JTarrou
1d ago
Too many violent offenses, not enough prisons.
The only solutions are death, corporal punishment, mass prison construction or what we're doing now, which is catch and release.
There are some other options, but they generally fall under "cruel and unusual", at least according to current lawyers.
JTarrou
1d ago
Most "modern democracies" are vassal states (allies) of the US, forbidden to fight anyone without our approval, and most of those have divested themselves of any real military capability. This was not done through democratic means. Our forefathers knew democracies had spent the last century invading each other, especially the French. When they set up the postwar system, the EU gave up its essential sovereignty in military terms to the US. So they could all be peaceful "democracies" under the aegis of US military protection. So too with Japan and South Korea. They aren't peaceful, they're disarmed. When they weren't, as in the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, they immediately fell into wars until the US asserted military supremacy over eastern europe.
Yes, being the global military guarantor of the trade routes routinely requires military action in far-flung parts of the world. Especially against regimes that have aligned themselves politically against your hegemony. This is something every superpower has to do, because that's what allows the entire global economy that has lifted our race of humanity from the endemic poverty of 99.999999% of our collective history. Some do better jobs than others. If you want to compare the US empire, compare it to the constellation of other great powers who ran it before us. Is our middle east policy really worse than France, Russia and Britain's? Was theirs worse than Spain and Portugal's? Or the Ottomans?
Actually, the Ottomans might have been the last great empire to have a better middle eastern policy, but nobody's going for the "Use Albanian slaves to crush all resistance" tactic anymore.
JTarrou
2d ago
The first casualty of war is truth, they say. War covers a multitude of sins. That's one of the reasons people like them. If you think you're going to get some clear-cut war like the "good ol days", you missed the second half of the twentieth century. War is fought in the media, everyone is lying. Trump is lying about Iran, Clinton was lying about Kosovo, Bush was lying about Iraq, Kennedy was lying about Vietnam.
JTarrou
2d ago
All depends on when you start the clock, I suppose. If you think the war started in 2026 versus 1979 versus 1953 versus 1952 for instance.
JTarrou
2d ago
Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.
JTarrou
2d ago
I think you're just completely misreading what's happening. The US touch overseas is lightening, not tightening. Kidnapping heads of state is orders of magnitude more complex, difficult and lower casualty than a bombing campaign. The previous Iran bombing campaign, very targeted, very precise, little in the way of collateral. The current run is certainly higher volume and less precise, as any escalation must necessarily be. But that isn't the tale of a US government obsessed with "lethality", much the opposite. You've got one or two out of thousands upon thousands of missions and millions of bits of ordnance to complain about.
JTarrou
2d ago
The Gulf states will be angry with Iran, but will ultimately draw closer with it out of necessity.
Could you explain this? The US is helping the Sunni nations of the middle east, which are in the midst of a multi-decade project of ethnic cleansing and religious persecution intended to remove all minority groups from their "Ummah". Iran, which has been trying for decades to out-anti-US the arab street, has been left in the lurch when the Sunni nations moved toward the US and Israel. This is why Iran green-lit the Oct 7th assault, negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is why Iran is just raining missiles on anyone and everyone around the gulf who isn't the US and Israel. And this approach is going to bring the Sunni and Shia together again?
Seems counterintuitive, say more.
JTarrou
2d ago
The US could easily beat Iran and rule it as long as we wanted, in military terms. In political terms, it's entirely impossible to do with a "democracy" of oligarchs who will change policies at the drop of a hat if the media whines a little.
JTarrou
2d ago
Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike? War happens. All this struggle session about it is lame.
Let me just get this out there. When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers. If you're very (un)lucky, you'll be facing a world superpower with good enough targeting to keep that ratio low. In a standard conventional military without smart munitions, the civvy/oppo ratio exceeds 5:1 for conventional operations and 10:1 for irregular warfare. Which is why irregular combatants are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.
This is what war is. There are, ultimately, no rules to the war game. Anyone cherry picking the one-off mistakes of any country in an armed conflict is doing so for their own reasons, not some established corpus of imaginary "international law" of which they seem to be the only lawyers.
JTarrou
7d ago
On choosing your destructor.
An outgroup is any group in which status change is mirrored by another group.
The best endorsement any potential leader could have is the fear and enmity of the outgroup. This in turn means that every group has a significant (though not decisive) voice in the leadership and direction of their outgroup. The political lesson of the Trump era is that the hatred of one group is as good as an endorsement for their outgroup.
If you ask me, the reason both Trump and Mamdani won election is that they sought and exploited the condemnation of their side's outgroup. This leads to a lot of rhetorical brinksmanship which is completely divorced from actual policy, and acknowledged as Kayfabe publicly by both men.
JTarrou
8d ago
This is what I'm talking about.
Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.
JTarrou
8d ago
Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.
JTarrou
8d ago
Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.
Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?
JTarrou
8d ago
A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.
You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.
If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.
JTarrou
9d ago
This is one of those things where people are desperate for the label and all the old baggage of the label, but the label has faded.
No, the current US government isn't a fascist one. Yes, someone has called every single administration since Hitlers a "fascist regime". The most fascist government the US ever had, with minorities in internment camps, a militarized society, rationing and government control of industry, was the one that fought Hitler.
Similar to the time there was a poll and a majority of Republicans said they wouldn't vote for Trump if he were a convicted felon, so the Democrats went out and got an extreme technicality "felony conviction", and the Republicans..........didn't care. If you want me to care about fascism, it can't be this banal. We've heard all this before, remember Trump's first term? Trans genocide? Coup? Cancelling elections? FASCISM? None of it happened.
This boy's been crying wolf since the 1930s, every four years like clockwork. Time to let him squall. "Muh Fascism" gtfo.
JTarrou
11d ago
As it happened, relatively few of Germany's jews were genocided, because most of them were pressured to leave ("ethnically cleansed") before the war really kicked off. And no, no one did anything about that. In fact, Britain sent boatloads of jewish refugees back to Germany for trying to get into Palestine.
Immediately after 15 May 1948, the majority of the land belonged to the Palestinians.
According to who? Part of sovereignty is deciding who gets to keep what land. Britain held the "mandate" previously, from the Ottomans, and they gave it up. There was no deal in place due to the arabs declining, so sovereignty is a jump ball. Everyone had an even break to form a state, and the arabs were in a much stronger position. But they did not declare a state, and the jews did. Whatever palestinian national aspirations might have proved died when they lost to the Jews at the local level and were occupied by their "allies" in the neighboring arab countries. Part of that whole process was some of those arabs being forcibly moved off their land for any number of good and bad reasons. New borders had to be drawn, and policed, and defended on both sides. A new government had to make a lot of decisions about who gets what, and there's always losers in that process. They tend to come from the losing side, but the fact that arabs remain a significant portion of the Israeli population in a way that jewish residents of arab nations are not is a pretty big clue to how relatively ruthless those groups are.
JTarrou
11d ago
It is not. It is illegal to do that in the country next door, to the degree anyone feels like enforcing that law. No one at Nuremberg was convicted of mistreating Germans. Once again, this is one of those sovereignty things. It is not against international law, and is outside the purview of outside governments, for a government to use force to move or eliminate any portion of their population. These are internal matters.
It's not against the law for Iran to kill protesters, though we may use that for political advantage. It's not against the law for Hutus to genocide Tutsis, which is why no one did anything except the Tutsis. Where things get dicey is when people are being killed in an argument over who is the sovereign power. In those cases, it matters who wins militarily. Might does not make right, but it does make sovereignty, and sovereignty has certain rights.
JTarrou
12d ago
It doesn't. It's just confirmation bias. Plenty of countries have some amount of "military policy" about displacing groups of people for any number of reasons. This is not new, it is not distinct, it isn't even illegal. It's part of the "sovereignty" that allows countries to make deals about territory and absorb population transfer.
JTarrou
12d ago
All colonial partitions had displacement and some amount of killing and chaos. See also: the balkans, India/Pakistan, the US etc. As these things go, taking the worst possible interpretation of the documents here, it's barely on the scale. When India was partitioned, anywhere from half a million to three million people died or were killed and twelve million or so were made refugees.
Once again, we're supposed to care because jews act exactly like everyone else when they have to form a state, only a bit less so. States are force and violence. They cannot be created nor destroyed without force and violence. Some people have to win, and some have to lose. The alternative is the status quo.
A lot of british loyalists got run out of the states, their land stolen, and many were just killed. The Revolutionary war went on some years after Yorktown, ugly local fighting crushing the rest of the loyal colonial Americans, and subjecting them to the new revolutionary order.
This is all thin gruel. None of it creates a legal right of return, any more than Benedict Arnold had a right of return to the US. Any more than muslim refugees' grandchildren have a right to their ancestral home in India. Any more than the Hindu refugees' grandchildren have a right to enter Pakistan. This is how partition and population transfer work.
The Arabs ran all teh jews out of their countries, Israel took them. Israel ran a minority of the arabs out of their new country, and the arab countries did not take them. That's the real difference here. It's the hereditary refugee status of the Palestinians, and the refusal of their part of the partitioned territories to take them, and the failure of their own politics to produce a government that can even negotiate with the Israelis.
JTarrou
13d ago
Trump is really going for the hat trick in his first year. I'm ambivalent on the long-term wisdom of the military operations, time will tell. But, at least in the short term, this stuff looks very good for Trump, and Hegseth, despite being panned as a lightweight, is at least delegating like an absolute champ. The first and second Iran operations and Venezuela are some of the wildest operations to be successfully pulled off by any world power, ever. And they're all in the first year.
My theory is that Trump does things that everyone else does, just louder, and more obvious. This dispels the illusions in some ways, makes the machinery of superpower status too plain. Who knows what the long term effects will be?
Trump is one of those guys Dan Carlin talks about having a "reality distortion field" around them. Historical figures who warped their societies and history itself around their ideas and goals. Ironically, it worked best on Carlin himself.
JTarrou
14d ago
As with any country, it varies widely based on region, neighborhood, class etc. In the middle-class districts of the major cities with squishy lefty politics like all middle-class districts of all major cities? Yeah, women about, very loose interpretations of hijab etc. In the Iranian analog to Oklahoma or Alabama, not so much.
The pro-western, pro-israeli, pro-shah groups of Iranian society have always been around, their more vociferous members live in the west now. They are influential, because they are the economic middle classes, and secular elites. But they are not a majority of the country by any stretch. As with most countries, the vast majority of the population is lower and working class, more religious, more nationalistic, more bigoted against outsiders than the college professors and the accountants. And generally harder on their womenfolk.
There is a very direct comparison next door in Turkey, where the same western-oriented secular modernizers have the same political outlook, despite differences in culture and religion to Iran. It's just that Ataturk was better at it than Reza Shah, and so when the religious nationalistic backlash came, it stayed within the bounds set by his government, rather than producing a revolution.
JTarrou
15d ago
I'm happy to stipulate that the Israelis and a distinct population of western jews both punch above their weight class in terms of media and political lobbying. But it's a big world, and there's a lot of weight classes. The motte is that jews are disproportionately influential. The bailey is that they outweigh realpolitik involving actual heavyweights like China.
There's also significant disagreement even among Israelis about policy, and obviously between western jews and Israelis, so the effects of their influence and lobbying is a bit muddled.
JTarrou
15d ago
It is wildly intolerant to you that a jewish person own a slate of failing media companies and niche AWFL providers? Hamas has a huge western media slate. So do the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and the Chinese and Koreans and Germans and Russians etc. etc. Basically everyone with a billion dollars to burn is using it to try to get five billion dollars out of the US government.
Rishi Sunak, former British PM, is now on the board of Microsoft and Anthropic, and an advisor to Goldman Sachs. Is that perfidious Albion?
Gerhardt Schroeder (sp?), former German PM is now on the board of Russian energy monopoly Rosneft.
God only knows how many corporate boards all the various pardoned Bidens sit on.
If this state of affairs is wildly intolerable to you, I suggest you go through the groups/countries alphabetically. That way we can see how many you left out before you get down to "J".
There's an alternate history where America winds up allied to the Iranian Shia coalition instead of the Turkish/Saudi/Egyptian Sunni one. I'm not sure that world is any more peaceful, but the Shia generally are less trouble than the far more numerous and expansionist Sunni.
I have a lot of respect for the Iranian people and their ability to organize. I have a lot of respect for Persian culture and their long and fractious history. There's a reason it's so unstable, and it is largely the result of tribal loyalties and clan-based societies. In this respect, the Iranians are no different from the Arabs.
Aesthetically is an entirely different story.
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