Blowing S#^+ Up.

Have you seen this video of the  30′, 20,000 lb MOAB we dropped on an encampment in Afghanistan?

I feel badly about posting that. That was not survivable. Whatever you may feel about the targets, we shouldn’t forget that dozens of lives were snuffed out in an instant.

I worry that seeing videos like this will numb us to the reality of killing people. We’re the most powerful country on the planet and it would be trivially easy for us to just bomb everyone we don’t like into submission.

There are two problems with this: 1.) it tends to piss dangerous people off and 2.) where do we stop?  Dropping big bombs and drone warfare can make us even more of a threat because it comes at relatively little risk for us. We have no “skin in the game”.  That should be deeply troubling to anyone

Other countries are starting to take notice of our recklessness. China is now raising its voice over the way Trump is stirring up tensions between North and South Korea. We could end up causing the deaths of thousands of Koreans. China’s foreign minister is surprisingly blunt:

“The United States and South Korea and North Korea are engaging in tit for tat, with swords drawn and bows bent, and there have been storm clouds gathering,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in Beijing, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

“If they let war break out on the peninsula, they must shoulder that historical culpability and pay the corresponding price for this,” Mr. Wang said.

This is especially stupid if, as that article points out, North Korea has nowhere near the capacity to launch a nuke at the United States. All the fearmongering on our side sounds like the same lies the Bush administration used to get us into war with Iraq. Remember how Saddam Hussein supposedly had the ability to rain WMD’s on us in 45 minutes all the way from Baghdad?  Turns out that wasn’t even remotely true.

But, hey, they’re over there, far away from us. All we need to do is apply all the force at our disposal to subdue those North Koreans. At least we’re doing something because someone needed to do something sometime to someone and what the hell do we have all these bombs and stuff for if we’re never going to use it, amirite??
I’ll be the first to criticize the Obama administration for not getting involved in Syria much earlier when intervention might have spared that country 5 years of devastating civil war. It’s a little late for that now. The damage is done, the players too compromised. We have major regional instability.

But blowing shit up is not always the answer to every problem. And the world hasn’t changed geographically. The choke points that were major theaters of war in WWII haven’t moved. The eastern Mediterranean, South China Sea, South Pacific  and the North Atlantic are still vulnerable areas of the world. We can’t just keep dropping bombs everywhere because it makes a bunch of clueless male Trump supporters hard.  Is that what it takes to feel like a man these days?  Really??

Those are real people under those drones.

For more on how masculinity is defined by each party, as well as why Steve “Thomas Cromwell” Bannon doesn’t stand a chance with the aristocracy, listen to TrumpCast’s So Many Men episode with NYT’s Frank Bruni. 

Bottom line: Republicans can get away with this stupid macho posturing whether they’re soft, tanning bed idiots or not. Trump wants to be a Putin but he keeps appointing well dressed rich men to his administration. Democrats better up their macho because there are some voters out there who are sucked into the Republican manly man ideal every time.

If there’s going to be any blowing things up, let’s start with the ridiculous idea that a bunch of guys sitting from the comfort of their armchairs are going to be able to overthrow the government with their silly underpowered pop guns.

They’ve obviously never been to a protest these days.

But I have.  I’ve seen what they’ve got in store for us.

The government can crush you like a bug.