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
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.
We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today.
?
The Iraq War coalition was framed as a pre-emptive war on the basis that Saddam did not yet have nukes (the only WMD to 'vaporize), but that he was trying to maintain the ability to create them in the future. The theory- propaganda, if you prefer- was that he was known to have pursued them in the past, there was reason to believe he was trying to maintain capabilities while actively circumventing sanctions, and that the consequences would be in the future if not acted upon now.
It was a casus belli premised on the argument that Saddam could not vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance.
I can tell by the lack of responses that this comment didn't really resonate with anyone else either.
Looks at OP vote count of -10 at time of writing.
Looks at response vote count of +29 at same time.
Raises eyebrow
It's been awhile since I last saw someone try and pull a 'no one agrees with you' bandwagon fallacy from a nearly 40 vote deficit and from negative resonance.
Is this just "Nothing ever happens, stop overreacting" in more words?
No, it is 'words have meanings, and making false accusations don't make them true.'
False accusations can, however, push people towards motivated reasoning sillyness where they confuse the justified response to their sillyness as tyranny.
Dean
Flairless
17d 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.
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
And if we ignore all the other requirements, it's only as hard as the exceedingly hard and expensive part that will take a substantial period of time and be subject to all sorts of expensive disruptions.
Which returns to assuming the conclusion, or rather assuming you have the police state in place to pre-empt the problem that could prevent the establishment of the police state following an invasion.
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
Main answer: None of the above. The ICE tactics you describe are not blackbagging by standards that would have been applied outside of Trump.
Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that?
Touching grass and recognizing that if you have to assume for the sake of argument that the outgroup is uber-boo, then you are admitting that the outgroup is not, in fact, uber-boo.
If the outgroup was uber-boo, you would not need to assume the conclusion for the sake of the argument, nor would you need to change standards to invoke pejoratives. Instead, there are years of precedent in of people not being disappeared for vocal opposition to the regime.
Conversely, acting on a false consensus that the outgroup is uber-boo, and then taking actions that merit a corresponding response in even a non-boo context, will instead be viewed as confirmation bias that the outgroup is uber-boo. Thus self-justifying more actions that do warrant detention from even non-boo actors.
These detentions, in turn, would be prevented by not perpetuating false perceptions that the outgroup is uber-boo meriting detention-worthy opposition.
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.
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
Imagine the sci-fi plot hooks for aliens who only know groups by reputation.
Maybe in the sense that as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps becomes ever more entrenched as a state-within-a-state, the corruptive influence of all that money and administrative self-interest will secularize it like the Egyptian Army?
Of course, then you get dynamics where the IRGC's perks and privileges derive from a permanent proxy-war footing, which merely means they'd increasingly rationalize sustained proxy conflicts on increasingly secular grounds, as Pakistan does.
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
But do the observed actions of Iran indicate a burning irreconcilable hatred, or standard-issue hostility, the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history?
Setting aside that both degrees are the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history-
-and that distinction is largely irrelevant when you working within a single leadership generation, which Iran still is for the founding revolutionary leadership class whose personal vendettas still apply even if their successors in a few generations change their mind and shift category-
-either would suffice for what Nybbler said.
This is the position Nybbler made that you quoted to dispute-
When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.
-and no part of this position on the nature of animosity, which makes it a distinction without a difference. Whether the Iranians elites have a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred' or not doesn't challenge the premise.
If someone with 'standard-issue hostility,' where 'standard' includes decades of terrorism in foreign countries against US institutions and directly supporting attacks on US forces when the US and Iran are not at war, is telling you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it (still) makes sense to believe them.
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
Because not only are those slogans backed by authoritative position statements from senior members of the Iranian state, they are backed by decades of observed actions, including state sponsorship of terrorism and proxy-militia attacks on American civilian, military, and diplomatic efforts in other countries.
'You should not believe any given political slogan' is not the same as 'you should not believe any political slogan.' Many political slogans are, in fact, generally accurate indicators of policy direction. Nybbler made the appropriate calibration from taking a statement to the directionional.
Excellent addition. Especially as not only have the costs of war risen since then, but so have the costs of occupation post-'victory.'
AKs and RPGs were enough to break the cost-benefit logic of emperial economies, and IEDs and manpads could make even 'less total' occupations prohibitively expensive. The modern development of drones are an even greater obstacle to projecting power at a, well, global scale.
This doesn't mean a 'world war' is impossible, but it really does beg the question of who is going to be fighting where how. The US ability at power projection is absolutely going to be hemmed in in the weeks/months/years/decades to come, but so is everyone else.
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
It wasn't chuck Norris - you would only need 1 plane, not 6.
Well, clearly the other stealth bombers are diversions to disguise Chuck Norris's actual entry point for as long as possible.
Dean
Flairless
15d 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
13hr ago
I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them.
Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground. Which is already hard enough without casually asking China for a few more mountains as well.
There's a reason the article you listed tried to frame impressive growth in terms of ratios of batteries produced (battery storage increased by a factor of 100 in a decade, 16 nuclear power plants) and not in terms of absolute volume of storage needed (storage capacity produced versus storage capacity needed) or grid scale (16 nuclear power plants versus the 54 US nuclear power plants in service, when nuclear power is only about 1/5th of US energy production anyway). The former works from starting from a very small number, and the later would put the battery capacity projections in contrast to much, much bigger numbers.
Which is the usual statistical smuggling, as is the ignored opportunity costs obligated by solving the green energy solution that requires the battery storage at scale.
One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose. Given that the fundamental advantage of the technology of a battery in the first place is that it is for things that cannot / should not / you don't want to be connected to a power grid in the first place, massive battery investments to sit connected to the grid and useless for things that only batteries can do is a major cut against the cost-efficiency off all alternative battery uses of the batteries that could have been made for off-grid use. This is just a matter of supply and demand meeting with the absolute rather than relative scale referenced above. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs then fuel power plants, they certainly are not factoring in the higher marginal costs for all other batteries, and battery applications, the load-storage batteries are increasing the costs of by demanding the battery materials.
The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.' By necessity, the batteries are only storing / being charged with the energy generated that is excess to current demand in the windows where the renewables are sufficient. A renewable-battery strategy requires enough excess renewable generation in the good periods to cover the renewable deficits in the bad times... but this is literally planning to increase your fallow generation potential (100 vs 50 units of idle panels / turbines) in order to to charge the batteries for the time that 50 units of generation are offline. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs than fuel power plants, they are also not factoring in that they have to build considerably more generation capacity to feed the batteries. (And compensate for the energy storage loss to, during, or from the storage process.)
Add to this that both the green generation systems and the battery storage are competing with each other for the same chokepoint- processed rare earth minerals. They don't use the exact same amount for the exact same thing, but they are competing for many of the same inputs. If you order X units of rare earths for storage capacity, that makes the X units of rare earths for generation capacity that much more expensive because you are increasing complimentary demand for the same non-substitutable good. A renewable-battery solution at scale is increasing the cost-pressure of a limited resource, not just for other uses of the rare earths but with eachother.
And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China. Which absolutely has used cut-offs as a geopolitical dispute tool with countries with policies it finds disagreeable. While I am sure they would happily sell a few more mountains of processed rare earths for mountains more of money, it would be a, ahem, risk-exposed investment.
Risks, costs, and limitations that could largely be avoided if you did not invent a problem by over-investing in renewables in the first place. Batteries are a solution for the costs of renewables, but renewable generation weren't the solution to an energy challenge either. They were a political patronage preference to the already-engineered solution of nuclear power, which would free up massive amounts of rare earths for more useful (and less ecologically harmful applications) than renewable energy schemes.
The Economist isn't particularly highbrow either. Kind of mid-wit for just recycling consensus takes with branding. Very much in the middle of the low-mid-high IQ meme.
Dean
Flairless
21d 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
22d 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.'
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Sounds like a still not happy to, then.
Good faith doesn't require such petty sneers.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
Building on this, the 'more important' ceasefire for most of the world isn't even Israel-Iran, but US-Iran.
The US entry was limited to the bunker buster attack (which Israel could not get on its own). Iran responded with the telegraphed attack on the US base in Qatar. This was a basic tit-for-tat, and the 'cease fire' had neatly concluded that.
A lot of Iran's more major potential escalatory steps- shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, needing a nuke for regime survival- are assets more against the US than Israel. But they are also assets with higher global fallout for global energy markets / global proliferation than just the Israel-Iran conflict as is/was.
It's not that the Israel-Iran part isn't important, but even if it breaks down (and there were reportedly some late-fires already) it won't have the same implications of the US being directly involved.
I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
This part I'll disagree with, however. Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes. That Iran has reached a point where its proxy strikes lead to direct retaliations is more of a measure of strategic misplay of proxy warfare* than an issue that can be resolved by gaining nukes.
*The first rule of proxy warfare is that plausible deniability requires the opponent to variously not know, or have enough doubt, such that they prefer to avoid the consequences of direct conflict and prefer to focus on the proxy regardless. If the proxy lacks plausible deniability, then there is no meaningful difference to the receiving state, and the proxy-using state has no higher authority to appeal to if the receiving state wishes to retaliate directly.
I would agree. Who besides you is using this logic?
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