No, but Congress holds the power of the purse. If the Dems hold both houses, or even get enough Republicans to flip on the votes in question, they could defund the war. Literally attach riders to budget legislation saying no funds can be used in X region after Y date. There's a bunch of other things they could do like actually invoking the War Powers Act, repealing the AUMF, up to impeachment and removal, if they can find the supermajority for that. But defunding is probably the hard, structural counter to presidental authority here, and probably the easiest to do, funnily enough.
Churro
5d ago
My reading of history explicitly tells me not to rely on the really, really dumb thing not happening. Most of the bits we think are exciting started because of exactly that happening.
Churro
5d ago
I'd agree! I think if there is any lesson we should be learning from the new ubiquity of drones in warfare, and our own history of what actually won us the one real war we were tested in (WW2), it's that our weapons must be ruthlessly economically efficient. I don't really have an answer yet as to how you economically defend a target as big and vulnerable as a base or a ship from a remotely pilotable bomb that costs $20,000-$50,000, and is buildable in a garage.
The vast majority, by an order of magnitude, of what Iran is shooting at us is drones. Mostly Shahed variants. What we use to shoot it down depends on whether it's a boat or a land target, but at sea we're mostly using the SM-2 (approx. $2.1 million) and ESSM ($1.8 million). The workhorse for land is Patriot PAC-3 (approx. $3.7 million). That is a bad trade.
Churro
5d ago
Cute.
Let me ask this a different way: if it were possible to have built a deliverable nuclear weapon within 6 months, why don't they already have one? They were off the JCPOA since Trump's first term. Or, hell, if we're to accept the Republican narrative, they were building a nuclear program the entire time they were on it. It's been 134 months since the JCPOA was signed, and 100 months since Trump backed out. You can pick either as the start date from when the Iranians began earnestly trying to build a nuke. You'll notice both are much longer than 6 months. Where are the nukes?
Or, would you argue that actually this is a process that takes years? That maybe it's a long research and development cycle, but Iran was finally getting near the end of it, and only timely action now (February) was enough to stop them from nuking Tel-Aviv or whatever by March. I believe the Netanyahu standard is about two weeks away. I mean, that's plausible. Except last summer, your dude told all of us that he had "completely and totally obliterated" iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. As he said: “We’re not at war with Iran … We destroyed the Iranian nuclear program … and we did it without endangering the lives of American pilots. That’s an incredible thing.”
So like... was he lying? Did he realize that actually he totally oversold it, and Iran's way better at building a nuclear program despite being bombed than he thought, and now we have to start a whole regional war that does get our people and lots of others killed to actually do the job he told us he did? And if that's the case, and it turns out you can spool up an entire, imminently-deliverable-bomb-producing nuclear weapons program in less than a year from "complete obliteration", I ask you again, where are all their nukes? They've had years and years of being unconstrained by our bombs or our diplomacy, and seemingly nothing to show for all their very, very active work trying to build a bomb all these many long years. North Korea managed it with an economy ten times smaller, a famine, and literally nothing that resembles Iran's scientific corpus. Where's the bombs that they should have been producing all this time, if they were actually trying to do so, like your ilk keep telling me?
Churro
5d ago
Iran will never produce a nuclear weapon. Here is a very simple proof: since Iran would win by producing a nuclear weapon, and Iran has not produced a nuclear weapon, they can’t do it. They’ve had six months and failed.
How long do you think it takes to make a nuclear weapon?
Churro
5d ago
Why are you in such a hurry?
Because every day we burn multi-million dollar missiles and interceptors to shoot down or blow up the launchers of weapons that cost tens of thousands or, at most, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't want to pay to throw weapons we'd need to defend Taiwan into the trash for the possibility of some distant payoff. Every single day this dynamic continues is a day Iran gets the best of us attritionally.
Churro
1mo ago
I feel like the political compass has pretty elegant terminology for this. Anarcho-communism and that milieu is libertarian-left, Marxist-Leninism and its ilk is authoritarian-left. In that same way, anarcho-capitalism is the pole of the libertarian-right, while something like Integralism would be an example of the authoritarian-right. Something like theoretical fascism, with genuine corporatism and not just crony capitalism as was the case in practice, would be authoritarian-center.
Churro
1mo ago
American politicians literally offered to pay bail for those rioting and looting.
Name me one, please. Literally a single example.
And to save us both time: a politician tweeting a link to a 501(c)(3) non-profit so the public can donate is not 'literally offering to pay bail,' nor are personal donations made by campaign staffers.
This whole talking point is also kind of moot? The vast majority of people arrested in the 2020 protests weren't even held on bail at all. And whatever money that did get donated, according to MFF's financial disclosures, didn't even get used for 2020 protest cases, but for later, unrelated cases. They took in $40 million in the weeks following Floyd's murder, and ultimately spent only $200,000 of that on protest-related bail.
Churro
2mo ago
Okay, I'll bite. Why are tattoos, numerous piercings, or a dyed undercut inherently ridiculous? Genuinely.
Churro
2mo ago
So he'd be a rapist and cost Maine Democrats a potentially winnable seat (generic Dem vastly outperformed him, even before this story broke). That's his path to being liked again?
Churro
2mo ago
I think there's a strong argument that Platner is the one who broke the concept of loyalty here, not the party. If this allegation was waiting in the wings, and Platner knew it was, his entire candidacy was based on false pretenses. He explicitly told his supporters that nothing more would be revealed after the initial round of scandals. That was clearly a lie.
I’m not a Maine voter, but I was a supporter of his until this point, and I generally back the populist left. I’m more than happy to ditch him now. He tanked his own movement by hiding a massive liability, and looking at the polling, a standard Democratic suit filler that isn't 70+ has a perfectly decent shot against Collins without all of this baggage.
Churro
2mo ago
Hey man, I get it. My family actually moved us out of Evanston while I was in elementary school for the same reason. Within the same month, I think my brother both got mugged on the way back from school, and our apartment on Dobson, just a block or two off of Howard, got broken into. We ended up moving to Aurora, and it's only in the last couple of years that I've come back to Evanston.
Funnily enough, Howard Street's problems trace back to a weird jurisdictional accident: it became the Chicago/Evanston line, got physically cut off from Evanston services by a cemetery and the L tracks, and by the 80s was so full of cheap vacant buildings that a documented heroin market moved into right around the Clark/Howard stop. North Rogers Park basically just started subdividing their homes and larger apartments into smaller and cheaper units immediately after WW2 and never really stopped or replaced their aging buildings, and lo and behold you've got a slum and all the complementary problems high-density, low-income housing with poor services brings.
River North is a bit of a different story. It's a nightlife strip packed with 5am bars, and the local alderman actually tried to kill those licenses because drunk crowds plus guns kept ending in shootings. When the 2020 riots hit, River North and the Mag Mile got specifically targeted, not randomly, because that's where the concentrated high-end retail was, by organized crews with U-Hauls. Then COVID brought a citywide carjacking wave that hit the North Side especially hard just because it's dense with cars and pedestrians, and downtown emptied out during the day as offices went remote, so you lost the foot traffic that used to keep the nightlife crowds in check.
Churro
2mo ago
Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.
This is just completely untrue and historically illiterate. I was born and raised in Evanston, and am now living there again, and there was plenty of violence, murder, and gang shootings in Rogers Park and the Howard street corridor when I was a kid there in the 90s. Chicago, like most American cities, saw a spike in crime and violence that peaked there in 1974 at 970 homicides, still the record. It hit a slightly lower headcount but higher per capita rate in 1992 (948 homicides, but a higher rate due to a smaller population). Neither has been matched since. Not in 2016 (which saw around 762), and not during the peak of the COVID-era surge (which topped out around 800). It's been a continuous decline since then, and we had 416 last year, a 60-year low.
For reference: Rogers Park is the northernmost neighborhood in the city, and Howard Street is the literal Chicago/Evanston line. You will notice this is not 'contained' to the South or West sides of Chicago, it's the doorstep of the North Shore, some of the wealthiest lakefront real estate in the Midwest.
Churro
4mo ago
If white people can muster the strength to walk past all the white victims of black crime without just calling every black person the n-word all the time, I think you should be able to do something comparable when one of the whites finally has enough and allows themselves to verbally wonder in a scarcely populated recess of the internet whether this whole civil rights thing was worth it.
What's with this hard-on all you reactionaries have for collective punishment? Some black people commit crimes targeting white people, so now every black person is guilty and deserves to be greeted with the most inflammatory word you could throw at them?
And oh, what a magnanimous sacrifice it is, apparently, to simply not racially abuse strangers who have no connection to the events you're citing. You're absorbing crime statistics, almost certainly wholly unrelated to you personally, and Chi_Wara is sitting in a forum reading a direct argument for his own ethnic subjugation. These are being presented as equivalent burdens requiring equivalent restraint. They are not.
Churro
5mo ago
To stop an active ethnic cleansing? Can you point to me the population that Iran is depopulating en masse?
This argument is "we should do war crimes because we did war crimes before".
Churro
5mo ago
I don't disagree. Blockades are a longstanding and recognized act of legitimate warfare, if always controversial (re: Turnip Winter). A nation is not obligated to permit the flow of goods into its enemy, although it should keep in mind what cutting off resources like, say, food will actually achieve when compared to the long term consequences of starving a population to death. Most people tend to not appreciate mass civilian death and suffering for little real strategic gain.
But what was being suggested was something entirely different in kind. The complete destruction of all power generation is total war logic against an enemy that has posed an until now unrealized economic threat that was clearly foreseeable and avoidable by not picking this fight in this way, with so little preparation, and managed to saturate US and Israeli air defenses with enough drones and missiles to cause, so far, a few dozen deaths and a bit over 8000 injuries, of varying degrees of severity. Oh, and a nuclear weapons program weeks away from a workable bomb for decades now. An existential threat deserving of existential tactics this is not.
Churro
5mo ago
The pre-electrification comparison doesn't really work. Iran before widespread electricity had somewhere around 20-30 million people, mostly rural and agrarian, and it was a society built around that reality. Modern Iran has 90 million people in a heavily urbanized country whose infrastructure, agriculture, water systems, and supply chains are all built on the assumption of a functioning power grid. The question isn't whether humans can live without electricity in the abstract. It's whether you can remove it suddenly from a modern nation of 90 million without mass death, and the answer is pretty clearly no.
The backup generator argument also assumes an intact fuel supply chain, which in turn requires functional refineries, distribution networks, and so on. If you're actually destroying all power generation infrastructure in a country, those downstream dependencies don't survive either.
Also, why are you advocating for punishing a people who recently were killed in the tens of thousands for protesting their own regime for the actions of that regime? Is getting killed in the streets by the Basij for saying "I don't want this government" a secret signal for preferring a medieval theocracy?
Churro
5mo ago
I don't know, 60% disapproval of Israel's actions would seem to indicate a majority actually do care about dead Gazans, or at least the scale of civilian deaths. But I'm more curious why you think the deaths of other humans are comparable to insects. Is it just proximity? Or is it something about who they are?
Churro
5mo ago
And that's worth all the civilians who will die without access to electricity to you?
Churro
5mo ago
You maybe, maybe have a case with Urban II, given that he does say
From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.
But he's referring to the Seljuk Turks, who were, as the name implies, Turkic by extraction even if they assimilated Persian culture over time akin to the Yuan dynasty in China. And you'll notice that the First Crusade was not in fact an attempt to wipe out Persian civilization, nor even sold as one.
I'm going to need an affirmative case made for any of the other popes to take those claims seriously.
Churro
5mo ago
Why keep asking people to participate if they cannot understand the simple stuff?
I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.
To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.
But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?
If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.
See, I'm not convinced that was going to be a problem until this war. Nor am I convinced the only way to avoid it is by committing ourselves to yet another forever war in the Middle East over WMDs that are nebulously always an imminent threat, justifying the wars of choice that the people who start them wanted all along.
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