BahRamYou
14d ago
I agree. I always thought it was weird that they pushed so hard to get stuff named after Chavez, but never really made much effort to explain who he was or why he was important. Of course they needed a leftest Latino American to go along with MLK and Harvey Milk in the sainted trilogy of street names, but it seemed like they just rushed out the first semi-famous name they could find, and only later had an "oh crap" moment when they realized how bad he was.
BahRamYou
15d ago
Interesting. I don't really know much about their system, just that they have a "president" who doesn't do much and a "Supreme Leader" who sounds scary. But that all sounds pretty good. Just more evidence that Iran has some really good parts under the surface, its just ruined by an oppressive government.
BahRamYou
15d ago
Sounds good to me. And there's no need to rewrite their constitution- they already have some democratic elements on paper there.
BahRamYou
15d ago
First off what does winning look like, in the eyes of team Trump?
Ideally, Iran makes a credible and verifiable commitment to dismantling their nuclear weapons program and stop supplying arms to HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russian Federation, Et Al. Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one. If the choice is between reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes and giving the IRGC access to nuclear missiles we choose to turn Iran into another Afghanistan.
They've always been a bit vague on that. My guess is what they want is to use people from Iran's existing regime to run the country but take orders from Washington, similar to what the US did in Venezuela. As long as they stop selling weapons to terrorists they're free to run the country as they see fit, though of course we'd like to see some progress on human rights too. It's a good strategy, it just doesn't sound good in a press briefing.
BahRamYou
16d ago
Right now prices are a bit high, but volatility (as measured by VIX and options prices) is super high, suggesting there's a huge range of ways this could go. Sound reasonable to me.
My main opinion is still that the US military is giving an absolute master class of dominance right now. They've recently destroyed everything on Kharg Island except the oil facilities, so that Iran can still sell its oil while limiting its ability to attack oil tankers. If this goes on much longer, Iran just isn't going to have anything left, and the strait will be open again. Then oil will crash back to where it was before, at historically relatively cheap prices.
Of course, it's also possible that this all blows up tomorrow. In that case oil shoots up again. Bad news for China, and anyone else who relies on imported oil. But everyone is scrambling to find workaround for that, too. Rationing, strategic oil reserves, the Saudis sending oil to the Red Sea, nonconventional oil increasing production, coal... there are options, even if it's painful in the short term.
BahRamYou
16d ago
I agree that "readily available" is weesel wording, but 9% is a lot! Even 1% could swing an election. I went through this myself once when I let my driver's license expire while moving. I had to go through an annoying 3 step process: first buy something online with my new address, then use that to get a cell phone bill at my new address, then use that to get a new Drivers license. All of which involves hassle and waiting.
BahRamYou
17d ago
Well, in my memory (admittedly it's been a long time) there was hardly any line. You could pretty much just show up to the airport and walk right onto the plane, just pausing briefly to walk through a metal detector. It's still like that for busses and trains, so it's not impossible.
BahRamYou
17d ago
They still had some basic security in the 90s, like metal detectors. They just didn't have weird sweaty guys giving you a pat down, or confiscating your nail clippers. The real security upgrade is the locked cabin doors + better background screening and counter-terrorism in general. We could go back to a more relaxed boarding process. They've already given up some of the worst bits of security theater, like making people take off their shoes and belt. I don't know how much they even search people's carry-ons anymore, I always put a ton of junk in mine and they hardly ever stop me.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Takes longer than a couple months to train elite pilots! Those guys who died in Midway all had years of experience. I dont see any realistic way for them to replace that. If anything, they should have switched to Kamikazes sooner.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Yeah, it makes sense. Reading Bean's blog, i got the sense that the reason the Burke class was so successful was that they designed it with enough space to handle decades of future upgrades, but that's really tapped out now.
BahRamYou
19d ago
I think this piece from Ross Douthat is the most likely explanation. Trump is a bully, and while he's obviously no military expert, he has an uncanny sense for knowing when someone is weak. Iran was weaker than they'd been in a long time, so he seized the chance.
BahRamYou
19d ago
I've seen a lot of discussion about that, with various ideas tossed around, but this is all just aimless speculation so far.
Some people say they just made it big to appeal to Trump's ego, with no real thought behind it. In that line of thinking, the extra tonnage is just a mistake.
Some people say, it's a work in progress. The extra size can easily be filled up with more missiles like the old "arsenal ship" concepts with 500 missiles.
Some people say, it's a political maneuver to get Congress to fund what they really want, which is a future Cruiser/Destroyer. So just take that armament, but away the excess tons, and call it a destroyer/cruiser.
Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship. It's proposed with three untested weapons systems (high energy lasers, railgun, and hypersonic missiles), and maybe nukes, so they might as well wait a bit to see how those shake up before committing to any one big weapon system. Some extra tonnage also helps a bit with survivability, which makes it a bit more of a real "battleship."
BahRamYou
19d ago
Of course, that place is no longer in business, because the world can’t leave a good thing well enough alone.
Still very common in Japan, for what it's worth. During my time there I always really enjoyed the izakaya culture you described (although there's also ones that people go to just to get hammered to hit on women or whatever). I think it kinda depends, though, on having a very hardworking backroom/owner to keep up with all the food orders while working for minimal pay to keep costs down. Otherwise it's just too expensive, so people do what you did- buy their drinks from a convenience store to pregame, then have just one drink, or don't even go at all.
Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.
I sometimes want to write a cynical version of the American war in the Pacific. We often get the "heroic" view, of daring pilots and fearless marines raising flags. But the cynical view starts with Japan as basically a 3rd world economy, stretched to the breaking point on long-range shipping, completely dependent on resource imports. The US starts with the completely broken Mark 14 torpedo as a result of institutional incompetance, but once they finally get a working torpedo, they quickly sink the entirety of the Japanese transport fleet, which had no defense at all. The home islands are left starving and quickly surrender. The entire "island hopping" strategy was a wasted effort except for propaganda purposes.
The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943
I know this is conventional wisdom, but that one always rubbed me the wrong way. It was obvious (even at the time) that the Americans had vastly more material resources- if Japan was going to have any chance at all of winning, they needed to win quickly. Pulling back experienced pilots to train new ones seems like a very American-centric way of thinking, that they'd be able to sustain a very long war with heavy casualties. They needed to repeat something like Pearl Harbour or Tsushima rapidly, not keep up in a war of attrition.
BahRamYou
21d ago
it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.
That's what I'm talking about. And most people don't have anything else to really distinguish themselves either.
BahRamYou
21d ago
How do you remember all that about everyone here? It's really hard for me to remember who anyone is here on sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.
BahRamYou
21d ago
Yes, I think this an important point that often gets missed in popular discussion about the war. The people with more military knowledge already know it and take it for granted, but the people with less knowledge about modern military equipment don't know and don't think to ask. There's basically two types of weapons for an air war like this- the high end and the low end. When the media reports things like America is running low on weapons They're talking about the most expensive, high-end weapons. They do get used up quickly in the opening stages of the war, but those stages also don't last long. It's a very high-intensity war. Dropping JDAMs means they're dropping regular old bombs, and they can keep that up basically forever with no fears of running out or even spending much money, as long as they can protect the bombers.
BahRamYou
21d ago
Yes, my impression is that the Europeans are much more critical of the war in Iran and the US in general, for obvious reasons. Americans are... pretty split about Zionism, but a lot more likely to support Trump. But I'm just generalizing wildly based on time of day and how people write. I have no idea where most of the people here are from.
BahRamYou
21d ago
Right now I kind of wish this place had location markers, or at least an optional flag we could choose. But the best proxy I guess is how opinions seem to change drastically depending on time of day. Specifically, it's when the European posters go to sleep and the American posters wake up.
BahRamYou
21d ago
You asked "how do you imagine it would look like under US rule" and I gave you an example. Is it your opinion that everyone in Iran- the entire population! is a fanatic who will happily die for their Islamic theocracty? Because so far that does not seem to be the case, at all.
Well, if the IRGC doesn't have absolutely enormous stashes of at least small arms (and drone/rocket parts plus warheads) in the mountains, they didn't plan even a week ahead. I'd be very surprised.
The bailey: "the IRGC will endlessly destroy all equipment and aircraft with their infinite stocks of missiles" The motte: "They must have some small arms still buried in the mountains somewhere..."
Well, I suppose they might actually try to fight in a motte-and-bailey style, but I don't think it's going to devastate the US military like you're imagining. They seem to have mostly stopped their missile attacks already.
Also, I'd expect Russian surplus equipment and Chinese dual use goods to make it across the border.
Which border? Neither of those countries shares a border with Iran. Is China going to be sending convoys of missiles all the way across Afghanistan, do you think? Is Russia going to stop their war in Ukraine to focus on sending cargo ships across the Caspian Sea?
BahRamYou
21d ago
I think they'd more likely be in the Quds Force or Basij. The IRGC is more like a regular military- it pays a salary and doesn't expect them to launch suicide attacks.
BahRamYou
21d ago
I don't think it's that hard to imagine- we can just look back to what Iran looked like in the 60s and 70s under the US-backed Shah. Some political repression and violence, but also a lot of peace and prosperity. I expect we'll also see this in Venezuela.
More generally, the kind of violence you're describing- massive use of MANPADS and sophisticated explosives- doesn't just magically happen. It happens when some other country with sophisticated weapons factories is sending them weapons. Normal people on the street don't have the capability to blow up an oil refinery or shoot down an airplane. And for a long time now, the country that's been supplying most of those sophisticated weapons to insurgents was... Iran.
BahRamYou
21d ago
It seems like a few long range missile strikes or commando operations against their pipelines and oil reserves would end all of that very quickly. They're a country with a billion people crammed tightly against the coast, utterly dependant on long rangefuel and food imports, and ideologically dependant on continuous economic growth (endure the oppression of the CCP in exchange for the promise that they can make the economy grow quickly). They seem very fragile to any sort of major war.
What about the things that are not so easily quantified in economic models?
eg:
But it all together and this might make for an ugly sort of cyber-feudalism, where a rich few control all the wealth and the vast underclass can only find work in humiliating servant type roles for the rich.
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