Here It Comes

It would certainly be poetic justice.

i hate US politics so much

Ain't gonna be no world war.

Hamas attacks Israel, Israel start genocide in response, Iran warns Israel to stop genocide and America to stop supporting them, America and Israel don't stop, Iran gets involved , Steps in and start slapping Israel, America jumps to protect its baby, Hits Iran hard, Russia steps in due to new arrangments with Iran, China Steps in because china knows it can Crush America. Its possible.

No it's not. Haven't you figured out that Russia is in no shape to get involved in ANYTHING right now? It's bad enough that they're still spending their money and manpower and what little secrecy there was about how outdated their equipment actually is in Ukraine.

Russia theoretically would not have to do anything, China will be the main opponent.

China generally goes for a hands-off policy, leaving other nations do their thing. The only anything they do involving others is when it serves their own interests. Even infrastructure, say in African countries it gets raw materials from, function to go from mine to port to China. They do try to enlarge their sphere of influence, but that's as suited to their own agenda, nothing altruistic.

Israel has far better military capabilities than Iran, including nukes, and Iran is aware that the US has been preventing Israel from bombing its nuclear develpment sites. It knows that getting directly involved would be suicide.

That makes a lot of sense. I really don't care for Anti , his stances on most things are completely counter to mine. But, reading your and his thoughts on this subject makes me feel a little less uneasy about this conflict progressing past what we are already used to seeing in the middle east. You guys have a good night.

Hey, you never know, but bottom line is that all the countries that used to wage war against Israel half a century ago are too busy making nice with it while Iran, the only ally Israel had back then, is its only enemy left and they're too busy trying to keep their own public from rising up against the dolts that control it to go get themselves nuked over a measly strip of land twice the size of DC.
The mighty Russian military has been reduced to buying drones from Iran and China will just stand by and watch the idiots kill each other and then the US will rebuild it then China will buy or lease what might be useful for it and that's it.

Except that after seeing what happened to Russia, they've decided to keep their heads down and stay out of escalating amything these last two years.

Or they are simply waiting for a time to strike and America has never been weaker now.

I mean, that would be convenient for you because then it would mean you were never wrong, but realistically, governments of countries have always erred on the side of showing more strength than they really have, not less. That's why China was watching the Ukraine invasion so closely - it's a barometer reading for how much leverage they have over a potential invasion of Taiwan.

The fact that China's response was one of conservative caution tells me that they didn't like what they saw, and if you were right then surely they'd be acting more aggressively than ever not less.

I don't want to be right about war. This is one time I hope and pray that I am wrong and you are right.

I'm quite confident that you ARE wrong, so, good news there.

I'm sure there will be smaller conflicts in different parts of the world - that's always an ongoing issue - but the escalation to an amalgamated global conflict? No.

So what I said then?

Of course the assasination wasn't the reason, but clairvoyent tomes don't make wars be.
Yeah, ok, folks were bored with Habspurg and a unified Germany had to strut its stuff and the race between propeller planes and bayonets and the last of the cavalries...

And sure, a war weary world was in massive denial about Hitler really REALLY meaning it and Asia getting raped by Japan didn't mean diddly as long as the Dutch and Portugese and Brits got their precious spice which they used for God knows what in their renowned diet of boiled pork boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage flavored with boiled water (the Northies, anyways. At least the Portugese knew that you USE the spice you killed millions for in your FOOD. My gosh, 100s of millions dead, and to date northwest Europe has the most bland food on Earth. Good grief. What they do, sell all that nutmeg and vanilla to Brazil? "We've got the tea, good chaps, you can buy the rest"). Oh, wait, Japan invading Dutch property, time to abhor the atrocities time!

But I digress.
One half-nut failed artist deeply concerned that mommy's favorite milkman might have been Jewish managed to inadvertantly usher in the modern age outside the hallowed gates of America with his 'death.' Who woulda thunk?

A lot of people were wrong about Oct 7th........ on Oct 6th. Same with 9/10/01.
Confidence has a way of pulling wedgies on those blinded by it.

Yeah, EVERYONE totally predicted World War I mere minutes after Franz Ferdinand got shot by a Serb!
But WWII, yeah, totally out of nowhere. I mean, how many times in a couple of decades can a 50yo country cause world wars? pfffffffft, the Hitlerites had trained on fake wooden guns, it was all just pre-paint ball gun rallies! As for the Eastern Front, so what if they got a decade head start? We don't care. Doesn't count.

Same with Ukraine. Not like the same thing happened for the same reason on another edge of Russia in 2008 because we don't care about Caucasian Caucasians in Caucasia proper because it's not Europe! Move along, nothing to see here folks. Let it run its course, won't happen somewhere where it really matters again.

Are we seeing a pattern here, or do wars really come with mailed invitations and scripts?

Neither of those were world wars. Both World Wars were quite obviously brewing years ahead of time; EVERYONE predicted the first world war, and the Second World War was less obvious in 1938 when the Axis alliance wasn't formally worked out but by the time the USA joined, the European and Pacific theatres had long since linked together.

Yeah, EVERYONE totally predicted World War I mere minutes after Franz Ferdinand got shot by a Serb!
But WWII, uh huh, totally out of nowhere. I mean, how many times in a couple of decades can a 50yo country cause world wars? pfffffffft, the Hitlerites had trained on fake wooden guns, it was all just pre-paint ball gun rallies! As for Asia, so what if they got a decade head start? We don't care. Doesn't count.

Same with Ukraine. Not like the same thing happened for the same reason on another edge of Russia in 2008 because we don't care about Caucasian Caucasians in Caucasia proper because it's not Europe! Move along, nothing to see here folks. Let it run its course, won't happen somewhere where it really matters again.

Are we seeing a pattern here, or do wars really come with mailed invitations and scripts?

I don't know what to tell you. Yes, famously, huge volumes of literature were written about the war that the world knew was coming during the 1900 - 1910 period and it was almost universally seen as inevitable. It was pretty brazenly obvious. Europe was a tinderbox, the arms race was on steroids, and each country was vying for diplomatic leverage over the alliance posturing of the major powers - which, as I hope you know, is how the entire continent got dragged into the war even though almost none of them had any kind of stake in Serbian independence.

It WASN'T the assassination in and of itself, that was a really minor aspect of how the war started and one of the reasons why World War 1 was so shocking to people at the time - an Austrian Duke gets shot and now every young man in Sc**thorpe died on the same day in the Somme? That just doesn't make sense! And it WASN'T the real reason. It was the activation of interlocking alliance systems that were negotiated without control during peacetime, in preparation for the major conflict that they all knew would start soon.

I'm only going to say this once, and then just walk away: World War 2 had fewer people predicting it directly as compared to World War 1. It wasn't quite as obvious. You still had people predicting it. Famously, John Meynard Keynes predicted it to within pretty chilling accuracy as early as 1919. But the waters were a little bit muddier for people who were discounting the possibility that Hitler and Mussolini would ever ally (because remember, publicly, they SAID they didn't want to, despite their ideological similarities). THAT's what I said.

But, look, war isn't just about surprise attacks and mobs of soldiers opening fire one sudden morning; it's about logistics, it's about diplomatic partnerships, it's about selling it to public opinion and to your own cabinet (unless you're an autocrat)... the actual opportunities to cross the alps with your elephants when your enemies aren't expecting it are not that common in history! Of course everyone WANTS to pull the surprise move off but it is mostly a fantasy. The effort it takes to beef up your soldier personnel AND put them through basic training AND move them to where you want the fighting to be is something that is really difficult to hide and tends to get noticed even by people who don't even work in espionage.

Scun-thorpe is a real place and I had no idea that it would be censored. Great job, imgflip.