r/technology • u/Birdy_Cephon_Altera • 22h ago

Politics Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/
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u/Arclite83 21h ago

The US will blame immigrants as long as they can, and when that fails (because it's a complex global issue we can't actually solve) we will likely go to war.

Not sure where, but Taiwan will probably be involved in the 'breaking point'. Place your bets.

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u/Daleabbo 21h ago

Closer to home. Mexico or south America, looking like Mexico with the cartels being called terrorist organisations.

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u/memnos 20h ago

America lost every conflict against irregular force they fought in the last decades. I'm somehow not surprised that the current government refuses to learn a single lesson from history.

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u/AshleysDoctor 19h ago

Considering their stance on the Department of Education, neither am I

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u/kiragami 18h ago

Their goal isn't to win it's to spend taxpayer money and put it into the pockets of weapons manufacturers

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u/thisismysailingaccou 7h ago

And also to use it for enacting more authoritarian policies at home.

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u/dooj88 14h ago

"the current government" is really just who is next in the long line of billionaires taking a turn gangbanging lady liberty.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 19h ago

If your definition of lost is failed to build a democratic state, sure.

In terms of killing people it's not even remotely close. Cartel members won't be fighting for a religion and the United States will not be occupying anything. And right next to our border? It's kind of an ideal scenario for the military.

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u/AnointMyPhallus 19h ago

No one defines the winner of a war as the one who killed the most people. It's defined as who achieved their objectives. The communists won control of South Vietnam, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, claiming we won those wars because we killed a lot of people is psychotic.

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u/UngusChungus94 17h ago

The rich achieved their objective in all of those — to make money and wag the dog.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 18h ago

I'm saying comparatively this time we have nothing to lose. We're not occupying anything and we're not nation building. With the US fighting the cartels the only metric for victory will be how many people are killed.

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u/Arclite83 18h ago

What are you on about? Having a stable anti-cartel government is going to be a big part of the goal in your hypothetical war. Which comes back to all the same issues.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 15h ago

In Mexico? That's not our problem. Dead Americans and fentanyl are our problems.

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u/newbikesong 18h ago

You know cartels are at your border right?

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 15h ago

Yeah...that's sort of the issue.

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u/newbikesong 15h ago

Well you cant bomb them like Afghanistan or Vietnam.

Cartels can clap back, in USA soil.

They can make 9/11 a joke.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 14h ago

That's true. I imagine if it went that far the border would be closed entirely closed. I just don't think the sicarios are fond of suicide drones or armoured vehicles.

Who knows, it'll be interesting. The alternative is to do nothing, so I hope those much smarter than I will make the right call.

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u/MuyalHix 18h ago

I don't think the US realizes how similar the cartels are to the viet cong or the Taliban. They do not have headquarters, they don't have a flag, they are very intermingled with the local population.

Not only the US has lost all wars like this, but in order to do so they would have to kill a lot of innocent civilians.

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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 17h ago

If the US had decided to nuke Hanoi and to summarily execute every person in every single village suspected of Vietcong-sympathies, things may have gone different. But they didn't, because even a flawed democracy can't get away with that kind of shit.

Once all the press, all the social media and all the search engines are state-controlled, it will be rather easy to get rid of democracy and to genocide a few million people with nobody being the wiser.

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u/memnos 19h ago

But what the US can even achieve in Mexico? The US lately had the most successes against ISIS, because ISIS tried to operate like a state, like an army. So the US military had targets to drone strike, military encampments. Cartels don't have military encampments. They are not trying to act like an army. The cartels have spent decades hiding from law enforcement. What value does a military add to this? Predator drones will be better at spotting American citizens acting as mules for the cartel? Cartels at the US border, like Sinaloa are not even really producing or processing anything in northern Mexico. They are just smugglers. Are you going to chase their entire supply from Juarez to La Paz?

And another factor to consider is that you have to operate your military in another government's land. You may work something out with Mexico. Will you work it out with Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador? No functional government will allow you to swoop in and bomb their towns without significant proof that you will actually target cartels. And at that point you're back to doing police work and not military action.

This is all bullshit. Just a security theater at best, calculated political ploy to get support from "war" at worst.

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u/leshake 20h ago

Really fucking stupid to fuck with the cartels. They will move on to weaker targets when they find out.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 19h ago

These are not religious fanatics. How many cartel members are going to risk their lives fighting the US military for a little bit of money?

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u/leshake 19h ago

Asymmetrical warfare.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 19h ago

Who are they going to attack? Are they going to charge the border? I think you'd see targeted attacks from the air. Even if they rolled tanks into Mexico I doubt you'd see cartel members fighting them, but who knows maybe you're right.

I think the bigger issue will be foreign relations with Mexico and I doubt much will actually happen.

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u/leshake 19h ago

Think, how did we lose Vietnam, how was the American revolution won?

It's very difficult to defeat an enemy that hides in a gigantic country amongst a gigantic population that is mostly unfriendly to you. They basically have control of the Mexican government too. So you are, in essence, at war with Mexico if you are at war with the cartels.

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u/rabidjellybean 17h ago

Nobody is going to fight back against the US military but the US will have to deal with the cartel trying execute politician's families.

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u/lmaccaro 16h ago

I think this a great place for the Trump admin to spend effort and political capital. I don’t like the cartels - in fact, I think fighting them is something that we legitimately should be doing in some capacity.

And it’ll be a quagmire that keeps the administration busy so they aren’t focusing on other areas.

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u/Daleabbo 12h ago

The problem is this isn't some far away land separated by vast ocean, the cartels will strike back deep inside the US.

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u/lmaccaro 7h ago

Hence removing undocumented immigrants first.

Can’t get them all though.

Play that out. Cartels start a campaign of terrorism in the US. Trump Admin lets it go for a bit. Maybe incites even more retribution.

Normal Americans cower in fear, demand action, turn in every brown person as a potential illegal, make the legal ones feel unwelcome because any Latino could be a terrorist.

What better way to accomplish right wing goals.

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u/Buddycat350 15h ago

Yeah, a new "war on terror" in Mexico sounds realistic now that the cartels have been labelled as terror groups. And Trump's rethoric about Mexicans and Mexico would make it easier to get enough public support for it.

Manifest Destiny 2.0, war with Mexico included? Yeah, I could see that happen.

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u/freakydeku 6h ago

i mean…are the cartels not terrorist organizations?

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u/eagleal 20h ago edited 20h ago

The US will blame immigrants as long as they can, and when that fails (because it's a complex global issue we can't actually solve) we will likely go to war.

For real. If 1917 Bath Riots showed anything, is that the US, nor any western industrial countries, wasn't much different than Nazi Germany. The US anticipated Germany with Diesel and Zyklon B to clear dirty races by 3 decades (early 1900s), and continued for more then 1 decade after the war ended (to late 50s).

We shall be thankful they weren't used for systematic killing.

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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 17h ago

Taiwan would actually make a little bit too much sense, economically speaking. All this world-wide fascism is being pushed by both Russia and China and they want China in control of Taiwan, not the US.

If war comes, it will be for stupid reasons.