Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a 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. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
or the whole thing is a combination of Oppression Fetishized, and being used to drum up support and donations.
'Follow the money' has been sound advice for generations for deciphering contexts for a reason.
As I said I don’t have any special insight into this sort of thing. If the end is to take over and disappear Americans, I don’t know what would look different.
Media controls, which really means internet controls, which really means social media control.
When states turn to disappearance campaigns, one of the key points is that people, well, disappear. Lose track of them. No one can find them for long, long periods of time. And part of this is that you prevent media from being to follow up- and that the media that try, also disappear. No official, reputable media reports on them, and the absence is what is conspicuous. You can't hide that people disappear, and to a degree you don't want to, but the tactice works by the ambiguity. The ambiguity is provided by the media not providing answers.
The current administration has been more notable for reducing the levers of influence over media reporting than in building the influence apparatus. When Trump feuded with Reuters (or was it AP) over the Gulf of America renaming, his retaliation was to... kick the reporting organization out of the press pool. Access is what is typically used as the influence vector of a government over a reporter / organization, since access in controlled circumstances is what gives the ability to build ties / leverage over others. Separation is distance is a decrease in influence.
Similarly, the Trump administration very quickly took direct steps to dismantle the sort of media-influence apparatus that the Biden administration supported. Trump and Rubio very, very quickly distanced the US- and by distanced I mean shut down the parts of the State Department participating in it- government-supported-by-proxy media-rating and fact-checker-black-lists that were used to support, and penalize, media groups based on their reliability.
If the end was to take over and disappear Americans, this is the sort of institutional capacity you would want to coopt, not dismantle.
You would use the government hand to apply aggressive fact checking to purge the political hyperbolics as misinformation, purge the old regime's supporters from the institution, and then use the misinformation pretext to aggressively go after anyone claiming the government was disappearing Americans. Part of this would be by staging a few false positives- for example, conduct to prompt a social media storm that could be proven false- and then use the false-coverage to start administering sanctions/punishments on misinformation grounds.
Dismantling a tool that could be used for a nefarious purpose isn't proof that a nefarious purpose won't occur, but it's about as good as one can get from inference. Especially given the rather elaborate preparation kabuki sets the Trump administration has demonstrated to date, such as the whole DOGE saga and how it started with the USAID takedown. There was a heck of a lot of choreographing in that, which is about as good an indication of prepatory planning, and the sort of policy-cognizant planning that would recognize tools for a crackdown campaign.
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
Thanks for the summary, that was excellent. Did you find anywhere a further breakdown of who responded to the survey? I'm specifically interested in figuring out who the people in the UK are who responded saying they need more social media enforcement, because those people... have an interesting perspective.
There is a fair bit more source diving in the fuller paper, and more of the raw data stuff on the website that was linked in the 'billed as' section. IIRC, the main trend was 'political left consistently favors more content moderation of social media.'
I'm pretty sure we can find many historical examples beginning / ending hostilities within the same generation.
I'm also pretty sure you can admit that Iran specifically is already in its second, leaning into third, generation of participants.
If you want to go by senior leaders, they already are in the second senior leader generation and are well staged for a hardliner to lead the third. If you want to go by major institutional leaders, the late Soleimani of the IRGC was around 20 during the revolution and 60 when he died as the head of the IRGC, which is to say that most of the revolutionary paramilitary types are being done by younger men of post-revolution generations. The Iranian Revolution is about 46 years old, which is to say a child born after the 'new' Iran has had time to grow under up, be properly educated, fight, have kids, and for those kids to have been properly educated and in their fighting / parenting years as well. The Iranian theocracy absolutely has a revolutionary veteran ingroup for people who were involved in the revolution from the start, but the age of the average iranian- 34- means that most of the actual feuding-execution has been conducted by considerably younger people for a generation or two already.
When we look at historical examples of participants ending a feud in any generation, the proponents for ending it are generally not both declaring themselves an enemy while continuing to conduct routine hostilities to their end-of-life years. Almost as importantly, their key pillars of support tend not to gained their privileges with joining in on the feud, and don't stand to lose substantial influence and wealth if they let the feud go away.
Iran is the sort of structure you'd expect to see continue on a conflict across leadership generations. Both the autocrat-level senior leader selection processes and the state-within-the-state role and incentives of the IRGC support continuing the conflict. The senior leaders select for, and remove on a basis of a lack of, commitment to the Cause. Even the nominally elected representatives are pre-screened at the candidate selection level, and the non-elected power centers are even more deliberately managed.
This selection structure is in turn enforced by an institution that would lose its perks and privileges if the hostilities were to end. The IRGC is both a revolutionary-enforcer private army, but also a state-within-a-state whose privileges are justified by defending the revolution and executing the feud by, yes, bringing death to Americans. (And others.) This is the 'worst' of three worlds in terms of 'ending hostilities within the same generation'- selection for revolutionary fervor, material incentive for continuing, but also the prospect of punishment if a non-revolutionary successor took over. Then the IRGC would get fewer perks, and possibly more prison sentences for those things like domestic detentions and torture of political dissidents opposed to the revolution.
if we want to characterize Iran's leadership structure, they'd be closer to historical analogs of Imperial Japan- where being insufficiently hardline could get someone assassinated or the government functionally self-couped- rather than, say, Gaddafi in Libya, who happily engaged in European terrorism before trying to reconcile later. Japan notably continued its feuding until its government was forcibly resolved, and Gaddafi's feud was not as over as he might have thought when the European successor-governments saw an opportunity to strike back at him with US support.
I thought the question they were discussing was whether or not Iran has a blood feud with the US?
They were, but your question was not that question.
You quoted the section about believing someone who declares themselves an enemy, as opposed to Nybbler's characterization of a blood feud. Your response questioned why to believe a self-declaration of enemyship by comparing it to any other political slogan, as opposed to any other kind of conflict. Your basis of argument specifically ignorred the sort of validating actions (that would give slogans credibility) that is the understood background context of the US-Iranian feud.
Maybe I misunderstood something, but how would you describe the concept if not a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred'?
I wouldn't.
Partly because even irreconciliable feuds can be reconciled, because 'irreconciliable' is a judgement of the involved people's character, not an objective fact of nature. People's characters change with time and context, such that things that were impossible for them at one point are imminently possible at another. Reconciliation is usually by the descendants (future generations) rather than the initiators (the current Iranian leadership generation), and the more degrees of separation the better. I do not recognize / subscribe to a fundamental distinction between an irreconcilable geopolitical and a feud that could eventually ends, for the same reason I do not hold the same for any other 'unending' human relationship. There are no unending human relationships, because there are no unending and unchanging humans to have them. There are no permanent geopolitical conflicts, because the people having the conflicts change out.
The other part is I don't think 'blood feud' is a coherent enough concept to be meaningfully definable. I would certainly recognize as a metaphor for multi-generational hostility. I would also recognize it as a metaphor for hostility-on-general principle. But because 'blood feud' is so nebulous, it is also non-falsifiable. If your concept of blood feud is [A] and Nybbler's is [B], and Phailoor's is [C], Nybbler is not wrong for not being aligned with [A], or even in asserting [B] when rejecting [C].
Given that Nybbler's argument uses blood feud in the way Phailoor was using it- namely as Phailoor's short-hand for a conflict that is (as he put it) mostly a response to the US and which would end if the US stopped acting- and that Nybbler's point was far more about 'believe what they say' than 'there is a blood feud specifically because they say there is'- I also wouldn't read into blood feud as any sort of specific concept by either of them.
Dean
Flairless
27d ago
Assets that, if some reports are to be believed, were in some locations recently relocated and possibly preparing for an upcoming major strike that would coincide with the peace talks ongoing offensive.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.
Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Yes, but if the processing system uses dollars and US banks (or banks that eventually connect to US banks) then US can control it. Dealing with a ton of different currency without having an intermediary one where you can align everything to the single common measure could be challenging...
The other point is that if the actors using the system also want to use dollars and US banks separately, the US can still influence it. This is why the attempted Iran-EU exchange program died after the JCPOA fell apart. The Europeans mooted building what would basically have been shell companies to serve as intermediaries who would never touch dollars for Iran-EU trade, and the US simply moved the threat of secondary sanctions to any European companies that did work with the shell companies doing work with Iran.
This is part of the classic misunderstanding of the influence of the dollar in the international system. It doesn't actually matter if you use dollars in the transaction. Dollars are just a lower transaction cost medium of exchange, but everyone already had the ability to pay a higher transaction cost if they wanted to do currency swaps and such. What matters if you also, elsewhere, want to do business with the dollar system.
Dean
Flairless
7d ago
Imagine the sci-fi plot hooks for aliens who only know groups by reputation.
Dean
Flairless
8d ago
Individuals also tend to consider it to be very different in terms of moral responsibility, and culpability, when helping other people do things they want to do versus when you do something yourself. Individuals have agency and individual responsibility for the actions they choose to do.
Of course, that there is the rub. A common stumbling block in characterizing international affairs is the hyperagency versus hypoagency bias, where the a country's agency is inflated and anyone else's agency and responsibility is diminished / ignored.
Dean
Flairless
8d ago
Pretty much. People radically overestimate how hard it would have been for the Ukrainians to disassemble the Soviet nukes and make their own triggering device.
Which is what most of nuclear arms security comes down to. When nuclear munitions have unlock codes in the first place, the 'failsafe' mechanisms are failsafes in the sense of 'this trigger device will be borked.' They are not failsafes in terms of rendering the underlying material unable to be used, only unable to be used by the specific device.
Replace the device, and you have a possibly less efficient, but still effective, nuclear device. Which is among the less challenging parts of the nuclear problem.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Prior to the last week, I would have assumed Iran was a hard target and thus somewhat untouchable (smaller strikes/assassinations being the limit of messing with them). It's surprising how hard they've been slapped.
This has long been an error in the Iranian model. Iran simultaneously has been persuing a near-breakout strategy, but also an asymmetric proxy war strategy, betting that the former would deter retaliation against the later.
Nuclear deterrence really doesn't work that way, for the same reason that Ukraine didn't refuse to fight Russia because of nukes, and that fears that supporting Ukraine with material to fight back would lead to WW3 were non-credible. Nukes don't really deter retaliation in principle, only the form. So your point here-
But also in some ways, they are still. No one is going to be launching a ground invasion, and the regime is not looking hot right now, but still has power.
-is absolutely correct. But also nukes weren't needed for it. Iran is a mountain fortress, and the US didn't have the stomach for the much 'easier' Iraq occupation. A conquer/displace/occupy threat was not, and still is not, going to happen, even though nukes are the solution to that level of intervention, and even though said nukes aren't present.
It blows me away that despite a close connection to Russia, and increasingly China, they had such terrible IADS. If you can't get invaded, the only way your adversary, who has one of the world's best Airforce's, can cause you serious issues is by air striking you into pieces.
They Tried (TM). It's not that Iran's IADS was terrible- they had a number of modern systems. It's just that any system can be taken apart, and Israel has done a lot of prep work.
They must have thought their missiles and proxys were a deterrent, which they were at one point. But man it kills me. In PvP video games, if things are going well/fine, you should always be asking yourself "how do I lose" and it doesn't seem like the gang in Iran did that at all.
It wasn't just the missiles and proxies, but specifically Syria. If Assad hadn't fallen, this wouldn't be happening today, because Assad wasn't just a proxy/ally, but kept the airspace closed. When Assad fell, the Israeli's bombed the old regime (technically new regime's) air defense systems, which has opened up the air corridor they're using now.
At a larger level, Iran's strategy over-estimated Assad's resilience, missing the scholerosis of how the regime military was becoming more brittle rather than more firm when the Syria civil war went long. In turn, neglecting the defense, Iran over-leveraged the offense. Whether you believe they were directly involved/aware of Hamas' October attack or not, and IIRC there were elements of the IRGC/proxy network that claimed they did, Iran via Hezbollah tried to play it to the hilt in what was probably an attempt at a broader intifada.
That strategy fell flat, in a series of events that led to here. Because the West Bank did not rise up as well, the war was focused on Gaza specifically. Because it was focused on Gaza specifically, Hezbollah was used to open a northern front via the artillery campaign. Because Hezbollah was was using so many munitions for the artillery campaign, Iran was dependent on Syria to keep the flow.
But when Israel thwacked Hezbollah via the pager campaign and follow on fighting, Hezbollah was throne into disarray. Because Hezbollah was thrown into disarray, Iran was unable to rush forces to the Syrian capital to stop the rebel offensive. Because the rebel offensive could not be stopped, the logistic chain to resupply Hezbollah was broken. And the air corridor over Syria was opened. And so on and so on and so on.
That being said. It's not hard to imagine a world in which Israel's air campaign culminates eventually as they run low on munitions and a deal of some flavor is worked out. Then Iran spends the next 5 years rebuilding and furiously fortifying. Maybe they get some tips on anti-espionage purges from the Chinese. And then in 2030 were right back to two weeks ago status quo but this time Iran has hardened everything.
This is a devastating tactical victory for the Israelis, the strategic outcomes remain to be seen...
Pretty much. There are things that could result this in being a bigger strategic and not just tactical victory, but they more or less hinge on the Iranians agreeing to some sort of international seizure of their more highly enriched Uranium, and I'm not sure I see that coming.
I once read a comment here that said "being a doctor is one of the most prestigious things you can be". And I just thought... really? Really? I mean it's an important job, don't get me wrong. Thank you for your services. I'm happy for them that they're making a lot of money. But at the end of the day it's, from my perspective, still just another job. Doctors are, modulo individual technical skill, fungible, and fungibility is antithetical to prestige as far as I'm concerned.
There's a game I like to play whenever I go to a new country or region, and that game is 'what job does this culture value most?', as measured by 'what careers do parents, but especially mothers, try to push their children towards?' Or, more flippantly, 'where do the best and brightest get pushed towards?'
There are absolutely countries where being a doctor is uber-prestigious. Korean mothers had (still have, presumably) a reputation for pushing their children hard in that direction. By contrast, an adult who, say, stayed in the professional military beyond the conscription requirement had the stigma of 'maybe they couldn't cut it.' If they were better, they'd get a better job.
But as you note, that sort of prestige isn't a given. Doctoring doesn't get any easier, but there are places in the west where they aren't as respected / striven towards as, say, lawyers. Or financial services. And let's not get into truly different cultures. There are cultures where a military service is considered prestigious (often when access to the military is selective/limited, as opposed to 'scraping the bottom of the barrel). In parts of the middle east, a religious education / islamic religious certification is something broader families take great pride in. Etc. etc. etc.
The game I referenced before comes from how inevitably, any sort of socio-cultural 'list your top X most prestigious jobs you'd be proud of your kids having' tends to leave more than a few highly relevant jobs off for those who are not as good or gifted. It can be fun to (gently! in good faith!) tease out those gaps in social values versus social impact. Surprisingly, not as many people as you might think put 'going into politics' as 'prestigious' for their best and brightest kids... and so who can be surprised when politicians are viewed as midwits? Or 'just' government service? And so on?
If you ever need a cross-culture icebreaker conversation on a low-key social drinking, that's a good one. It's a good way to get your counterpart to open up about their background, why they are in the job they are in, and even what they feel about it- all of which are good for your personal/professional relationship. It's also an opportunity for some comradery, since no matter where they are in their own country's relative preference stack, there's usually another culture where their job would be in as high or even higher esteem (and thus you can signal recognition/respect that their culture may not ascribe to them). Alternatively, if they are highly placed and they know it, you can get them out of their normal headspace by inviting them to wonder what other jobs they might have had in a different context- something which gets them outside of their familiar context of knowing all the things they need to know.
I agree, which is why I didn't raise the issue or make an argument based off it. Eliot did, and did so as part of a wave of next-day response posts to dismiss objectors. The 'I can tell your post didn't resonate with anyone else' only works as a dismissal if a lack of 'resonance' is indicative of quality.
I am quite happy to agree that voting is tangential to quality. I also agree with you that it is 100% indicative of agreement/disagreement. An exceptionally high degree of agreement is the evidence of 'resonance' that makes eliot's attempted engagement flex, well, eyebrow worthy.
After all, if there's one thing more cringe than a dude-bro conspicuously flexing how they can pick up heavy weights, it is someone trying to do the same with light weights. It is all of the same arrogance, but none of the capacity.
Dean
Flairless
12d ago
If you're speaking metaphorically, you are directionally correct, though so time abstract I can't take any real position. If you're speaking literally, the reason your concept is an exaggeration is because drones are no more immune to the concept of cost-efficiency and opportunity costs and geopolitical balancing than anything else.
But, again, the context is so abstract there's not really much to disagree with.
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
That's part of it. When working in lower-trust societies, people make judgements based on their personal relationships, and part of that personal relationship comes from non-textual connotations. There are some writers who can convey their own personality, but by and large its easier and quicker to do so on the basis of the factors you mention.
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.
The reasons why are threefold (or more).
First, if the Chinese used their cruise missile potential like that, they'd have blown through most of their stocks in those three weeks, with relatively few left for the landing. (They'd have some, but proportionally). The nature of a missile that you can launch from long range is that throughput is high (you can fire them faster), and the diminishing returns of bombardment over time is low (you get less value per cruise missile on week three than on week one, and on week one than on day one, because everything easily killable either dies or becomes less-killable with time). It doesn't really matter what the specific number is, the nature of the munition is that you can shoot your stockpile far faster than you can sustain it, and your incentives are to do so early when it's most effective. If you're going to wait three weeks regardless, you'd might as well just hold fire, so those munitions could paralyze the Taiwanese ground force when you do move.
Second, the opening weeks of that sort uber-overt conquest scenario is a race against time, with the time being the ability of the US navy from the rest of the world's oceans to relocate to the Pacific. This is measured in weeks. Add however long you expect you ground force to take onto that. In a sustained offensive, the Chinese want their bridgehead established and expanding before American carrier airpower can bring, lest the reinforced carriers start cutting the sea lanes supporting the attack. That doesn't mean a day-0 landing attempt, but it does mean there's an optimal point before the island is bombarded into dust, but more importantly before the US carrier airpower in the pacific quadruples, to land.
Third, there is a non-trivial chance that Xi or whomever gives the go-ahead convinces themselves that the Taiwanese would collapse / surrender promptly once landed, whether because they convince themselves there won't be any resistance, that the resistance they will face will be brittle and easily crushed, or that once a landing is made the authorities will surrender, especially if if they believe their agents will defect. This is the sort of belief that leads to judgements that prioritize speed and audacity over preparation. Remember- in the 'don't screw up like this' invasion of Ukraine, the Russians did make the vast majority of their gains in those opening days and weeks, even when the ran into a wall, and a lot of that was because there was a bunch of actually-worked preparartions of corrupted government types who were bought off in advance. If that sort of optimism seems unreasonable, consider what level of default optimism you'd need to approve a landing in the first place, and then consider the system and identify who will tell Xi the optimist 'no.'
It also helps to remember that Omaha Beach 1944 was... not actually that well fortified, in the grand scheme of things. As much as it's been valorized / dramatized in the decades sense, even at the time it was attacked because it was a less fortified part of the coast, with the closest German reserve further away. It was not exactly held by the German best (or most). That D-Day remains (for now) the greatest amphibious invasion in history is a testament to how hard the logistics of amphibious warfare is, not the combat-intensity at the point.
C.S. Lewis remains a remarkable writer of timeless trends.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.
I must dissent. Of all the years to pick to claim identity didn't shape politics, picking a period right in the midst of the rise of nationalism as a mass movement (1789 French Revolution, fundamentally changing the relation between the people and the state based on identity) and the publication of the communist manifest (1848, formalizing an economic-class based approach to politics in addition to already existing national/religious identities) is certainly a place to start claiming that people weren't identifying or acting according to their identified category interest.
Even in the American system, identity-driven interest politics is not exactly hard to find. The dominance of state-identity interests (what is good for my state, the team I identify with) forged fundamental characteristics of the US political system (Senate versus House), major landmark legislations (the various new-state compromises over slavery balance), regional interest economic policies (north-east favored protectionism vis-a-vis the south-favored freer trade), and was regular motivation for which side of the civil war various people aligned with (check the generals).
There was never a halcyon period where people didn't have their politics shaped by their affiliation, and each individual made their judgements out of sincerity unbothered by allegiance. The affiliations that mattered most change by time and context- religious identitarianism, dynastic alliance structures, employment contexts- but they certainly existed, whether it's remembered or not.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
The idea that we should keep bombing the middle east because they hate us because we bomb them is silly logic.
I would agree. Who besides you is using this logic?
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
You saw 'proven' as if anything has settled, as opposed to there being regular ebbs and flows of various forms of underhanded tactics and political violence mixed in amongst other strategies. Any given tactic, underhanded or not, has diminishing returns.
It's not exactly hard to find evidence even in US history of when political violence was part of the public confrontations of the day. Your memory and/or awareness may be shaped by institutional efforts to downplay the existence- there is a reason that the American self-history of the civil rights movement hyper-focuses on peaceful protestor leaders like MLK while diminishing / downplaying / ommitting violent actors- but pick a 25 year period, and it's not exactly hard to find acts of terrorism mixed with general unrest or political controversy movements.
A lot of these are ignored / people are unaware of for a variety of reasons, including self-interest of partisans to downplay/disassociate themselves with ideological cousins or ancestors, but among the reasons is that movements that tried to capitalize on them often hit their limits and failed.
Dean
Flairless
24d ago
Are there enough Dems who genuinely want infrastructure / railroad / whatever funding to pass a bipartisan budget?
My recollection of the last decades was that the Democratic Congressionals were more than happy to raze the commons they might have shared with Trump, and that this inclination has only gotten stronger.
Dean
Flairless
24d ago
It wouldn't be a singular benefit, but benefits. As long as both parties have their own interests being advanced, they don't need a singular.
As for specific potential benefits: the clearest benefit is for Elon getting to politically distance himself from Trump and Doge as he returns back to being 'just' a business man and the various other actors who might want to capitalize on a Trump-Musk 'split.' Benefits to Trump are more nuanced, but could serve an internal political party management- the nominal straw that is breaking Trump-Musk is the budget, annd this could be used as a circle-the-wages call (demand) to get the Republicans on board to pass the bill despite the fiscal conservative objections.
If this was a coordinated break, however, I imagine it would be to bait the Democrats in Congress towards the Epstein file that Musk called attention to. This feud is the insinuation that it incriminates Trump, which is catnip to the Dems, but if this were coordinated, then both parties could know that Trump himself is not condemned, but also that other (mutual) political opponents might be. If the Epstein file was released by Trump directly, it could be dismissed as a political attack fabrication. If the Democrats 'force' it open during Congressional hearing discovery, they'd be owning the responsibility / consequence for any fallout. When you consider how MeToo ended up scalping more notable Democrats than Republicans....
(And- at the same time- the previous individual benefits listed above.)
To be clear- this isn't saying/claiming this is the reason. Merely that this is an example of a political ploy a fake falling out could serve.
Specifically, North Korea had enough artillery in range that the casualty estimates for the first day of shelling were on the scale of a Hiroshima/Nagasaki, i.e. a nuclear weapon.
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