FlailingAce
No bio...
User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
1d ago
Why do you think that press releases are a reflection of the true plan? I'd argue the opposite - that the Trump admin uses deliberate strategic ambiguity in their public statements. To quote 2016 candidate Trump: "I don't want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is."
FlailingAce
6d ago
it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq
I think this is the key point. He was talking about invading and occupying the country. I don't think anyone, even the most rabid war hawks, is suggesting we should occupy the whole of Iran. From what I've seen, most of the usual hawks don't want troops on the ground at all.
As I've said before, the aim seems to be to destroy the ability of the IRGC to wage war in the hope that the Artesh or some insurgent group can move in and take control. And in the case that no such group succeeds, we can still be happy with destroying as much of the IRGC military infrastructure as we can. The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.
FlailingAce
7d ago
I would argue that the war ended because of media coverage of the Tet offensive. Most media treated it as a massive blow to the US, a surprise attack that showed the strength of the enemy. But militarily the offensive was a failure. It didn't meet its objectives and was very costly for the Vietcong. The media portrayed this incorrectly because they were already ideologically against the war. I agree there are many factors, but ultimately I think the US lost that war because of demoralization and successful psyops from the Vietnamese.
FlailingAce
7d ago
Is it normal to meet with foreign intelligence agencies and work with them in that?
Yes. That was my point. The only reason you think it's not normal is because you read a tweet to that effect.
FlailingAce
7d ago
Personally I wouldn't support a ground invasion at all. If I were the boss, I would be willing to commit troops to special operations and direct action missions that would provide outsized impacts that we couldn't achieve from long range strikes - but it's not clear to me that there are many targets that require that. What exactly would be the purpose of an invasion?
Also, there aren't 500,000 currently deployable ground troops in the entire US military. There may be that many troops in total, but to get most of those units ready to deploy would take months, and then months and months more to ship them overseas a few at a time. For more context, at the peak of the Iraq war we had 170,000 troops on the ground, and less than 5,000 were killed over the course of 8 years. I'm not sure you're really calibrated on this.
FlailingAce
7d ago
How do you think countries normally interact? A US Senator goes on a diplomatic trip and meets with members of the foreign government, who discuss how to talk to the US executive - and this is shocking to you? A foreign intelligence agency shares military intelligence with an allied government to convince them to act, and this is somehow beyond the pale? How dare Israel advocate for a course of action! Absolute monsters!
Sorry, but I find this to be a really thoughtless take. Like, you haven't put an ounce of critical thought into this WSJ article. I feel like you're motivated here either by your armchair objection to the military action itself, and are working backwards to justify why it was a bad idea, or by simple dislike of Israel - or perhaps both!
FlailingAce
7d ago
Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.
This is not NLP mind control, this is how military decisions should be made. You may object that Trump is just too stupid to assess military intelligence - okay great, thanks for you input. Or you can object that the intel was bad - obviously a baseless objection, but if you think Israel is secretly evil then I see where you're coming from. But to object to the President making a military decision based on military intelligence is completely asinine.
FlailingAce
7d ago
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?
More like we left the job half done in Vietnam. Afghanistan was a counter-insurgency and nation-building fight, whereas this is a pretty straight-forward destroy-the-enemy fight. We don't even need our own troops on the ground to provide advisors and support to the Artesh, communications tech has come a long way since the 60s. And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.
FlailingAce
11d ago
See now I'm even more confused. OP is suggesting we kill US politicians because they're irredeemable? Is he saying Trump, but also Mamdani, is literally Hitler? What does this have to do with China?
Point stands. Don't use memes as your thesis. Use your big boy words!
FlailingAce
11d ago
Hi, I don't have much to add to the topic at hand, because 'billionaires have too much power/influence/XXX' is not super interesting to me. But I wanted to comment that I do not know what the 'Steven universe meme' is, and do not care to investigate it to figure out all its nuances. From what I can gather, this sentence:
I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys.
was essential to your thesis, it may even be your thesis statement, and I have no idea what it means.
I understand everyone on this forum likes to write in this witty memetic style but please don't do so at the expense of clarity. /soapbox
FlailingAce
16d ago
I Give it a Year is a silly British romcom from 2013 that always cracks me up.
FlailingAce
16d ago
You might be weird like me. I dated a handful of women in my 20s, but the longest lasted a couple weeks. I was mostly a loner. Then I met my now-wife at church at 33 years old and got married about a year later.
You don't need 'practice' being in a relationship. I'd argue the opposite - most people just develop bad habits and baggage. When you're in the right place to seek marriage and family, be intentional about it and follow good advice and you'll probably be fine.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Just to be clear, your argument is 'profiling doesn't happen that often, so stop complaining about it'?
It's wild to me how many people are biting the bullet on 'yes let's just racially profile people' despite the fact that it's illegal to do so.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
I’ll fine with spending a day a month in ICE lock-up while they verify my identity. I’ll gladly do my time to help ICE out.
Sorry, that's insane. I'm not going to dignify it by treating it as an argument.
Your response is wildly disproportionate to the suggestion, which (to be clear) is that ICE should make checking someone's citizenship part of standard operating procedures for immigration enforcement arrests so that US citizens aren't arrested and detained when they shouldn't be. It's already the law that they cannot detain US citizens for immigration, once they know that person is a citizen they are required by law to be released - this is literally just saying 'hey, you have to check if they're a citizen'. It's a procedural remedy to a mistake ICE has been repeatedly caught making. Your cost-benefit analysis is so off the rails it's laughable.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.
This is what-about-ism at its worst.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
As I mentioned elsewhere, protestors are literally already doing this. They are accosting suspected ICE personnel and demanding their identification. So what exactly are you afraid is going to happen?
Besides, the original claim was that this is 'completely unreasonable'. The only person being unreasonable is Nybbler, acting as if a policy change would occur with literally zero guidance, that protestors could 'hack the system' by DDoSing agents during an arrest, like it's a video game and they can chain-stun them.
Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."
The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
I can see how, again, you could imagine a poorly worded rule that would have this consequence. But any reasonable implementation would provide the necessary protections so that before someone is locked up in a detention center, ICE would be required to do due diligence on the person. Obviously anyone, US citizen or not, who refuses to give their name would not be protected by this. How could you imagine it otherwise? But there are cases where a US citizen told ICE who they were but were still arrested and taken to a detention center, and had to call a lawyer to get out. That's obviously unacceptable!
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
Again, any reasonable implementation - in fact scratch that, literally any implementation - would provide guidance on when and where ICE agents need to identify themselves. Seriously, how do you imagine this stuff works? Not to mention, your horror situation doesn't even rely on the new rule, protestors literally already do this!
FlailingAce
1mo ago
If you were a Spanish-speaking Hispanic citizen you would feel differently. If you were routinely stopped by ICE until you could prove your citizenship, solely on the grounds of what you look like, you'd be rightly furious.
ICE should not be rounding up people who look like they could maybe be illegal and demanding papers from them. That's insane! And blatantly illegal! You cannot detain someone on the grounds of 'looking Hispanic in public'.
There's a huge difference between you treating someone differently based on assumptions you make from their appearance, and law enforcement openly targeting people for the same. It's a totally different standard.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Can I just throw in my opinion that this is a totally uninteresting and pointless case?
Everyone involved agrees on what should happen. The intent of the law is for the biological children of Irish citizens to become Irish citizens - both the parents and the state want this to happen. The only objection is that the trans woman (and biological father of the child) doesn't want to check the box that says 'father' on a government form because she doesn't like how it sounds. This is patently ridiculous grandstanding. The reason it says 'father' is because the genetic material for the child comes from a male and female gamete, and the father is the one who provided the male gamete, so for the purposes of the law (whose intent, again, everyone agrees with) it can't say anything else.
What a waste of time for everyone involved.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
For most people, wealth is only useful for retirement. The model is: you save and invest and develop wealth so that eventually you can stop working and live off that wealth until you die.
Two common ways to do that now are down-sizing from a large home where you raised a family to a smaller home/condo/retirement community (what my parents did) or a reverse mortgage if you don't have kids to pass assets on to. In both cases an inflated housing market gives you more cash.
I would guess it's rare to use leverage on your home to enter the capitalist class, but that's also a possibility. For instance, my first home has risen in value >$100K and I can potentially access that equity to help fund my new business.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
A pretty interesting book called Red Helicopter, tells the story of a private equity guy who ended up CEO of a failing fashion business, and turns it around by focusing on intangible assets like goodwill and kindness. Spotted it at random in the library and have been enjoying so far - it's relevant to me since I'm in the early stages of starting a small business. We'll see if the thesis holds up!
I think you mean the same institutions that brought us Venezuela. Iraq and Afghanistan began over two decades ago, which is a complete replacement cycle for the US military. Literally thousands of people have no other job than to analyze those conflicts and figure out what went wrong and how to do better.
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