2rafa
51m ago
Rodriguez just made the erstwhile chief of the revolutionary secret police and notorious user of torture against regime enemies one of her top people and defense minister a few days ago.
2rafa
1hr ago
Quite awhile back, you argued that none of Israel's enemies in the region could defeat it even without US help.
I will try to find my old comment, so you might be right, but I think what I said is that Israel’s destruction would not be inevitable in that event, or another statement that was maybe at least a little more cautious than what you imply. I’ve been pretty negative about Israel’s long-term prospects here for a while.
2rafa
1hr ago
This is a response to a generic argument but not the specific one. Iran and Israel were not historic enemies. Historically, Jews were sometime treated poorly in Persia and sometimes well, but that was true in many places. Israel doesn’t have any territorial claims on Iran. Even the most fantastical, maximalist Zionist claims disavowed even by most religious zionists end in Western Iraq, nowhere near Iran, and would require conquering other nations to reach. Israel and Iran had a coldly neutral or allied relationship for most of the Cold War.
It is disingenuous to pretend that what changed was not the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power in Iran a theocratic government let by a clerical leadership that considered the destruction of Israel its central and absolute foreign policy goal (not the only goal, of course, it also sought to export the revolution to Iraq and Sunni states, but the central goal, yes). This government was not threatened by Israel, which has neither the population nor any economic or political reason, independently, to rule over an Iran that is not hostile toward it. Iranians have no ethnic and scant religious relations (other than those they imagine themselves) with the Palestinians, Sunni Arabs who have themselves fought wars against them for centuries (millennia, Iran being Muslim because the Gulf Arab conquerors destroyed the Persian Sassanids, of course) and today - Hamas fighters fighting against Assad in Syria for example.
The sole reason for Israeli hostility toward Iran for the last 45 years has been the revolutionary mission of the Islamic Republic, which seeks to destroy it. Or ask yourself a simple question - if the Islamic Revolution had never occurred, do you think Israel would care to fight a war against Iran?
2rafa
2hr ago
…written almost 20 years after the Islamic Revolution, and 12 years after Hezbollah officially joined an alliance with Iran, receiving funding toward its mission of destroying Israel, which had been enshrined as a central goal of the Islamic Revolution from nearly the beginning. Israel didn’t start the hostility with revolutionary Iran.
2rafa
3hr ago
“Apparently” they didn’t want Kushner and Witkoff because they were involved in the earlier “bad faith” negotiations and asked for Vance instead.
2rafa
4hr ago
I agree, it’s disingenuous when people suggest Israel started the conflict with Iran. A core objective of the Islamic revolution is the destruction of the “Zionist entity”, not partially but wholly and absolutely, a raison d’etre of the modern Iranian state is Israel’s destruction, even at colossal political and economic cost (as we’ve seen). Since the neutering of Iraq in 2003 and Saddam’s replacement with a quasi democratic largely Shia government, no foreign power or group realistically wants to annex major parts of Iranian territory (other than perhaps the Kurds, but nobody else including Turkey would want that, and it won’t happen).
Israel’s hostility to Iran isn’t ethnic or national or irredentist or religious, like the hostility to the Palestinians. Iran is far away and Israel doesn’t claim any of it. It’s solely downstream from the Islamic revolution.
2rafa
4hr ago
East Jerusalem has much more religious significance than most of Southern Lebanon. Arguably even Syria has more. All Israel has ever wanted in Southern Lebanon is some kind of Maronite ethnostate, but the reality is that Lebanese Christian elites are low tfr, far too comfortable and all have foreign passports and so don’t care to fight and die for their homeland really. This was the reality in the civil war and is the problem today. The Shias are poor and have nowhere to go.
This would be good for Americans in America, because we will not be top dog forever; in a century or two we may find ourselves in Iran’s place with a more powerful China attempting to oppress us and conquer us.
Whatever the Chinese decide is or isn’t in their interest in a century’s time, I have absolutely no doubt that it will not be determined by the comparative empathy level of American foreign policy in the early 21st century.
Yes, this war has not gone well for America, but that was hardly unexpected, there’s a reason no previous American president was dumb enough to do this, including HW and Jr. Disarming Hezbollah is equally flawed, Shias in Lebanon are loyal to it and will reform and rebuild it in whatever guise, whatever the case, and the country is too divided by sectarianism to stop them. I hesitate to say it’s over for Israel, it’s faced poor odds before, but the future certainly isn’t bright for it.
2rafa
1d ago
This was unnecessarily rude and a ban was deserved. Twitter is a cesspool and you shouldn’t let the zero standards of basic politeness common there change your writing.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s actually less likely than you think. Even with the cost of insurance, the journey itself could still be profitable. But consider the risk of an attack - legal cases with the crew and negative press attention for “getting workers killed” (even if they volunteered) aside, the biggest risk is that you lose a ship you can’t replace just at a time when shipping rates might rise overall. New specialized tankers or other specialized cargo ships take a long time to make, you can’t just buy a new one off the shelf. So even if the insurance pays, you’re out a lot of revenue. All these things factor in.
2rafa
2d ago
Since 2016 but really 2022-ish second campaign planning there was a noticeable shift by many MAGA-adjacent conservative women to a kind of Miami Latina inspired look with some Hooters Texas bimbo characteristics. Search ‘Kristi Noem before and after’ for the archetypal example.
The look is a combination between the ‘global Latina belt’ look common from Mexico to Lebanon to arguably in a way even corners of SEA, and which is therefore somewhat racially ambiguous and aspects of drag makeup that were reintroduced to the female population as a result of RPDR. It was probably first popularized in the West by the Kardashians in the very early 2010s, but took another decade to make its way to the conservative influencer circuit (as late as 2019, Fox News blondes still had a very different style).
2rafa
3d ago
So Trump chickened out and said he’s making a deal, then Iran came out and said they’re not making a deal, then Trump clarified and said that actually it was Witkoff and Kushner, implicitly speaking to some third parties, who were relaying messages to Iran.
The markets are wobbly but I think this is the clearest sign possible that a unilateral Trump retreat is the most likely next step. If Iran keeps the strait closed or - more likely - extracts a hefty toll from anyone who wants to ship through it, that is something Trump can and will blame on others. He can say “we pounded them and killed the supreme leader” and that will be enough for the base. Gas prices can remain elevated but will trend downward over time.
@ me if this is all a feint in advance of a US invasion but I doubt it.
2rafa
6d ago
Don’t other countries have rules that actually ban police raiding your house at 2am for no reason?
2rafa
8d ago
As for scam courses and money, the modal donation to a streamer is in the $5-$10 range.
Many of these streamers stream 7 days a week all day, that $10 a stream adds up fast, there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.
"Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else." You could say, yeah, everyone knows looks are important, but since you're not currently a looksmaxxer, clearly your preference for looks is weaker than Clav's. And he'd say your preference was wrong.
Most important thing for what? I think a reasonable framing is that looks are very important, especially when seeking a partner (but also generally, the halo effect, etc). That’s just biology. But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.
This whole thing is pretty weird to me. Many of the men in the documentary are avowed misogynists, but guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.
What confuses me - on both the ‘incel’ and ‘mainstream liberal’ (not that those are the only two views, but they’re the two most commonly represented in this debate) is that both sides are taking something out of these stories and interactions that isn’t true.
Let me illustrate:
The handsome, outgoing and tall 19 year old ‘Clavicular’ flirts with and hits on the young women outside Miami bars and clubs on camera. He says some outrageous things and also happens to have been an incel / looksmaxxing forum dweller. According to the incels this somehow vindicates a particular strand of contempt for women. But this young man’s misogyny and performative meanness to women isn’t why he gets laid! He gets laid because, presumably, he is tall, handsome and outgoing. A very handsome and charming 6’4 man could just as well be a consummate feminist and do just as well. If the accusation is that women looking to hook up with guys outside clubs in Miami prioritize looks over the politics and social views of the men they hook up with, OK? As the joke about white nationalist men with non-white wives goes, this is not a gender-specific concept.
And does this really mean women in general are particularly shallow? Leaving aside the fact that may of these streamers primarily hookup with OnlyFans content creators (ie sex workers), even the “girl in a tight dress outside a nightclub in Miami at 1am willing to talk on camera to a guy with an entourage of posturing young men” isn’t the ‘average’ woman or even young woman, it’s a very much filtered group. It’s like dating only people you meet at Burning Man and complaining they all smell bad, are polyamorous, and have STDs.
The second issue, the banality of the progressive or mainstream critique of these guys, is just as obvious - the primary victims of these men aren’t young women, who mostly don’t care or have nothing to do with them (unless they have an OnlyFans to advertise) - they’re the young men who donate their hard earned money to them on stream, or who spend thousands of dollars on scam courses or fake ‘trading’ apps where nobody but the house (and the influencer taking a cut of every rube he directs its way) ever makes any money. It’s that short Mexican guy from the documentary who thinks that if he’s only a bit more masculine, more misogynist, more alpha, he can have the life of the tall rich white guy.
2rafa
9d ago
I think it’s broadly known that hardline Chinese nationalists and the far right are censored on Chinese social media. They are a potentially large opposition group to the CCP’s vaguely Marxist post racial broadly liberal future vision of Chinese society. Communism itself is, after all, an imported ideology invented by two foreigners whose statues sit in many major Chinese cities and CCP assembly halls, and in the name of which much classical Chinese art, architecture and civilizational infrastructure, from the elite Chinese court cuisine (reportedly the most complex and elaborate in the world) to forms of media was destroyed or severely damaged as decadent, backward and reactionary just a few decades ago by the very party still in power.
2rafa
9d ago
It’s not for the Iranians, who won’t comment until it’s confirmed (in the hypothetical situation in which it’s true). I always thought the occasional Putin disappearances were in part about seeing who seemed to move suspiciously fast or ask a lot of questions during a leader’s unexplained absence, but Netanyahu doesn’t have close to that power even now after almost as many years in power. In a way, I think @SecureSignals is probably directionally correct. I don’t think it’s about US or even NATO public opinion, though, I think it’s about the Gulf and the Arab world. There are people who can politically withstand going to war in partnership with America, but not with Israel. If Israel fades into the background, the former becomes more likely.
2rafa
9d ago
The disappearance is unusual but I think it’s very hard to hide the death of a world leader for a long period of time, there are too many internal factions who hear word and start posturing. In addition, who can forget the approximately one million times Putin has allegedly died in secret over the last decade according to tabloid rumor. In addition, keeping news of Netanyahu’s death secret wouldn’t serve even his relatively close political allies, since if anything it would rally people to their cause and Israeli morale in this conflict doesn’t depend on Netanyahu’s life at all, they largely believe it’s about life and death for all of them. Lastly, Iran has not successfully killed many senior Israeli officials, while even Soleimani’s assassination alone made successful Israeli targeted killing claims much more believable whether or not the state confirmed someone’s death.
For the record, I think Netanyahu is laying low, trying to avoid saying something provocative because he knows this war will end when Trump decides it does, and concentrating on eliminating Hezbollah in Lebanon as much as possible, which seems like Israel’s primary focus in this war.
And I think Mojtaba is probably alive. The Telegraph suggested he was injured but is alive. He may not be particularly lucid (I doubt he is vegetative), but I suspect he is alive and has at leas a chance of recovering; there were other supreme leader candidates living and a hereditary succession was not uncontroversial.
2rafa
12d ago
Why would the Democrats replace Trump with Vance? They know the latter is more reactionary in practice, has a longer attention span, will avoid some of Trump’s worst policies for the economy (by limiting tariffs and seeking a quick resolution in Iran), is invested in staying in power for a second term, and will replace cabinet ministers chosen because Trump liked them on Fox with seasoned conservative operatives who have spent decades wargaming coming to power. That seems like a bad trade.
2rafa
12d ago
You wouldn’t want to be friends with college law professor Obama because he would be the most annoying “um akshually” midwit at the table. That said, he could read a speech well and had good speechwriters throughout, stuck to the script, and could practice the tone shift needed to speak to both black and white audiences in a plausible and mostly likeable way. The arrogance was and is there under the surface (and seeps through the page in the texts he semi or largely writes himself), but he lacks the overt greasiness of Vance in my opinion.
2rafa
12d ago
It remains to be seen whether the IRGC are actually capable of guerilla warfare. Iran isn’t Yemen or Afghanistan or even Iraq. Iran fell below replacement level tfr 25 years ago. Iran is more developed and educated than those nations. It lacks the strong tribal loyalty upon which the Taliban and Houthis rely. IRGC officers are used to creature comforts, not living in caves.
It is still a very high risk, of course, but it’s not guaranteed that a collapse leads to a Houthi style Shia Islamist insurgency.
2rafa
12d ago
Have to disagree. The slowness is the point. I feel strongly that Red Dead 2 is a game designed to be played in ~10 8-hour sessions. One must be fully immersed, this is an all-day activity. That is inconvenient, but it’s hardly unique, plenty of hobbies have that kind of time commitment, just not most video games.
The slowness is the point because the game is holistically and intentionally designed to reject game convention. Like GTAIV (Rockstar’s other masterpiece, and the game closest to Red Dead 2 in both tone and style, albeit compromised by immaturity and GTA convention), it is as much about the slice of life activities and the general vibe as about the actual main storyline. The minimalist soundtrack is a masterpiece, tense beats, the occasional restrained strum, a handful of songs that fit perfectly deployed at precisely the right moment. The story is more conservative than any major comparable game, the rich inner lives and stories of Arthur’s companions fully present (and clearly known to the writers) but revealed only in fragments, rarely explicitly, just there, if you care for it. The game does not care particularly for the player, which is a great argument in its favor. You may come to camp at the right time, on the right day, in between story missions and see an entire, extensive, motion captured and voiced and acted vignette between Arthur’s companions. Other players may miss it, the game doesn’t care, unlike any other game, in which there would be a mandatory reminder to return to camp and the event would only trigger when the player did so.
Iran is hostile to pan-Arabism, its people aren’t Arabs, and a pan-Arabist state that incorporated Assad, Hussein and Nasser’s states would become (regardless of who was in charge of Iran) a huge threat to Iran militarily and civilizationally. Israel didn’t bring war to a region that was beset with countless sectarian and ethnic divides long before it was founded.
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