Nobody could have predicted this. I have my doubts even when they call it “spying equipment” or whatever considering Chinese claim it was a meteorological balloon, certainly no doubt they would try to paint those tools as such.
article is about how it wasn’t actually spying
Constantly refers to it as Chinese spy balloon
Fucking liars are STILL saying it was a spy balloon when the military is like no, actually, it wasn’t.
You clearly didn’t read the article. It WAS a spy balloon but it appears the spy equipment wasn’t turned on. So no information was gathered.
the article presents zero evidence that it’s a “spy balloon”, just some dipshit general saying that it is. we know the U.S. military regularly lies about its enemies, so his word is worth nothing
did you ever stop to ask why a supposed “spy balloon” would be so large and easily noticed?
lib@lemm.ee
And you read the article yet you didn’t even quote the funny bit.
Martin said, “On paper, it looks like this colossal mismatch – one of this country’s most sophisticated jet fighters against a balloon with a putt-putt motor. Was it a sure thing?”
Somehow we’ve managed to find the first human being to function without a single neuron firing.
A brain exists, but nothing is occuring within. No electrical signals, no neural activity.
And yet they manage to post anyway
I’m still getting used to federation. I saw that comment, didn’t look at the poster’s name, and assumed it was just sarcasm.
lmao
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I really hope this is a bit
The article makes no claim as to the nature of the balloon. The author is very careful about that. It’s a balloon that didn’t collect any intelligence nor transmit any data. How, exactly, would you define a spy balloon? It’s starting to sound like your threshold for “spy balloon” is “launched by some Chinese person,” which is probably more than a little racist.
Your name is Occam’s Razor, but you don’t seem very good at using Occam’s Razor
Reminder that the missile they used to shoot this balloon down cost $400k
And one missed
And in the immense wave of paranoia afterwards they shot down three American weather balloons at the cost of 400k per missile plus fuel and maintenance and man hours.
And one of them was a child’s science project
Oh please do tell more
Not sure which balloon she’s referring to, but I imagine it’s the one from the Illinois bottle cap and balloon club (or whatever it’s actually called, they took the name lovingly from the movie Up). No one ever explicitly confirmed that’s the balloon that got got… but literally every piece of evidence points to one of them being theirs. Hobbyist balloon club, so at least no weather data was destroyed!
Doesn’t an F-35 cost something stupid like 40k an hour to operate?
greatest military in the world no doubt
They love to talk all that shit about “our missiles are so accurate that we can hit a ladybug” or some such level of nonsense. Which all of a sudden goes away every time that it is shown how many more people were killed while trying to get one person.
Turns out they can only hit a ladybug because the heat from the blast fries the bug even if the missile misses by a wide margin
superior firepower just means more firepower
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Yes. This alone should disqualify Biden from being president.
Name a president in the past century that wouldn’t have done the exact same thing.
This is actually the most American thing Biden has ever done lol
My president:
Is that before or after the flight time on the plane they launched it from?
That’s just the direct cost of the missile itself. The cost of flying the $200m jet I’m unsure of!
It’s 70k per hour lmao. Amortized though so just 1 hour probably costs at least 100k
The DoD is the world’s largest employer with 2.9 million employees as of June 2022. Besides its direct function of projecting US power, it is also functionally a jobs program. The US is ideologically prohibited from handing out money for free via welfare programs, they must maintain the ideology of capitalism, by creating pointless work by which these people can “earn” the money. It is of zero consequence that each missile costs so many dollars. The whole point of its manufacture was to pay the workers and to allow the military-industrial capitalists to skim excess off the top of this waste. It’s a sham but it is a little more complicated than just lighting $400k on fire. That money was already spent, and they want these missiles used in order to justify their replacement. As an additional benefit, each of these 2.9 million employees is heavily propagandized by the state department every day at work.
Long-term, it benefits the US if the industry and its warfighters are permanently ready to fight a war.
I don’t agree with any of it btw, just adding some context.
literal weather balloon and the sensors weren’t even on lmao
“freight truck of spy equipment”
The extreme overreaction to a perceived but non-existent threat is a common symptom in dementia patients.
For me, the greater takeaway was that none of our political leadership had the maturity or courage to say “we’ve been operating with some bullshit narratives, some of that is our fault, I know the news loves to stir up a good frenzy but this is just a weather balloon.”
Instead, rather than challenge people to stop and think, they spent a week launching missiles at weather balloons. Truly jaw dropping (I’m desensitized to all of the violence they normally do). I’m a communist, so by definition I’m not one of the adults in the room, but at least I’m adult enough to tell the truth when I fuck up at work and just fix it.
I think this is making assumptions about what the goals of the leadership are. If the goal was some sort of abstract idea of Responsible Statecraft or, like, philosophically sound epistemology to their claims, then yeah, they completely fucking failed.
But that’s not the goal any more than it was with their WMD claims.
Absolutely true. I’d still say going through this whole charade was immature and cowardly. They could just say that China poses a longterm threat to the American bourgeoisie, and if the American bourgeoisie suffer, no one can stop them from taking down a lot of American workers with them.
No, because then the correct answer of “Toss the American bourgeoisie to the wolves, construct a system where they cannot pass their pain down to us” becomes obvious.
I know no less than 30 people I could send this article to, and yet know I would get one of two responses:
- It actually was a spy balloon and all the media is pretending it wasn’t so that the US can hide that they’ve gained valuable knowledge
Or
- Okay maybe this one wasn’t, but what if it was a spooky Chinese spy balloon?
Yeah, I’m not game for any of the hypothetical conversations I can imagine
I’m gonna send this article to some people I know, and I already know what they’re going to say: “well they said it wasn’t collecting any data but it was still a spy balloon”. China’s explanation that it was a weather balloon is obviously, objectively true but acknowledging that the US government lies all the time is too much for Americans to accept.
But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done. On May 21, President Biden remarked, “This silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another.”
So the article still blames China for damaging relations with the US, not the other way around.
it’s also not like it was great before
Obama’s turn to asia? Trump and Biden’s trade war? Anyone???
He tipped off the Billings Gazette, which got its own picture, and he told anybody who asked they could use his free of charge. “I didn’t want to make anything off [my picture],” Doak said. “I thought it was a national security issue, and all of America needed to know about it.”
Imagine being such a bootlicker that you deny yourself getting that bag for basically no good reason. Plenty of news sites would have been happy to pay for it and all of America would still know about it.
“I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China.”
I’m gonna be honest, that sounds like it’s missing two of the three defining features required to term something a spy balloon.
Isn’t the third feature that it’s a balloon? How can you fuck that up?
We fucked up every other part. Statistically, we are likely to fuck up this one as well
One does have to start wondering if it really was a balloon after all. “I would say it was a balloon that we know didn’t float, or fill with any air”.
All of this geopolitical escalation to make sure
Tyre Nichols killers avoided national scrutinyBiden didn’t have a race riot during his term. Can’t wait to throw this in libs faces in a year.
Death to America
The hysteria had its intended effect of heightening tensions and further implanting in people’s minds the idea that the SEE SEE PEE is an existential threat to our (decaying, miserable, alienating) way of life. All of these little incidents and micro-hysterias are serving their purpose. Consent is being manufactured. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weather balloon or if it didn’t gather intel or whatever. America, like the devil it is, would reign in hell rather than serve in heaven (or at least purgatory).
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Yeah, this article feels like it was written so that no matter what you believe, you have something in this you can point to and say, “No, you’re just reading this wrong, it really [was/wasn’t] a spy balloon!”
It doesn’t matter, because the damage has already been done. They knew this from the start, but it was useful propaganda for the anti-China narrative, so they let it fester while sinophobic sentiment rose steadily and caused more anti-Asian crimes. Even now, while reading some of the comments to this article on
and YouTube, I saw people either changing the narrative into “so the Chinese are incompetent!” or “the government is clearly lying to us! the balloon flew over military installations and you’re telling me they didn’t record anything??? suuuuure”. Really the most propagandized dumbfucks on this planet. 
