Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Only if it was presented as a reason to do the war, as opposed to a consequence of how the war turned out. Since Trump made no claim that this was The Goal or The Plan, he gets no credit (and has made no claim) for it.
In theory, the Iranians could have chosen another supreme leader aligned with or signalling support for the reformist camp. That they did not, and would not, was predicted by various people, including critics of the potential war before it started. This was generally preseted as a warning, typically in the form of 'a hardliner is bad (for the US/Israel) because they'll be more aggressive,' but that is in no way incompatible with 'a hardliner is bad (for Iran), because they'll refuse reform.' Whether the 'benefits' of Iran assuming greater opportunity costs outweighs the costs of another (quote-unquote 'more') hardline theocrat just goes back to frames of reference on what time scale, and under what sort of paradigm (i.e. negative-sum versus zero-sum versus positive-sum).
Which, as you note, I'm not making a position on. This is just noting the externalities that come with various dynamics.
(And thank you for recognizing / noting openly that you were not taking my... 'jawboning'?- as advocacy. The expectation of any such observation, or critique, being advocacy / defense is one reason I've avoided commenting much on the Iran conflict while I was enjoying a video game hiatus.)
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
It's possible that the war will end in a way that makes it easy to determine the winner, but it also seems plausible to me that the war will end with both sides claiming victory and the real measure of that victory will be measured in subsequent behavior over years or decades.
Very much this, and it's the decision-making process of the the subsequent decades in particular that will... not vindicate, but provide context for whose expectations may have been better grounded.
There are two general parts of state-level decision making in geopolitics: you need the resources to do it, and the sort of political leadership to choose those resources. I am far from convinced that the Iranian system will be better positioned for either in the future, even if the desires to toll the straights of Hormuz becomes the post-war status quo.
For state resources, many things are not just a matter of money, but time and capital. The US and Israel claim to have gone after a lot of military industry, and that is neither cheap or quick to replace, nor are the outputs. The nature of losing years to decades of naval or missile investments is that they may take years to decades of reinvestment to rebuild. Until you build another Navy, I doubt even the most hardline Ayatollah will, say, send a blue water task force to escort Iranian oil tankers to China in a US-china war and dare the US to start another war to stop it, with all the implications that has (or could have had in the middle east).
But political leadership matters to. The Iranian political-economic system was already strained enough that there was a 'moderate' faction of pragmatists who were willing to disagree with IRGC-aligned hardliners not in goals, but in the need for reforms to get there. This war seems to have let the IRGC step in and leave the reformists out, and over the longer term states that don't reform can still be aggressive and dangerous, but become less capable over time. There is also a point to be made about the difference between animosity and the belief of personal distance from risk. Ayatollah Khamenei and most of the Iranian high-level leadership had over 30 years of lived experience of well-justified belief that they could wage asymmetric and not-so-asymmetric warfare against the US and Israel and that they wouldn't be retaliated against. Khamenei 2.0 and his core advisors may hate the US and Israel even more than his father, but somehow I doubt they will hold that sort of belief.
None of this is an argument for or defense of the American attack on Iran, but it seems clear to me that this is a war to try and shape the trajectory of the region, and there's more to the future of the region and relative Iranian or US power than the straits of hormuz or if the Iranian theocracy stands.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I have heard from many a Chinese that the two decades after 1989 were some of the most profound political, economic, and social reforms of CCP-Chinese history. That Xi reversed many of these trends does not exactly change that shooting the protestors demanding such changes (and more) did not fix the issues of the Cold War-era communist economic-political order.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.
Out of curiosity, what soft of things do you think the government of Iran would be saying if things were not going well for them and that they were prepared to make politically painful changes?
Remember that- at least according to various pro-Iranian positions of the last month- part of the travesty/evil of this war is that the US and Israel attacked during negotiations in which good-faith Iran was supposed to be on the cusp of making major concessions. I personally do not believe this claim, but for the sake of argument let's take the pro-Iranian claims at their word, and then take into consideration the Iranian words of the time. What narrative line pushed with the same vigor and effort by the state apparatus would you have looked at at the time and gone 'yeah, in the next few days they're going to make geopolitical concessions they've spent decades refusing'?
Or go back about 3 months ago, at the end of the January protest crackdown. This is hopefully not terribly controversial, but a government that shoots tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets is facing things that could politely be called 'serious issues.' Hopefully also not terribly controversial, but shooting tens of thousands of your own citizens does not actually fix the issues, but tends to make them worse. Protests are a symptom, not the cause, of protests. But during and immediately after the regime, what high-level state or clerical rhetoric would you as the observer see and think 'they recognize and are going to address the underlying problems?'
Or go back further, to an event of your choice. The Iranian Revolution has had the better part of a half century to make mistakes and back down under pressure, despite the wishes of its ruling elite. At the time before the backdown was indisputably public, what sort of rhetoric were you seeing to indicate cracks within the system?
The point here isn't a claim about the current state of the current conflict, but about the ability to use certain types or sources of information to make meaningful conclusions about the state of the world. Different states lie in different ways, both deliberately and as the natural form of dissembling. For the Americans, the metaphor of kabuki theater exists for the sort of going-through-the-motions that has no real impact on the final result. For the Europeans, there will (almost) never be a diplomatic meeting that does not make positive 'progress' or that is not 'productive.' Examples could continue. There is quite often a public default position, regardless of what goes on behind the scenes.
If you want to take Iranian public rhetoric as presumptively true, and make the possibility that it's just public dissembling false the caveat, I'm not going to stop you. In fact, I will thank you for remembering the caveat. But before you feel disquiet and defeat, it might be worth considering whether Iran might have a default public persona of defiant triumphalism, and consider how that compares or contrasts if the Iranian opponent is an actor with the media objectivity and positivity that surrounds Donald J. Trump, and consider how that might shape your perception... and the information that would be provided to you.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Partly because right now is a politically opportune moment, but also because a lot of groundwork had to be laid to set up a viable path to cross the hundreds of miles.
Agreed on both of these parts. One of the frustrating elements of the early-war discussion was something barely discussed at all- the fact that both US and Israel have elections this fall. Trump was already more or less doomed to lose the Republican trifecta, but Israel was also going through a potential major shakeup. This was a political window of opportunity for both parties, even aside from other elements and potentially limited opportunities.
This is not a claim that it's an opportunity that should have been taken, or was right to have taken, or any such thing. But Israeli political calculus would be factoring the potential 6+ years before the next potentially favorable US executive, and the US executive branch that's been trying to settle issues (starting with Venezuela) would be measuring the window of opportunity in even shorter time frames.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
There should be a strong prior for widespread support of the regime in charge.
Why?
Most authoritarian states exist without widespread support. They exist with widespread acceptance / tolerance / fear of consequences if they actively oppose. I suppose we could claim passive acceptance as widespread support, but that's not how many people use the term.
Government rallies and government funerals are extremely weak indicators of popular support. It's the classic conflation of proportional versus absolute numbers issue, further complicated by the resources of a state to pay for pageantry and attendance.
Even if they're not armed, where's the arson and window-breaking, the rocks thrown at police? Even Palestinians can manage that much.
That was about 2-3 months ago. Understandable to have forgotten. It's not like the even the Hamas-Palestinians are doing much different after their own recent, uh, bad time.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
I'd be happy to concede for someone who wants to be concerned about both, so long as it's consistent. But as you say different forms of lethal conflict is still lethal conflict. That this is hard to determine parts of the conflict because of their deliberate and systemic use of proxies doesn't change the underlying point: there is no caveat to the right of self-defense under international law that says you can only act against proxies, any more than there is a word-cell series of claims that lets someone go 'I can hit you (indirectly), no hit backs.' There is no principle under international law that the other party must accept your denials of plausibly deniable proxy warfare: the determination of plausibility, and what to do with it, has always rested with the other party.
I generally don't contest peoples personal opinions per see, so I wouldn't spend much time or interest on anyone who wants to take the position on who 'started' the conflict. But who chose to 'start' a conflict is different from who chose to continue it in certain ways, and how, and there is plenty of agency open for the Iranians on that front as well as anyone else. There are a number of regional states that fought multiple wars against Israel who have chosen other paths, and there are an even larger number of global states who fought wars with the US for whom relations are anywhere from cool to cordial. Making hating the Americans and the joos part of your raison d'être is a thing a polity chooses to do, not something their chosen enemies chose for them.
So- with those caveats- I otherwise generally agree with the point that this conflict didn't 'start' in 2026. We are watching an air-campaign that has been a series of campaigns, from both directions, for longer than most members of this site have paid attention to global affairs. It is not the start of a long-war any more than the Iranian supplied-and-directed artillery campaign via Hezbollah that displaced tens of thousands in northern israel was the start, or the airstrike on Solemani when he was on his way to engage Iranian-allied militia groups in Iraq that off-and-on attacked Americans was the start, or the American invasion of Iraq as a neighboring security treat was the start, or the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentine was the start.
It is also not going to be the end of the long war. Personally, I doubt it was ever intended to be, but that is a post for another time.
So Iran did not have the option to use its full military capability against Israel and the US. It was either fire against the Gulf states or not use some of those weapons at all except as a deterrent.
If firing against the gulf countries ends up looking very stupid in hindsight, and retaining deterrence is something useful even in hindsight, you might as well say 'It was either doing something very stupid or not using the weapons except for something useful.'
Nor is your framing a particularly well structured either-or. There is the third option of 'not use those weapons against host nation infrastructure.' Or even the fourth option of 'not use those weapons against countries who did not give offensive basing and overflight to the Americans.' There was even a fifth option, of only using it against American bases, which are typically camps in the middle of the deserts. If that had happened, the response in, and from within, the gulf countries might have been far different. There's even the sixth option of allocating all the close end-weapons against one gulf state in particular, say the Saudis. There are a lot more than six possible alternatives.
I could go on, but I hope it isn't needed. Iran was not in a use-it-or-lose-it scenario, where if they didn't use the weapons now they'd never get a chance to later. Nor was there any obligation, requirement, or military necessity to use them as they had. It was a choice, and while it may have had a reason behind it, it wouldn't be at all surprising for it to be a bad reason that will look worse with hindsight.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
If true, it would be one of the bigger own-goals of a national defense strategy in recent memory.
While attacking a state you've already deterred from joining into a war coalition is certainly a bold strategy, it does have a few potential drawbacks. Such as providing a basis for more direct and open military ties that previously had to remain secret.
But there's also the throughput implications. Anyone familiar with the graphs of the strikes per day should remember that Iran basically front-loaded most of its launch capacity in the opening days, and was followed by a week of exceptionally suppression. Those first days were going to be the most significant opportunity Iran had to overwhelm the established defenses at known targets. Well, there's a rather significant difference in the military disruption if you throw 600 missiles in 3 days at 3 states or if you spread it around 6, or 9, and so on.
Of course, the war isn't over yet, and however it ends I'm sure there will be no shortage of people insisting it was fought the more reasonably way possible by their favorites. But absent a reduction of the arab states into Iranian tributaries at the end of this, I suspect that- if those basing denials were true (and communicated)- the costs to Iran over time may not be seen as worth the gains they thought they'd get.
I've seen a lot of discussion online about whether or not Iran would mine the strait, and it looks like it's happening.
Mate, not to put too fine a point on it, but CNN was publishing on this 2 weeks ago.
I'm not one to condemn people for not paying attention to ongoing conflicts. But if you have seen a lot of discussion about whether Iran would mine the strait or not over the last two weeks, you were seeing a lot of discussion by people who were either low-information, in denial, or falling for (admittedly generally widespread) efforts of international governments and their media-allies to downplay true-but-inconvenient facts. Update priors, and past questions, accordingly. If you are wondering how the mines would change the conflict, you've had the last two weeks to observe the impacts. If it was a game changer, the game changed about half the length of the conflict ago.
Now, there's certain some interesting questions or discussions that could be raised from this media report... such as why is there a press surge now of 'old' news? Why did so many states and media try to smother the initial information in the first place, including CNN not revisiting it? Is there an actual new development on the ground, or is this part of DC kabuki theater as the Trump administration tries to move towards closing the conflict while the Iranians deny there are talks?
An international attention surge might have utility to someone. Or maybe something else has happened.
I'll offer a measured apology if this came off as being too harsh at the start. However, treating old news as new is a pet peave of mine, in part because it is such a classic propaganda technique used by the originators (which are not you) to get people to react rather than remember context.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
So where does their good reputation come from?
The mid-2000s successes of their proxies that they trained/equipped/advised in frustrating / stonewalling the Israeli's in Lebanon and the US in Iraq. These were cases where the larger conventional force made deliberate efforts to win a decisive battle, and failed to reach any sort of conclusive victory. This translated into prestige for the groups that won-by-not-losing against world-leading professional militaries, and prestige-by-proxy for the IRGC.
The best example was the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the Israeli's launched a conventional invasion into southern Lebanon. In the month-long war that followed, Hezbollah fought with guerilla tactics the entire time and was not cleared by IDF forces, launched over 4000 rockets with the IDF being unable to stop it, and kept the war goal of the captives away from the Israeli reclamation efforts. It's debatable how well / long Hezbollah would have lasted had the war not been brought to a quick close after a month, but the war did conclude and Israel certainly did not achieve its objectives in that time. Hezbollah went toe to toe with one of the more respected militaries in the world, won the war it set out to do, and almost certainly would not have without IRGC efforts.
A later but still IRGC-coded example was the Huthis in Yemen. While the Huthis are their own entity who are more partners than pawns, cultivating that relationship was an IRGC effort, and it provided major frustrations to Iran's adversaries. The Saudi war in Yemen for one, the later closure of the red sea shipping, and the US inability to stop that as well. It provided the durability of a missile force focused on area denial, which is what the
The IRGC reputation has never rested on the ability to protect people and infrastructure, so its failures in that respect don't really work against their reputation. The Iranians have pursued a proxy-war-abroad strategy for decades, basically since their foundational experience in the Iran-Iraq War, and that has generally worked from a premise of having other people bomb militants and infrastructure anywhere but Iran.
The strategic wisdom / competence of the IRGC strategy is an entirely different question, one where I have a dim view that boils down to 'they lost the plot on how a proxy strategy works,' but the IRGC's current (recent) reputation derives mostly from its proxy warfare capacities abroad, which are significant.
Playing (and nerd-analyzing) a fair bit about the fictional war game MENACE, which I actually mentioned I'd be off line a fair bit more when I gave it an endorsement a month ago. Basically my most-anticipated tactical strategy game in some time, and it's been a loooong time since I had a game scratch the itch so good that it actually makes me want to spend more time with it than on the Motte.
I know, I know. Hard to believe. Also not the first time this has produced a funny gap, since I typically don't post my gaming hobbies much here. The curse of having different accounts for different hobby spaces.
Plus, when I saw the initial top-level Iran War threads, by the time I had the time to post they were typically in a state where there wasn't much productive surface vector I could touch upon that wouldn't have easily been toxiplasma culture warring. Fog of war, heated emotions, and various efforts to shove everything into paradigms I often find badly fitting at best.
As much of a dodge as it may seem, I am trying to get into fewer internet arguments this year.
I am taking notes and do have a few effort posts lined up for the que. One of which is a long-desired post on the idea of the Cult of the Offense, and some of the nuances / distinctions that this conflict highlights or contrasts.
Also @hdroacetylene
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
So the US Supreme Court struck down most (all?) of Trump's tariffs in a 6-3 ruling, ruling that its use exceeded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This appears to have largely been done under the major questions doctrine, the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. The majority ruling is that Trump's attempt to claim and leverage emergency powers overstepped this, plus doubtless other nuances I'm not noting. The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.
(Do I predict the Trump administration will try to use this as a basis to give money to the electorate in a totally-not-buying-votes-before-mid-terms scheme? No, but I think it would be funny if political bedfellows put Democrats on the side of big business importers who will make claims on the refunds even if they passed on costs to American consumers.)
Trump will reportedly make comments soon. While this will be a major policy loss for the Trump administration, and promises to make the next many months 'interesting,' part of my curiosity is what this ruling might hold (or have held) for other court cases in the dockets, there will also be significant geopolitical reflections on this for months and years to come. This ruling wasn't entirely a surprise, and various countries (and the European trade block) had been hedging in part to let the court case play out. We'll see where things go from here, particularly since not all Trump tariff threats were derived from the IEEPA, and so there will probably be some conflation/confusion/ambiguity over various issues.
While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.
For longer commentary from Amy Howe of the SCOTUS Blog-
In a major ruling on presidential power, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in a series of executive orders. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the tariffs exceed the powers given to the president by Congress under a 1977 law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats.
The court did not weigh in, however, on whether or how the federal government should provide refunds to the importers who have paid the tariffs, estimated in 2025 at more than $200 billion.
The law at the center of the case is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, which authorizes the president to use the law “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the president declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” A separate provision of the law provides that when there is a national emergency, the president may “regulate … importation or exportation” of “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”
The dispute at the center of Friday’s opinion began last year, when Trump issued a series of executive orders imposing the tariffs. Lawsuits filed by small businesses and a group of states, all of which say that they are affected by the increased tariffs, were filed in the lower courts, which agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not authorize Trump’s tariffs. But those rulings were put on hold, allowing the government to continue to collect the tariffs while the Supreme Court proceedings moved forward.
In a splintered decision on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not give Trump the power to impose the tariffs. “Based on two words separated by 16 others in … IEEPA—‘regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “Those words,” he continued, “cannot bear such weight.” “IEEPA,” Roberts added, “contains no reference to tariffs or duties.” Moreover, “until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.”
In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers,” Roberts said, “it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.
The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined another part of the Roberts opinion, holding that Trump’s tariffs were also not supported by the text of IEEPA. “The U.S. Code,” Roberts noted, “is replete with statutes granting the Executive the authority to ‘regulate’ someone or something. Yet the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the main dissent, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In his view, Trump had the authority under IEEPA to impose the tariffs because they “are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.” Moreover, he suggested, although “I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward … because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.”
Kavanaugh also warned that “[i]n the meantime, however, the interim effects of the Court’s decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”
(And apologies to @Gillitrut, who posted while I was drafting this.)
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.
My dear strange German, if I didn't want to read about your opinion, I would not be on the Motte. Not only am I on the Motte, but you are one of the posters I enjoy. Keep sharing your opinions, my southern kraut who is north of me.
My sense of snark obliges me to note that transgender affirmation surgery of minors was the policy of the government medical establishment barely more than a year ago, and the administration before that had to knowingly lie about its own healthcare proposals to get them past the public at which point many of the promised benefits that weren't deliberate lies still failed.
'Incredibly stupid and incorrect beliefs on medical care' has been more or less the public health policy of the United States for longer than many Mottizans have been cognizant of US politics.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
I'd say no. It's less about fuck-you RNG, and more about being very unforgiving if you make mistakes like 'I think I'll try running a glass cannon mass infantry build against a faction with literal artillery and laser designators' or 'they couldn't hit an elephant at that distance' without actually investing in the appropriate enablers. However, there is always a counter or three to any given threat, it will just come with tradeoffs (opportunity costs annd otherwise).
(I will note that for now you should only play on the lower two difficulties- the highest difficulty is pretty unbalanced, basically giving you something like 60% supply and giving the AI 140% supply and breaking a lot of the ammo economy logic. This isn't RNG though, just list economy.)
The game's RNG is low in tactical shenanigans, typically following a law of averages approach, but high in mission framings like map setup. Tactically, the game follows a per-bullet-accuracy salvo, in which each bullet in a 10 shot salvo has its own accuracy and armor penetration roles, as opposed to XCOM's all-or-nothing salvos. This does mean your high-power/single-shot anti-armor weapons are swingy, but there are ways to get literal guaranteed hits with certain weapons.
The game's start-of-mission map settup is procedural generation, however, so it's quite possible to have particularly hard/brutal maps, like enemies with artillery who have spotters hidden in high-concealment forests or who can start killing units before most of your units can reach. There are absolutely tools to mitigate this, but until you learn what and how...
The game is actually pretty low-lethality for your irreplaceable investments. MENACE is a platoon-level tactics game, and your named/controlled characters are squad leaders. Squaddies are the members of your squads, and they act as both an increase to your primary squad-weapon damage output (1 more guy holds 1 more gun to shoot with) and as HP gates. The squad leaders- who are what you invest promotions and gear investments into- will never go down until all the other squaddies do, and when you do you have 4 turns to stabilize them to save them, and there are medevac assets you can invest / find in operations. Squaddies in turn are a relatively fragile-but-replaceable strategic resource. It doesn't take much to kill a squaddie, but you can invest in a base upgrade to recruit 2 a mission, and start with a medical center that will save 1 from death and has a 15% chance to save each subsequent casualty.
The game can be quite punishing if you ignore various threats and make bad investments at a list-building level. Every faction has its unique strengths, and good lessons learned against some factions become very bad against others. This also applies to specific mission formats, where sometimes a concentration of forces is all you need, and other times it's bad. I enjoy this in the sense that you need to not be complacent or try to build an all-rounder build, but constantly re-adjust your list. Other people hate it, and do things like call defense missions impossible (because they invest all their points in a few super squads who can't maintain enough map control).
The key system that helps mitigate/tie all of this together is the intel system. Intel is a campaign stat that indicates how much insight into the enemy you'll have. At the starting level 0, you'll only have a blip that there is something in a general area, at levels 2 you might generally know if it's infantry or vehicles with some units specifically identified, but at levels 5-6 you'll know exactly what type of unit is where. This system comes at the opportunity cost of other investments, but lets you align the right units and the right gear the right way. This basically removes most of the 'surprise!' elements that are technically RNG from you not knowing the full enemy list in advance.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
The fixed characters are a real problem in my opinion. With BB's proc-gen brothers, there was always room for buildcrafting, and trying to make the misshapen mongrels you got as recruits work nicely with your company. But in MENACE, the characters are utterly fixed, so the room for buildcrafting collapses into one or two meta builds per character, and that's it. Very sad. I really hope the devs have plans to shake this up, or else it's stale before it even leaves Early Access.
I don't intend to disagree about pre-defined characters in a characterization sense, but I find MENACE's mechanical build-sets far more flexible than BB's. BB was pretty much as fixed in meta terms once you started building for specific roles, which any meta-optimizer did. Even if you try to fit MENACE leaders into two each- and I think it's pretty clear/consistent that there is a big-squad route and a smaller squad route for most characters- that's still 2x [size of cast] variations to play with. Even if you insist on always every character-unique perk, there are certainly ways to justify your spread of the remainder on repeat games. And that's if you even have the same characters, given how the recruit new leaders system works.
I particularly think part of MENACE's build-composition flexibility is because of how the point-buy, promotion cost-scaling systems, and weariness systems work together to encourage you to take different, and worse/cheaper, units into the field. This is such a contrast to the XCOM-like model of hyper-scaling your best members repeatedly, with only a backup team as necessary, and it invites all sorts of compromises and adjustments in the process.
Like, don't get me wrong. I like my attack dog Rewa. But I learned to love Bog in his battle bus, and then make up for his poor accuracy by taking the sort of weapons that don't need accuracy. Or Ivory, who has a floor of 1/3rd hits, and can get a massive increase to lethality if she has a partner to designate targets (or self-designates).
Other than that, I like it. The point-buy system is right up my alley. Trade-offs, trade-offs everywhere. And the enemy plays by the same rules (though with a bigger budget to compensate for the mediocre AI). The tactical combat is also pretty good. Moment-to-moment, it's engaging and nicely punishes dumb mistakes. It gets a little samey, but that's probably down to this being the minimum viable product they were willing to go into EA with. More content will help.
Tradeoffs is a big thing I'm loving. One of my favorite dynamics of a point-buy system versus a traditional progression system is that there is an incentive to take worse weapons, just because they are cheaper. Trying to make those work, and finding the synergies that can, has been fun.
For example- there's a specific enemy in the [spoiler] faction that is notoriously tanky. Absurdly so. It typically takes a whole lot of concentrated fire to grind it down, and a lot of discussion focuses on late/end-game weapons to brute force it.
Unless... you find out that 25% in damage modifiers from any source can make one of the 'worst' anti-tank weapons one-shot each model. And now it's a challenge of who in the crew can pull that off.
Figuring out who can make the cheap-o options work is such a treat, and even if it will be a 'solved problem' at some point it can allow for a fair bit more build diversity beyond 'get the next tier of weapon.'
But I digress. (And hope you have enough fun.)
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
If anyone plays turn-based strategy games, MENACE went into early access last Thursday. If that is your genre, I do recommend, but with caveats.
While social media types have characterized it as a new XCOM-like, since it is sci-fi with aliens, it's really more like a tabletop wargame. Specifically, it uses a points-buy list-building format, where your company-scale force is built with every model and equipment costing points to field, as opposed to capping you to a maximum of X characters of most squad-scale tactics game. It also has an alternating-activation system more akin to chess as opposed to you-go-I-go turn order of moving all your pieces at once ala XCOM. Add in some of its own systems, and it's proving to be more of a (de)buff meta, as opposed to the XCOM alpha-strike meta that most XCOM-likes fall into. Plus, no overwatch, so no glacial-but-optimal defensive turtle crawl across the map.
Instead, MENACE uses a suppression system of heavy debuffs to suppressed unit actions and accuracy that promote a find-fix-flank-finish combat loop. This combines with the point-buy system because every weapon, manpower body, and even promotions increases the cost to field a unit. Every point you spend on fielding or upgrading one asset is a point that can't buy another capability or upgrade. Specialization is the cost-efficient name of the game, but over-specialization can make you brittle. It's a combination of systems that can be rough to learn or pick up, but a very high skill ceiling means that when you do, battles can transition from brutal grinds to practically dancing.
There are rogue-like progression elements to the system, meaning no two campaigns will be quite the same in terms of character recruitment, gear progression, or mission format. The game breaks missions into operations of 3-5 missions each, with more rogue-like progression for selecting between different rewards or modifiers for the mission. There is no tech/R&D/manufacturing system, but instead a barter-economy market where you trade in (RNG) salvaged enemy gear towards a (RNG) selection of items, with a rotating selection of offers that means you can't just save for good things that may not come. Since the gear system under point-buy means sidegrades are often preferrable to upgrades, you get get different sorts of tensions as its rarely 'what's best' but 'what is best for what,' which in turn depends on character builds and promotions.
All the same, the game is very clearly in early access, and not complete. This is normal for the developer, who did the cult-hit Battle Brothers which was in early access for a year. Here it means the story and character writing is only at the introductory level, there are clearly unfinished assets, and various balance aspects will doubtless be revisited. There is also the inevitable jank that comes from RNG maps and, meaning sometimes RNJesus will bless you and sometimes you will feel abandoned. It is still an excellent tactical combat system, but you can be forgiven for holding off.
Price-wise, MENACE will probably maintain a $40 base price. However, Steam has a 25% discount for the next week and a half, so $30 thru 19 Feb.
I do recommend, and if it seems like I'll be posting less for a while, well, yeah.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Congress has until the February 13 deadline to fund DHS, and negotiators have signaled that elements like body camera expansion and training could be areas of agreement, while warrant rules and mask policies remain unresolved.
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
But whatever the aggregate statistics show, there clearly are individual cases of misconduct being uncovered via open records requests. Traditional media use the same public records laws in their reporting, which certainly does uncover misconduct and generally inform the public.
Cases of county sheriffs drinking and driving, questionable shootings by officers, and other cases of potential misconduct appear on some of these body cam channels.
Yet on these channels, videos of possible police misconduct are dwarfed by lurid arrests for often minor charges. Police departments won’t resist public records requests that merely show ordinary citizens being embarrassed and officers in a sympathetic light. And an average YouTube viewer probably prefers to be titillated rather than depressed by police violence. So while you wait for videos of abusive police behavior, in the meantime, you can get footage for videos like “Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired” or “Drunk 18-Year-Old Girl Completely Loses It During Arrest” or “Woman Sets Porta Potty On Fire Because She Doesn’t Like It.”
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
“This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
I'm remembering my post last year about how Trump can (lawfully) strike back in the sort of protest-fueling excesses of the Democratic civil war.
I don't think anyone needed to goad Don Lemon into doing something stupid- he hardly needs the help- but for all that the recent Mineapolis shootings gave Trump/ICE a political black eye, I think they've also demonstrated the sort of political solvent effect of the democratic civil war as factions nominally unify against Trump, actively compete for the kudos of opposing Trump, but also stand to benefit for when Trump turns on one or another faction for its excesses.
In just the last few weeks, after all, the most recent Dem VP has functionally ended his political career and said he'll never run for election again, a government shutdown effort couldn't even form various party members said nope so fast, various Democratic governors and AGs have had widely divergent stances on opposing ICE, with the relatively hardcore anti-IC AGs getting minimal political support from 2026 establishment frontrunners like Newsom. Rather than nation-wide anti-ICE riots following two shootings, the best the party is managing is another No Kings nationwide protests, which are almost certainly going to try and enforce a peaceful protest persona as a contrast to the anti-ICE tactics of MN.
This isn't a verdict of victory or defeat one way or another, but I think it is demonstrative that the party conflict is dynamic, and more importantly dynamic in a way that does give the Trump administration a number of legal ways to go after not-so-edge actors, even with many hostile/oppositional judges in the judiciary. And these cases, in turn, are probably going to catch not-so-minor players in the Democratic Party civil war, shaping the trajectory in ways some people will not only try to capitalize on, but set conditions for.
Where are we getting the idea that this is what is happening?
Where are you getting the idea that I am claiming that is what is happening?
Particularly when, just further down in the exchange, I helpfully clarify for any confused Russians in the audience who might have confused a general argument for a specific claim-
To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.
I think this works well enough as a response from me, so thank you.
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