Press da button

Also hard to dismiss that he probably likes killing things.

Judas Priest? Cool

Doubtful. The boomers are uniquely self serving as a group and have a sort of cruelty brain rot bug that may or may not be lead poisoning.

Many are obsessed with entrenching themselves within institutions, creating a poor work life balance (while blaming the rest of us for not sacrificing as much) leading to fragile interpersonal relationships that are centered around 'keeping up with the Joneses' rather than creating a meaningful sense of community.

Most younger generations blame boomers for having a good life and then promptly shutting the door in their children's faces.

We have survived 500,000 years as a species because past generations cared about the world they left behind for their descendants. Boomers, instead, are collectively focussed on enriching themselves by putting our future at risk as collateral.

As a generation, they will not be remembered well. Many of us wish they would simply step aside so we can fix the mess they've propogated.

Tl;dr: There is more to this than the usual young vs old dynamic.

Sure, we may want the same things, but we don't go about trying to obtain them in the same way.

Your generation largely has those things... you know, housing, a retirement investment plan.... younger generations largely do not, and they never will, because your generation climbed the ladder set up for you by your elders, and then you guys blew it up with dynamite after you finished climbing it, in order to selfishly preserve your own status.

This ultimately destroyed society in the process, and now, well, that bomb your generation threw at the ladder after climbing up the wall... has done collateral damage to the wall itself, and will soon crumble, and you all will have impoverished yourselves and all your children.

The housing market is currently crashing, Trump's mismanagement has damaged your 401k, and Trump and the Reps really, really want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA Tricare, all that shit... and the US economy will soon enter into a Second Great Depression, and most of you will die alone, being mistreated in understaffed, corporate run retirement homes, or just on the streets homeless after your house gets foreclosed on and you can't find work you can actually do.

Your generation could have instead been more equitable with your historically anomalous and freakish amount of prosperity... by continuing and expanding upon the New Deal and Great Society style programs.

Instead, your generation dismantled them, and it made things so unfair and unstable that, unless you are one of the very few who made it into the top 1 to 0.1%, most of your material wealth and accompanying social status will evaporate right when you need it the most.

Oh and there's also the whole... climate change thing, which your generation refused to take seriously during the timeframe where doing so could have made a difference, so the result is that now most of humanity is doomed to perish this century.

You are the generation that grew up watching a man transposed forward in time, bellowing "You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” ... and then your generation just... did that, blew it all to hell.

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?

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.

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.

Scientists are not valid military targets