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
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Their claimed conditions for peace before the ceasefire, for some. Reparations from the US, reparations from the Arab countries, the end of sanctions, and right to toll the strait of hormuz were all demands rather indicative of a state that sees money streams as a significant aspect of what they want.
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
'Again' implies that they had stopped closing the strait to regional traffic.
Aside from some high-visibility propoganda passages, the open commercial data of, say, Iraqi trade does not show any such unblocking.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced.
Why NaN, I wasn't expecting a defense of the Trump's blockade from you of all people. Normally I'd have expected a pithy 'but Trump said the strait was open!' to deny the Iranian role in blocking the economic activity they weren't letting pass.
'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.
It does have the echo of the totally-not-pro-Russians of yesteryear who were very adamant that the west was giving too much aid to Ukraine, and very evasive about what an 'appropriate' amount of aid was.
Dean
Flairless
24d ago
What, are you suggesting that Iran, leader of the axis of resistance that routinely hides military assets in restricted sites, might... lie for propaganda purposes?
Or exaggerate a real but smaller number of casualties? Or obfuscate if there was a valid military objective moved inside the school during the pre-war dispersals? Or benignly omit any past history or context of the infrastructure that might lead non-psychopaths to believe something nefarious?
Surely not. If you can't believe the government that months prior was killing thousands to over ten thousand citizens in the streets, who can you trust?
'I can't understand the reason for -position X-' is a bit of a peeve of mine when used as a rhetorical tool as opposed to confession of ignorance. If someone wants to understand, by all means, and if an explainer can't be clear that issue is on them. But when people who do understand and simply don't agree with underlying premise use it with the connotations of 'and if I don't understand it it's not reasonable,' it's just a form of consensus building via a implied reasonable person standard that smuggles in the person's standards in lieu of actually engaging other positions.
It's particularly recognizable when someone repeats the premise on the same topic. There's only so many times people can profess to having never heard a respectable counterargument until it's clear the lack of respect is on their end, not the interlocuters.
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