Space Force has an operational weapon, and there’s no going back

Does it work in airport lounges too?

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Really?

ETA: Oops, the following quote came after your statement, so my bad. Still, it’s a valid example, so I’ll leave it.

Others who have studied these issues extensively disagree, and with good reason.

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Right? We claim a leadership role in world affairs? Well, it would be nice if we actually did that on these issues that are literally life and death for all of humanity.

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The need for a space police of some kind will become alot more necessary when some of the asteroids start getting mined. Some of these are being valued in the quinitillions.

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Yes, that’s a huge problem. But there’s a spectrum of warfighting capabilities in space that goes beyond kinetic-kill vehicles and things that explode and pollute orbits with debris. Avoiding these scenarios is at the top of the minds of space security professionals (or at least part of the calculus). Not that we should place all our confidence in them, of course…

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If anybody can help me get this video embed to work…thanks in advance…

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I’m for it. The devil’s in the details.

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You could start by getting US military out of my country. The base at Menwith Hill would be a good start.

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All the more reason not to start this walk down that road.

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The ideal thing would be to avoid it, of course. The militarization of space is not a Good Thing. It’s our reality, though, and we have to engage with it in ways that minimize risk. What those ways are is not obvious. Solutions are not easy.

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Thank you for saving me a trip to google image search. The important work in this thread is done.
[turns off light]
[locks the door]

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Here you go:

Fantastic movie, BTW. One of my favorites. Gets a LOT right.

(For future reference, if you paste the YouTube URL directly in the editor and then hit return, it will appear properly in preview)

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darn, I was hoping for a sweet railgun.

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The USAF has been using the double-diamond delta since the early '60s in logos and patches of space- and missile-related units. It’s way older than Star Trek.

Here, fr’ex, is the unit patch of USAF Space Command, which predates the Star Fleet patch it’s often compared to:

(Besides, who mistakes the 3-D planar, faceted, symmetric “delta diamond” the USAF has long used for the 2-D flat, asymmetric, double-tailed swoosh made of radial arcs that adorns the Star Fleet badge? Really, the Star Fleet swoosh is closer iconically to NASA’s double-tailed, curvy, asymmetric swoosh than it is to USAF’s faceted delta diamond.)

The scifi y’all grew up with was trying to predict various futures in space. Now that the future has become the present, and we’re actually becoming a spacefaring scivilization, some of it is going to remind y’all of various bits of that scifi. That’s inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean it was “stolen” or “ripped off” from the scifi (and it also doesn’t mean that everything in that piece of scifi is therefore accurate prophecy).

The present is going to look increasingly like scifi, and you’re just going to have to get used to it. (-:

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That makes no sense, (to me, a non-American), could you clarify how that works? :thinking:

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Lawd that was a good adaptation.

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Because it means the federal government has far less enforcement powers to protect newly freed people from racial violence, because they had limited ability to turn to the US military as a means of enforcing federal law.

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Sure. During Reconstruction, federal troops occupied the states comprising the former Confederacy, and one of their objectives was to ensure the civil rights of the former enslaved persons. For some years several southern states had Black senators, congressmen and governors. But after the disputed presidential election of 1876, a compromise was reached that included the end of Reconstruction. That meant removal of the occupying army, and the end of civil rights for Black people in the south until 1964. The Posse Comitatus Act made this “legal.”

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Well I’d sure fucking hate somebody to mistake a triangle for a swoosh, that could end everything!

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