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FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


				

User ID: 195

FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

					

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


					

User ID: 195

There is a difference between cold blooded public murder and targeted killings of leaders during a war

Given that the war was "announced" and the Ayatollah was killed at home within ten minutes, I'd say they were pretty similar levels of cold-bloodedly killing a man who was just going about his day because the shooter thought that the man was evil. This feels like a distinction without a difference.

And I'm going to call you on this, as I have done before, and ask you to show me anything even close to an apples-to-apples comparison.

The most obvious would be various GrandBurdensomeCount personas, where his disdain is always treated as pathological or trolling. This isn't primarily an accusation against the mods, but the forum itself, it's not that you see an attack on white people and ban someone, it's that the tone of the conversation develops such that a ban is inevitable.

Third Gulf War Negotiations Thread

As we approach the end of the 5 day pause(?) before the USA ramps up attacks again, reports are coming in that the Trump team has sent Iran a 15 point plan for peace. I don’t think the full text has been credibly made public at this time, as should be expected, but from what I’ve gathered the points can be reduced from redundant and detail points, Iran gives:

— Iran stops funding proxies abroad, especially Hamas and Hezbollah

— Iran pinky promises to never get a nuclear weapon, surrenders nuclear material, agrees to various future restrictions/inspections

— Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz

In exchange Iran gets:

— Full sanctions relief, including removal of the snapback provisions that removed sanctions would go back on Iran immediately if Iran violated the agreement

— American assistance with their civilian nuclear program.

Iran, after denying that negotiations were happening at all, has come back with the following demands:

— Bombing of Iran ends, assassination of Iranian officials ends, guarantees that it won’t start again

— Reparations

— Recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz

— They won’t negotiate with Steve and Jared, only with JD Vance

Trump has delayed bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure for this week, while Iran has let some ships through the strait as a gesture of good faith, or as Trump put it a “very expensive present.”

Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.

But I’m filled with a deep sense of disquiet and defeat. The Iranian regime is rebuilt, reinforced, made more powerful. The Iranian regime is given new credibility, where before my diasporic friends could claim that with a push the rotten structure would collapse, now they know it will not. Iran gets effective, if not formal, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets sanctions relief. Iran gives up more or less nothing, just some fissionable material that is easily enough replaced and a few proxies that have already been degraded. I don’t really credit the promises Iran is making here for much, especially if the snapback provision is removed.

Giving Iran anything after they close the Strait is tantamount to recognizing their sovereignty over it, de facto if not legally. Simply by asking for it, and then making a deal, Iran is going to be perceived as getting sovereignty over the strait. The USA, by accepting Iran's "gift" of letting ships through the strait, is already acknowledging that Iran has control of the strait! And this would be disastrous.

The flip side is that there’s little guarantee that the US would keep its promises in the future, but that doesn’t feel very good to me either. I’m not sure where I see the off-ramp at this point that isn’t a full invasion of Iran.

Another view is that given the conditions, this isn't really the Iran war, it's the Lebanon war and the Iran war is a sideshow and a distraction. The casualties are higher in Lebanon, there are troops on the ground in Lebanon, Israel is considering expanding its territory into Lebanon, occupation will inevitably result in settlements which will not be removed, etc. Perhaps the purpose of the Iran war never had anything to do with Iran herself, which is why the goals against Iran never seemed achievable, but were instead more local to protecting the Israeli homefront against Hezbollah. The USA distracts Iran and forces it to accept Hezbollah's defeat.

I suppose at least we’ll get good pistachios and saffron now? I’d love to see sanctions relief on a personal level, and I think sanctions are a wildly ineffective method of international relations, but on a geopolitical level this seems like the US admitting defeat.

@Amadan

One of the patterns that is easy to arrive at given the make up of both the forum and the moderation team is H1Bs looking out for other H1Bs, and that is where I feel like users like @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon are coming from.

To be clear, I don't think this is limited to Indians or to Jews. My feelings, as I've said before, is that at times:

If you hate white people or men you're a troll and will catch a ban, if you hate Jews or Asians you have to show receipts or you risk a ban, if you hate blacks or hispanics or arabs you're rounding second ahead of the throw.

I don't think the tone of what KMC said, though I find it wrong and stupid, would have caught any flack if he said it about Venezuelans or Somalians rather than about Indian academics. That includes me, of course, I objected to his vitriol against Amar because it's someone I knew personally and a type of person I've been close with in my life. As a result, I don't think KMC ought to be disciplined for it, or I think a lot of other discussion should be disciplined similarly.

Policing purely for tone and not content would mean that the death of the Ayatollah would be dealt with the same way as the death of Charlie Kirk, which I don't think is or really could be the case. We're always going to have a bias towards our friends.

It should give you context as to why Nixon wins the election even if I don't know anyone who voted for him.

You have made the point repeatedly that there exist significant portions of the American public rooting against America in the present war.

Do you think the United States would fall as a result of similar circumstances?

I love the America of my birth, of my father's birth, that my grandfathers fought for, that my great grandfather's immigrated to. I love the America that is Great because we have the best of everything and the best of everyone, the America where I grew up with a Pakistani pediatrician, where half my best friends growing up were Indian, where I learned from professors like Amar.

I love the America that develops so many great athletes that you had the Heritage Americans on the American WBC team, Italian Americans on the Italy team, and Mexican Americans on the Mexican team, and they were all competitive!

I love the America of Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, of Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower, the America of Joe Dimaggio and Frank Sinatra, of Woody Allen and Bob Dylan.

I'm glad we can be clear about terms. You can find it offensive to call an eminent constitutional scholar American, I will find it offensive when you don't.

I want to register that although I disagree with my learned friend in argument @KMC here and have said why below, I don't think this particular comment crosses the set lines of theMotte.

If we want to move the lines around that's fine, but it's perfectly in line with discussions of other ethnic groups that have been accepted in the past, and a new rule shouldn't be enforced retroactively.

Because "these people" are also posters here and are entitled to the same civility as everyone else.

Indians shouldn't get kid glove treatment because there are clearly open Indians among our number, where blacks or Palestinians or Iranians wouldn't because we don't have posters within those identity groups.

Amar isn't a random blogger, he's an eminent originalist constitutional scholar. I recall a blurb on the back of his book saying he was one of the five most cited living American legal scholars. He's a man who has devoted his life to the study of the American constitution.

This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.

Yes. The USA failed to pacify the population sustainably until, roughly, 2017 when ISIS lost most of its territory there.

I would not say that was how Dubya and Rumsfeld drew it up.

I'm less interested in the military effectiveness of the gulf countries than in the reaction of their civilian population to Iranian bombings in their cities. It seems to me that every campaign that I've seen begin with the assumption "the populace is docile, cowardly, Aristotelian natural slaves who will surrender when attacked" it hasn't worked out that way. Most recently, Ukraine was assumed by essentially every intelligent observer (including essentially all major governments and intelligence agencies) to be a fake country with a population uninterested in dying for a corrupt elite. That has proven untrue, to the sorrow of millions.

I don't know that the Gulf Arabs can convert popular anger into effective military action against Iran, but I'm unsure that the theory they will cower and sue for peace is a good one for Iran to set as their win condition. In the same way that I would caution against building a win condition into USA war planning that the Iranians will sue for peace as a result of aerial bombing.

If one loves America, extant America not imaginary America, one must guard against both.

The Americans of 1890 were (I would think) overwhelmingly the Americans of 1776 or 1690.

This would be wildly incorrect, unless you have a specialized definition of overwhelmingly. Black 47 brought the Irish fleeing famine, 1848 brought waves of German immigration after failed revolutions. Local elementary schools near me taught in German until the 1900s. We got 2,000,000 Irish and 1,500,000 Germans dumped into an 1840 population of around 15,000,000 free men. The Civil War was fought, in significant part, by immigrants.

Immigration would break 1,000,000/decade in the 1840s, and crest at 5,000,000 in the 1880s.

If you want England to be English, that is fine, for you. One only has to turn back the clock a few decades, within living memory there were few immigrants in England. England is still 80% white English. The United States white population, broadly defined not even getting into the "heritage American" distinction, fell below 80% in the 80s.The colonial stock were a minority by 1900, at the latest, among the white population. And 1900 is the start of the American Century, not its end.

In America especially I observe a thought process that goes approximately: America is a land of pioneers everyone who comes to America is by definition a pioneer therefore they’re super-duper American and all is well. I think this is extremely superficial and surface-level. Creedal nations don’t work because everyone interprets and responds to the creed differently.

Yet America remains the greatest nation on Earth, as a creedal nation, assimilating vast multitudes.

Thank God and Ben Franklin I'm not English then.

Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche.

The thing that will make America more like Japan is if we turn into an insular people, focused on our past and our heritage and our purity. You're so frightened of America you want to turn it into a foreign country.

Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living, and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry, or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin.

Past tense being used here to indicate death I assume? My condolences, though at this point even a soldier who enlisted at 17 in '45 would be 97 or something.

In the fifties and sixties this might have been accurate to a reasonable degree, there were zero Indian Americans born in Michigan who went on to become important scholars. One could ignore them or wish them away. That isn't the case now, one must deal with Kash Patel and Akhil Reed Amar whether one likes it or not.

You're using a foreign language to try to import a foreign concept from a foreign culture. Akhil Reed Amar is not a foreigner, you'd know this if you knew anything about him, or his work.

"Foreigner" as a word in American English does not describe a person born in Michigan, raised in California, living in Connecticut. If you used it in conversation it would confuse people. You're reaching for the Japanese concept because you want to make my country more like Japan, I don't.

You're using foreign concepts from foreign languages to try to tell me about America. There's a reason that there is no equivalent American word, because there is no equivalent American concept, because that is a fundamentally foreign belief system.

He got a lot of flak for the nursing home policies, "grabbing fannies and killing grannies" as Sliwa put it. But that's a sort of technical Covid thing.

I don't care what the Japanese say, I'm an American, not Japanese. I have no interest in becoming Japanese.

I've met, had lunch, and argued about politics and baseball with Akhil Reed Amar. He's a better American than you.

The anti-Iran "alliance" here is presumably capable of blockading Iran's ports just as well.

Everyone is capable of blockading oil traffic, but when you live there it's holding a gun to your own leg because nobody wants to deal with a series of giant oil spills just off your coastline.

Odd standard, US military bases open your entire country to bombing.

The IRGC is operating on the theory that the gulf is cowardly and the USA has ADHD. They may yet be proven right, but their target selection reflects a preference for efficient soft targets not precise political punishment.

What politician's career has been ruined? Trump was president when the lockdowns and masks were at their height, he is back in office. What businessman has faced consequences? The closest I can get is maybe Cuomo, but that was mostly other stuff and general distaste for him personally.

Various heterodox figures were predicting obscene consequences from vaccine deaths. They still have followings as large if not larger.

Fauci is a million years old, in a functioning society the same guy in power during AIDS shouldn't have been in charge six years ago anyway.

Note that the few ships traveling through the strait are currently using a small area near the Iranian coastline.

I have strong suspicions that the non Iranian ships doing so have made "donations" to appropriate Iranian parties for safe passage.

This is a crisis I've faced personally, as I've reached middle age and become a local curmudgeon.

I use marijuana products, and I'm in favor of legalization in general.

But I was driving by my old high school and the gas station across the street was advertising, with a HUGE banner outside, for Delta-8 Gummies. And I'm quite a fan of taking an edible with my wife when I have an evening I want to enjoy at home, but...there are kids there? And especially for a semi-legal product like Delta-8, are the Dinergoth or pakistani cashiers going to check IDs for a product that they don't legally need to check IDs on? And for teenagers that are buying something they need to hide from their parents, are they going to use it responsibly, or are they going to take it in the parking lot and drive home getting high as they go?

And I caused a big stink with the local police and the town meetings until they put enough pressure on the owners to stop selling it.

I'm fine with people getting high, but you should need to put in some effort. Go to a weird head shop downtown in the city, speak to some shady people, feel a little naughty and a little guilty. But don't sell it to kids! And don't sell it to kids casually, on the way home from track, where I used to stop and get a hot chocolate or a gatorade after practice.

I'm becoming less libertarian when I see the frictionless world we're headed for with so many vices.