully convinced, the people said, and has held off authorizing strikes as he also awaits the possibility that the threat of US involvement would lead Iran to talks. The effectiveness of GBU-57s has been a topic of deep contention at the Pentagon since the start of Trump’s term, according to two defense officials who were briefed that perhaps only a tactical nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Fordow because of how deeply it is buried.
>Those in the briefing heard that completely destroying Fordow, which Israeli intelligence estimates to go down as far as 300ft (90 metres), would require the US to soften the ground with conventional bombs and then ultimately drop a tactical nuclear bomb from a B2 bomber to wipe out the entire facility, a scenario Trump is not considering.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/19/trump-caution-on-iran-strike-linked-to-doubts-over-bunker-buster-bomb-officials-say
We're fucked either way. Iran and Israel's oil and gas output is out which is already creating an international supply crunch where most of Europe still has eye-watering debt from 2022.
Awful lot of funny jokes today about hitting the Israeli stock market building. A Chinese account explaining that this is for them worse than hitting a synagogue and another saying that the white smoke signals a new Jeffrey Epstein has been elected.
>>102153 >another saying that the white smoke signals a new Jeffrey Epstein has been elected.
Not only does this joke not really make sense, I saw it a week ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/trump-iran-attack-plans-denial >Donald Trump has denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that he has approved US plans to attack Iran, saying that the news outlet has “no idea” what his thinking is concerning the Israel-Iran conflict.
>He also confirmed, later on Thursday, via his press secretary, that he’d be making a decision within the “next two weeks”.
>A day earlier, on Wednesday, Trump told reporters: “I have ideas on what to do but I haven’t made a final – I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due.”
>He added, referring to direct involvement: “I may do it, I may not do it. The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week.”
Now that's fucking leadership right there. Shrug your shoulders, mumble "uh, I dunno, I'll see you in a fortnight", and wander off. It's like Biden never left!
Also, just in case you're one of those thick bastards I see out and about; Isreal is laying waste to the whole of Iran. They are running the exact same playbook they ran in Gaza, only on a much larger scale.
>Also, just in case you're one of those thick bastards I see out and about; Isreal is laying waste to the whole of Iran.
That's just obviously a lie. Most of Iran has been entirely untouched, despite Israel having total air superiority. Israeli attacks are overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran and Esfahan and are verifiably attacks against military leadership, air defence assets and nuclear infrastructure.
They're running exactly the same playbook they ran in Lebanon - a decisive decapitation of military capabilities. The ground invasion of Lebanon lasted less than a month, because Hezbollah had the good sense to admit defeat and sign a ceasefire. The question for the Iranian regime is for how long they are willing to continue fighting a war that they have already lost; they have a narrow window of opportunity to save their own skins and avert regime change.
Trump can provide a GBU-57 or not, that's primarily a domestic political matter, but the Fordow site isn't going to be around for much longer. Israel will re-run the Masyaf raid if they have to, they'll dig a 300ft hole with JDAMs if they have to, but the complete destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons programme is a non-negotiable outcome.
Isn't it weird how it's fine that Israel and South Africa got to make nukes without anyone intervening but "Iran tried to make nukes" means that anything you do to them is fair game (and anything they do in response is aggression.)
That's the rules based international order: we make the rules, you lot follow our orders.
Do you think any other regime watching non-nuclear Iran get pummelled and nuclear North Korea get left alone is going to think "hmm, better leave it" or "fuck, we definitely need one of those to avoid being blown up on a whim but we'd better not get caught"?
(For the record: I don't care what happens to Iran so long as we're not involved. I do care that we've apparently given up on the pretense that there are consistent international rules that western allies have to follow too, and I care that we probably will be involved.)
>>102157 Yes, it’s very weird. But you see, Iran deserve this because they fund unabummer groups who attack Israel and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and laplanderstan fund unabummer groups who attack us, and that’s totally fine. Once you understand this totally logical attitude, it will all make sense and you will feel silly for ever questioning it. You big silly billy.
Luckily he won't have to make the decision. The US has stated in no uncertain terms that Iran must not target US military assets, and doing so would be an act of war.
So I have a feeling one of their bases is going to be "targeted" by "Iranian" "strikes", if you know what I mean. I mean Israel will do it.
>>102161 Iran has the 26th most Jews in the world, so being antisemitic might be a bad idea. If they're a Muslim Iranian it might win you favour with the cab driver, but if they're a Jewish Iranian or affiliated with them it might kill the mood. High risk, low reward.
Iranians regularly demonstrate outside the Iranian embassy in London to protest against the regime. They've been waving Israeli flags and chanting "Netanyahu, thank you" since the war broke out. Yesterday a load of pro-regime blokes turned up and kicked the shit out of the protesters.
As far as I can tell, most Iranians have got understandably mixed feelings about the current situation - they obviously aren't keen on seeing their country getting bombed, but the bombs are landing on the bastards who spent the last 40-odd years destroying their country. Pretty much every Iranian personally knows someone who has been tortured or murdered by the regime.
>>102165 Not to play Ayatollah apologist, but it's not like there was ever an extended period where modern Iran wasn't under a regime. The current lot came to power off the back of the fact pretty much everyone knew someone tortured by the Shah's regime, so they brought an angry expat home to lead them and look how that turned out.
There was that bloke we killed for trying to nationalise oil, I suppose. He didn't last very long.
Months ago I chuckled at how out of date this album seemed 20 years later. I've got to start keeping my mouth shut.
>>102157 South Africa was put under immense sanction anyway, Israel ended up as a fait accompli but you can follow the history on the matter to see it wasn't a straight path over multiple decades with a largely secretive programme that exploited the cracks.
>That's the rules based international order: we make the rules, you lot follow our orders.
I think you're forgetting that the entire UN Security Council stepped in to get Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme and allow in inspectors. It's not a 'we', nuclear proliferation remains a taboo in international society and for very good reason and that's how we ended up with Obama's nuclear deal.
So Israel is now attacking Iranian nuclear facilities but it's part of a multi-decadal war with Iran that it has every reason to suspect is not going to end anytime soon and has this year heated up into directly attacking each other. There's not a scenario where Israel can tolerate a nuclear Iran that is funding paramilitaries across the region that want to explicitly recreate the holocaust and there's a breakout phase once you get to weapons-grade materials that makes the final jump to a bomb impossible to monitor and stop. Israel takes the piss when it comes to self-defence and pre-emptive strike exemptions to international law but it's really hard not to see them having a good argument to attack Iran in this case - especially when they have no reason to suspect Trump wouldn't taco on negotiations and they've already had Iran attacking them.
This isn't even in the first time Israel has attacked hostile states in the region to prevent nuclear programmes and generally everyone has been okay with it because everyone hated Saddam Hussain.
>>102159 Iran has attacked US bases multiple times before with Trump as president. He's now said two weeks which is the same deadline he gave the Ukraine War, that Tariff War and he's probably told Melania the same thing about painting the kitchen but he's spent all day today posting on presidentfa.gs about watches.
>>102165 >>102167 My favourite Iranian-abroad moment was when protestors against the Shah were being beaten in West Germany by the Shah's secret police and then when the police turned up they started beating them as well. A student even got shot for it by police.
Of course the only thing waiting for them if they topple the regime now is a military dictatorship or complete breakdown into an ethnic and sectarian civil war
>>102168 They nationalised their oil industry in 1953, costing BP and Shell many billions. All Iranian history since then has been based on that, as far as I can tell. But they also make lots of speeches about wanting the West to be destroyed, so that's not very nice.
Although it's not like the West doesn't do the exact same thing:
Iran are also closely aligned with Russia, and I think some big cyberattacks have been attributed to them. Iran were definitely responsible for attacks against some American water infrastructure, but then we aren't American so perhaps that doesn't count as "us".
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/04/iran_unabummer_us_water_attacks/
Iran also funds various Shiite groups that are considered unabummers in the West, but Shiite Muslims aren't really into suicide-bombings and lorry attacks, and they certainly don't do anything in this country, even if they might occasionally attack British army bases in the Middle East.
All in all, I am not aware of anything Iran does that's bad, that isn't also perpetrated by countries that are meant to be our allies. They undeniably get a suspiciously bad deal from the West. But they throw gay people off buildings and have "morality police" to violently beat any woman who doesn't wear a headscarf, so I'm sure I will be able to get on with my life if their regime does get overthrown.
I guess saying taco has rattled him. That or he followed the advice that the best time to bomb Iran was the weekend so the markets would have time to calm before opening on Monday.
>>102173 They should call him Zion Don. Not only is it one of his most entertaining nicknames if you like edginess, but the huge number of anti-Semitic MAGA types really don't like it when you call him that, and yet he really is just acting like Netanyahu's pet attack dog. One of Trump's proudest claims was how he didn't start any new wars as president, while nearly every other US president in decades has started at least one. Now he can't even claim that. He's exactly the same warmongering military-industrial complex shill that the Democratic Party was, and attacking Iran doesn't even benefit America in any way. What's he doing?
Yeah, one of the very few things I was willing to credit him with is that he didn't start another forever war, and back when he originally beat Hillary, I was willing to credit part of it to the fact she was perceived as a warhawk who would be sending teenagers to their deaths in Iran within hours of inauguration.
And yet here we are.
I think this will be a disaster for him though, even the die hard MAGA base are going to have a hard time swallowing this without having to ask themselves if he has even the faintest fucking clue what he's doing or if he's just purely operating on the whims of how irritable that basketball sized geriatric prostate has him feeling on a given day. And you can tell that Vance lad absolutely hates having to go along with it, it's completely against the image he has built for himself and he no doubt feels supremely conservativeed to be doing Israel's bidding.
>>102175 >one of the very few things I was willing to credit him with is that he didn't start another forever war
Without trying to be a cunt about this, you should probably pay closer attention. Trump talked a big game about ending the war in Afghanistan, but never actually did so. He's also never stopped whinging about the manner in which Biden did it, because apparently when Trump's president US Marines get a immunity save from suicide bombings.
Moreover, Trump greatly expanded the drone war during his first term, and has already made it easier to launch strikes during his second.
I think a lot of people, especially the "Millenial" and younger "Gen X" aged ones, kidded themselves into thinking Trump hated forever wars because he was one of the few western leaders to, point blank, say Iraq was a mistake. The reality is he's far too drunk on American imperial might to actually dislike military intervention. Bannon or suchlike probably managed to convince him the Iraq war was bad, forgetting that lateral thinking isn't the president's strong suit and therefore he wouldn't put it together that all wars of aggression are bad.
>I think this will be a disaster for him though, even the die hard MAGA base are going to have a hard time swallowing this
I have to disagree here also. Not all of them, but enough of those people would jump into the laser grid from the Resident Evil movie for this prat. The evangelicals see anything relating to Israel as divine provenance, the neo-cons fucking love turning things into rubble, and the rest of the American right still sees him as an anti-system liberator from things like taxes, not being openly racist, and having to know how literally anything in the world works.
>>102174 I'm always a little suspicious of people who make out like the Democratic Party are more pro-war than the Republicans. Especially when it's someone who just floated engaging in anti-semitism because it's "entertaining".
>Not all of them, but enough of those people would jump into the laser grid from the Resident Evil movie for this prat.
Quite, but they are a minority of his support base.
The rest of them are people who, as we have discussed before, more realistically just wanted to throw a spanner in the works because they were sick of neither side of the two party system really representing them; over time they started to believe in the bullshit because frankly I am convinced by now that that's how the majority of people's political beliefs really work. They don't start from a point of I support [thing] and therefore [this guy], it's the other way around, and they rationalise who/what they support because it's the thing they support.
What those people lack in critical thinking, their redeeming quality for it is the relative lack of blind devotion. They are quite easily broken out of the spell, hence why he didn't win again in 2020 against a candidate who was practically a walking corpse being animated with wires. When the American isolationist who wanted to fix the economy, has done a speedrun of making everything more expensive and then gone and got America involved with yet another war, they aren't going to do much mental gymnastics to justify it.
>>102178 Someone in the White House definitely, must have had a bet that they could get him to tweet MIGA. They might even have advised him to order the Iran bombings just so he’d be more likely to tweet it.
People used MIGA satirically before Trump's message to mean "Make Israel Great Again". I suspect Trump is attempting to co-opt the acronym to sidestep that criticism.
There's also the tacit admission or implications in there that if "MIGA" means regime change, and that's a good thing, then MAGA means the same. Autocracy is good for you.
In the ICE protests, the protesters outnumber the government forces. But the government has less-lethal guns, tasers, gas, and body armour.
If a large number of these protesters bought a Desert Eagle .50 AE (this model is $2690, but you can get a black one for $1917), and a box or two of ammo (20 rounds for $24.99), they could tear through the government forces. Cost might be an issue, but I'm sure there are plenty of moneyed California liberals who would be willing to donate money for the cause.
Getting guns in California might be tough, but there are loads of pro-Hispanic people in Texas where getting a gun is probably easy. Then they just travel across to California. If 500 protesters turn up with high powered firearms, ICE could be stopped. I'm not advocating for any of this, I'm merely pondering.
You hear a lot about the second amendment but it's rarely exercised by the left. Why is that?
Shooting effectively with a pistol is vastly more difficult than non-gun people realise. Novice shooters struggle to hit a man-sized target at 15 metres under range conditions, let alone under stress. American police doctrine regards knives and handguns as being equivalently dangerous. Even an highly skilled pistol shooter will be totally outmatched by a mediocre shooter with a long gun at 20-25 metres.
.50 AE pistols are exceptionally difficult to shoot effectively and are widely considered to be a gimmick, even by some people who generally enjoy large-calibre pistols. Quite aside from the colossal recoil, shooting one produces so much blast and concussion that it feels like being punched in the head, even if you're wearing hearing protection. I think a large proportion of non-shooters would just drop it after firing one round.
I don't think that .50AE will usefully penetrate standard police-issue IIIA soft armour, which is rated to stop the only marginally less energetic .44 magnum. It's a large but slow bullet, which is the opposite of what you want for armour penetration (c.f. FN 5.7x28). By the time it passes through the armour, a soft lead bullet of that size is going to be so deformed that it'll likely only do superficial damage, even if it is carrying ~2kJ of energy.
If 500 protesters turned up with high powered handguns and no training, I think they'd just get massacred, either by the military or heavily militarised police officers. 500 well-trained and disciplined protesters with AR-15s and plate carriers could start a small insurgency, but that's never going to happen, for basically the same reason that we don't have to worry about the kind of ingenious unabummer attacks that you see in movies - there's no overlap in the Venn diagram between the kind of people who could do it and the kind of people who would.
>>102202 That's disappointing. Desert Eagles always seem cool in media, so I thought they'd be a good fit. I suppose the problem with long guns is concealment. And looking into it now, armour piercing rounds for handguns are only for military or police use. Also grenades are illegal. It's pretty hard to fight back, and that's with the feds only using less-lethal equipment. Sad.
I saw a video of a woman attacking the ICE facility with a machete, she got tased, but I admire her chutzpah. She was trans so it's getting a lot of traction in right wing online spaces.
What's funny is that looking back I've realised Trump was lukewarm at best about "declassifying" the Epstein files. He was gung-ho about UFOs, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, but whenever Epstein was mentioned he get's unusually sheepish.
>>102505 Yeah, we're kind of like a nice, non-threatening, mate who someone sleeps with, mostly by mistake, after a bad break up. Economically speaking, you see. And we're also secretly evil too.