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I think the saddest part about these WW3 memes is that it really does feel like the people making them only care about the conflict being engineered in the Middle East by Trump and Natanyahu because there's a chance that it might negatively impact their own lives. The implication is that as long as this doesn't actually turn into WW3 (it won't, Jesus Christ please learn some basic history) it's fine and a bunch of people getting killed by bombs is missiles is OK as long as they're brown and way over there.
- You're probably right in some cases, but I think it's more of a way of people dealing with their disbelief that it's come to this. There's a lot of ways to process the current insanity; dark humour is possibly the most accessible though.
  
  That’s where I am, we went from being in disbelief that an active genocide is being supported by the US, to the US contemplating nuking a country cause Bibi says they have WMDs.
  Usually when I’m befuddled I resort to observational comedy.
  
  Sure, but the button on the meme could just as easily have said "WAR" as "WW3". It's even the same number of characters. Do you see what I'm getting at? The the constant fearnongering about this turning into WW3 always suggests that what's happening right now isn't bad enough. Surely the dark humour could be directed at the actual real bad things Trump is currently doing, rather than hypothetical bad things that he might be doing?
  
  Hyperbole is often an essential part of humor, dark or otherwise.
  
  I don't feel like the hyperbole defense really cuts it when a significant number of people think the hyperbole is true. You can find an example of that happening in this same thread and I've had plenty of other interactions like it. For every person who takes it as hyperbole, there's another who genuinely feels like we're staring down the barrel of WW3, and that kind of fear is dangerous and harmful.
  It's never "Just a joke" when the joke is hurting people.
- Realistically there is absolutely nothing any of us can do to stop this. Anyone who isn't an arsehole is constantly appalled and sickened by the constant conflict created by the usual sad little psychopathic narcissists.
  About all we have left is black humour expressed as memes. You can't stay constantly anxious about it or you go mad, and at this point humour is basically self-preservation.
- I feel like you're reading a lot into this and start with a false premise. Both war and WW3 can be bad, WW3 is just more memeable
- Perhaps there is an element of that but I think many people are bracing for a repeat of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction scenario so they're starting early with using humor as a coping mechanism.
  Many also feel that Israel's current government is a fascist genocidal regime that very likely will be the instigator of WW3. Which should be a lesson to humanity in general on fascism as those that face the greatest trauma (as they did in WW2) are often more open to the extremes of nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
- Your final sentence has pretty much been american military policy for the last few decades.
  Don't start a major global conflict and kill mostly brown people of a different culuture and religion and we will get away with it.
- What makes you sure it won't be WW3? I don't know enough to comment just asking for your perspective
  
  Turn the question around. Ask yourself, what are the conditions necessary for this to become WW3?
  First, at a minimum, you need more than one major power to become involved. For the purposes of this discussion I'll define make powers as The US, The EU / NATO (functionally indistinguishable for all practical purposes at this point), China, Russia, India.
  Aside from the US, the only other major power with a serious interest in the region is Russia. You can vaguely make an argument for the EU, but they're too concerned with the war in Ukraine to really give a shit right. At best you might see some involvement from the UK, and they're no longer strongly aligned with or capable of influencing the rest of Europe.
  So basically the only way this escalates beyond a limited regional conflict is if Russia decides to throw in. For Iran. While they're struggling to win a war in Ukraine that is currently cratering their economy and killing off an entire generation of young Russian men. Do you really think they have the slightest inclination to get into a shooting war with the US right now, with everything they're currently facing? I'm not even sure they have the logistics capacity to actually get troops to Iran right now.
  But what if local powers get involved? They won't. No one in the region likes Isreal or Iran. They're both pariahs. No one around them wants to get involved in a war for either of their sakes.
  Hell, they can barely even fight a war with each other. Rockets and bombing raids are the only real options they have, because there's a whole lot of Iraq in between them. At best the US could stage a naval invasion (something that Isreal has no capacity to do on their own), in which case what you're looking at is another Iraq style invasion followed by twenty years of bloody, costly occupation as they try to maintain order over a mountainous region containing a hundred million people.
  
  That's really reassuring thanks
  
  Let me add - and I should have said this in my original reply - that I completely get why it's easy to feel scared about this stuff. First, there's this constant environment of everyone talking about the looming threat of WW3, which is exactly what memes like this contribute to, creating a culture of fear for no good reason.
  But, second, there absolutely is a general ratcheting up of tensions across the world. Major powers are more militarized than they ever have been previously, and the strong trade relationships that helped maintain peace are eroding. There is, absolutely, an increased likelihood that we're going to see conflicts break out, but what's missing is the specific conditions needed for those conflicts to spiral out in a mass scale escalation.
  What I think we're likely to see over the next ten to twenty years is more limited regional conflicts like Ukraine. I think it's quite likely, for example, that India and Pakistan may go to war. But there's simply no reason to believe that war will pull in other major powers.
  The world is becoming a scarier place. You're not wrong to feel that way. And any conflict is a tragedy. Why these memes annoy me is not because I'm on the "Nothing ever happens train" but rather because they discard very real, very valid concerns in favour of this nebulous fantasy of everyone dying in nuclear fire for vague and unspecified reasons.
- Yeah buddy we got starving kids in our country that people don't care about. Take a moment and process that.
  Why you ask because the rich assholes set up the system so nobody gets rich doing "the right thing".
  Why does everyone need to be rich you ask?
  So they can pay to not be effected by the failings of the "greatest country in the world" society.
- I laugh at these memes because dark humor is my only way of coping.
  It seems like there's nothing else I can do. I don't just care because it might negatively impact my life. Every time I look at the news (and for sure this is not just under Trump's America, it's been going on forever) more people are dying across the world in stupid wars because of stupid childish adults in power. And now our Antichrist President is stoking things up even more and even more people will die and it's only to fuel his ego and his rich friends' interests.
  I vote, I speak up, I try to do my part and be the change and all, but what more am I going to do? I could stand in the middle of the street in front of the capital and scream how wrong this is but I'll just get written up as another ignorant millennial lunatic and in the meantime I've been working sustained 50-80 hour weeks with no improvement in sight and can still barely afford to eat. Can't change the government alone, especially not when there's rent to pay and I'm bloody exhausted.
  
  You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not telling anyone off for venting about the prospect of America kicking off yet another forever war, or another brutal bombing campaign. That shit sucks, and people need to vent about it. Sometimes dark humour is the way to do that.
  My issue is very specifically with people framing it as "World War 3", even though a) its not, and it won't be, and there's nothing happening right now that could realistically cause it to be, and b) "War" should be bad enough. There's plenty to vent about right there. Actual real people will die for the sake of Netanyahu's political career and Trump's fragile ego. That's awful, and if you need to vent through memes to cope with that, fair play. But why do we have to add this entirely fictitious "world war" layer just to make it somehow worth venting about? Why build up this completely fictional set of horrors in place of the very real ones, in a way that convinces people already stricken with despair that things are somehow even worse?
  You're absolutely correct. Shit really sucks right now. Everything is awful. So why the fuck would you (plural, indirect, nonspecific) want to convince people that its even worse than that? Seems like reality is already bad enough.
  
  Point well made, I agree.
  I think sometimes there's a sort of dark humor for some in exaggerating to the worst scenario in memes, knowing that it's exaggerated, but then other people find it tiresome or too much. I don't know, I don't make memes, I just steal them.
- That's a hell of a lot of projection, meme makers are usually highly regarded gnomes tasked with morale in factory lines of the pole and unfortunately most now freelancing because it was something with their genes not like racism but more like a mutation of sorts and this group specifically of gnomes are not fit for the usual gnome tasks which is why they are highly regarded because most gnomes wish they were in contact with computers and Internet but they can't be trusted with such
- It's another Six-day War with far more exciting weapons and a surprisingly feisty opponent. In the end, Israel always wins, mostly because it looks like Islamist regimes are shockingly bad at war. I mean Jesus fucking Christ, leaving your top scientists exposed?
  
  Scientists are not valid military targets
  
  This is Israel we're talking about.
- I'm actually hoping that this is another domino falling towards a world-ending ww3, this planet is fucked either way. Better to be vaporized instantly than to slowly be cooked to death over decades.

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