ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
This is a devastating tactical victory for the Israelis
...Israel claims. While flooding every diplomatic channel with desperate pleas to the United States to join the war, closing the borders and airports so their citizens can’t leave, and passing laws to make it illegal to film ballistic missile impacts.
I don’t mean to bag on Israel in particular here, but this is a wartime situation with all the propaganda that implies. Iran has already imposed wartime censorship and shut down the internet, so the only confirmation we’re getting for any strikes on Iran is from the Israeli military spokespeople. Meanwhile there have been dozens of ballistic missile impacts against high value target locations in Tel Aviv, and the missile defense systems seem to have dropped from a 96% intercept rate to a 50% intercept rate, to a 10% intercept rate. But don’t worry, like Russia in late February of 2022, Iran is just two weeks away from running out of missiles.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I’m increasingly convinced Sam is a The Boys from Brazil-style clone of Leon Trotsky.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret. This organization wasn’t even actually secret and they still managed to conspire undisturbed for forty years.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
’sexual innuendo’
Ok, now you’re just being pointlessly obscure. Mods! Mods! This man is violating the rule that everyone must speak plainly!
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Also, even one accepts that there is a Christian duty to support the Jewish People, and that supporting the modern state of Israel is an extension of that duty, does that really require one to enthusiastically approve of every single act of depraved lunacy that comes belching out of the Israeli military-intelligence complex? Especially when those acts stand a high chance of getting regular Israelis and Jews killed. I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest that supporting America means having to happily support the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Operation Northwoods, or dosing random businessmen and hookers with LSD.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
This is my main complaint about libertarians generally. They don’t understand the nature of power, and they don’t understand the connection between money and power. Once a corporation gets big enough it is going to start exercising power by whatever means available to it, including access to state power. If it gets really big it’s going to start trying to exercise state power of its own, with all the restrictions on other people’s liberty that that implies.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Why does Silicon Valley feel the need to build a lobbying strategy for the Vatican?
Because there are 1.4 billion people in the world that put a fair amount of weight on what the Pope says, and even more than that who see the Pope as a generally important figure of morality like the Dali Lama.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I doubt anyone young liberal and ambitious who goes through the modern educational apparatus (especially at the high levels) is going to come out the other side as a middle of the road neo-liberal. The factory that produces that model doesn’t exist anymore.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Massive immediate shortage of consumer goods, industrial parts and equipment, some kinds of food (which isn’t grown in China but is often shipped there to be packed or processed or canned), and basic military equipment (boots, uniforms, etc).
The main strategic value of taking Taiwan is removing the threat to China. Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland. The chip fabs and any other economic value are a distant second. Ideally China would like to get those, which is probably why they haven’t invaded yet in the first place. China has its own chip fabs, so everyone else would be in a much worse position than China if they got destroyed.
Regarding your second point, for the US to blockade China, the United States would need to:
- Decide it’s actually going to fight China.
- Decide it’s an acceptable loss that the entire US economy falls apart in a matter of hours.
- Decide it’s ok incurring tens of thousands of military casualties in a matter of days.
- Decide it’s fine with the risk of nuclear conflict.
- Actually get it’s ships somewhere near the vicinity of Taiwan without getting them all sunk.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
The bombardment Iran is getting isn’t even close to what Taiwan would get. It would look more like Iraq or Kosovo, but in a much smaller area.
They're still ahead
I’m not even sure they’re ahead now. If you compare the US and Chinese Navies as a whole the US Navy looks better, but the US Navy is spread across at least four different oceans and seas, most of the Chinese navy is right there. And maneuverable re-entry vehicles and constant satellite surveillance make giant aircraft carriers a lot less practical. Recent war games have indicated that getting carrier groups further west than Hawaii would be extremely risky. And that’s just the large extremely long range ballistic missiles, most of the fight for Taiwan would have to be within 100 miles of the Chinese coast. And that’s not even getting into the string of pretty worrying incidents lately that show a dramatic loss of basic seamanship skills in the US Navy (like accidentally scuttling the John Paul Jones).
Also for some reason it seems like most people picture a Chinese invasion of Taiwan like it’s Omaha beach in 1944 with Higgins boats full of Chinese soldiers getting mowed down on the beach, it wouldn’t be like that at all. It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.
Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership has been a thing for almost as long as total war has. There were hundreds of plots to assassinate Hitler, and dozens of Nazi plots to assassinate Churchill and Stalin. The only reason none of these worked is that all parties involved were surrounded by fearsome state security apparatuses, and because infiltrating a dozen commandos into a foreign country to kill a VIP under massive security is pretty hard. Later during the nuclear age, assassinating leaders of major powers became untenable along with all the other aspects of total war.
@erwgv3g34 And it’s pretty ironic that Scott mentions Lincoln, given that Lincoln died as the result of a botched and too-late massive decapition strike against the entire Union leadership structure. The plot was supposed to kill President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Secretary of State William Seward, and Commanding General of the US Army Ulysses Grant. The plot fell apart near the date of its execution for multiple reasons (partially because the plan came together too late to actually win the war) and only Lincoln and Seward needed up being attacked.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Possibly. Patriot, Arrow and THAAD all have limited interceptor capacity and once those run out lots of targets become sitting ducks. I’ve also seen video footage that show signs that Iran isn’t just yeeting missiles at apartment blocks, there is definitely counter-battery fire in an attempt to take out the missile defense systems. This is the same thing that happened in Ukraine, but it could happen a lot faster here because Iran has spent 20 years stockpiling missiles for this one job.
What I don’t know is how badly Iran is getting diced up right now. They are definitely getting hit but I don’t know what the state of their missile launch capability is. If it’s still in good shape then Israel could end up in a pretty bad situation pretty fast. @coffee_enjoyer might be right about imminent US intervention but it remains to be seen. And of course there’s always nukes.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
This is a very good post. I would add another couple of points:
-
Actually invading Iran would be very difficult, much harder than Iraq, and would risk turning into America’s Ukraine War.
-
From the Israel perspective, a secular Iranian nationalist government isn’t necessarily going to to be a lot friendlier. There are many Iranian dissidents who think that the Islamic Republic government is cowardly and has been going much too easy on Israel over the last two decades. And that is somewhat true, the Ayatollahs are unpopular and any foreign adventure is risky because of their low support at home. There are very good non-religious, non-ethnic reasons for Iran and Israel to be at each other’s throats. Each stands to be the major regional power in the Middle East and the town isn’t big enough for the two of them. In the long-run, a secular Iranian government with high levels of popular support that is competent and actually has its shit together is probably a lot worse for Israel.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal are incapable of destroying them.
Israel has probably had hydrogen bombs since the late 1970s.
HAPPENING NOW: ISRAEL LAUNCHES MASSIVE ATTACK AGAINST IRANESE NUCLEAR FACILITIES—AIR RAID SIRENS HEARD ALL ACROSS ISRAEL—MASSIVE AIR ACTIVITY OVER IRAQ-SYRIA BORDER—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS CONFIRMED IN TEHRAN INCLUDING COLLAPSED BUILDING—IRANIAN FIGHTER JETS SEEN TAKING OFF FROM AIRSTRIPS NEAR TEHRAN—BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES REPORTED IN IRAN—REPORTS OF EXPLOSIONS AT US BASES IN IRAQ—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR IRAN’S NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY—VIDEO FOOTAGE SHOWING NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY BURNING—UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT THE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE IRANIAN MILITARY HAS BEEN KILLED IN A TARGETED STRIKE
—Inb4 source
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
It’s like quitting drinking. If you’re a terminal alcoholic, quitting will have some major positive effects on your life. If you drink a few beers twice a month, you’re probably not even going to notice. For “The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z” who are cranking it out to hentai 7 times a day, nofap is a revelation, and they will see substantial improvements to their mood and energy levels. For anyone with normal habits it probably isn’t going to be a game changer.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Because it was an impossibly high bar. Nothing was able to do that, for years. The idea that you’d be able to talk to a computer program and not recognize it seemed like science fiction.
Well remember even passing the basic casual Turing test used to be extremely difficult. It took at least 65 years between the creation of the test and systems beginning to pass it consistently. And I still remember science articles and science fiction stories from the 90s and 2000s talking about it like it was the holy grail. It’s only in the past few years that it’s started to seem like an inadequate measurement of an AI’s capabilities.
Interestingly your motivated Turing test starts to sound a lot like the Voight-Kampff test from Bladerunner.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I don’t see Newsom getting the nomination in any contest that involves an actual primary. Older black Democrats in the south have a lot of pull in the primaries and they don’t like slick sharky Patrick Bateman types. Biden’s goofiness was actually a big advantage for him in those contests.
Well fortunately thanks to Ukraine/Russia, India/Pakistan and Iran/Israel we now have an excellent iterative stress-test of just how far you can push a nuclear power before they push that big red button. Yeeting quadcopter drones into a leg of the nuclear triad? Check. “Accidentally” blowing up the other side’s nuclear weapons with a conventional strike? Check. Chucking ballistic missiles with a 4,000 lb warhead into the densely populated high rise downtown area of the capitol city? Check. And of course the control group for the study, China/USA, where nothing ever happens, but it’s always looming.
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