Hadad
1mo ago
No, where did glassing Taiwan come from?
Your chain of causality there suggests that it's our munition reserves -- and our ability to launch them at Taiwan if China invaded -- keeping China in check. That is, we'd render Taiwan useless before they could extract any value out of it. It's not like we'd start lobbing missiles into mainland China over Taiwan!
Hadad
1mo ago
A shame if the bunkers themselves are truly impenetrable. In that case, we'd have to destroy everything except the bunkers.
Hadad
1mo ago
Realistically, there is no international law that America disagrees with, and that especially includes a rule of "you must let yourself be overrun by undesirables". I would personally sign up for Trump's Golden Gestapo to mow down orcs by the boatload.
Hadad
1mo ago
In your worldview, am I to understand that the reason China doesn't start World War 3 is because it fears America will bomb Taiwan into oblivion, and thus, if at any point we seem like we can't glass the entire place, they will invade?
Hadad
1mo ago
I'm more confident in this administration's ability to enforce our territorial sovereignty than previous ones. We don't actually need to let them in, no matter how many there are.
Hadad
1mo ago
No. It is true. There is no "may". These things I mention being complicated and multifaceted doesn't mean there is a chance or a scenario in which population is not critical in their determination.
It remains "may", because as said, scaling a population up doesn't necessarily improve its military or state capacities.
America was superior to Iraq (2003), and Syria, and Afghanistan, and Libya. Did our intervention in these countries go well for America? No, they did not.
The wrong goals were pursued in all of these cases.
It does not matter if America is superior to Iran. It matters if America can achieve what Ted Cruz wants to do, in the way Ted wants to do it, at an acceptable cost. If Ted Cruz does not know basic facts about the capacity of Iran to impose costs, how will Ted be able to know what costs Iran can impose?
I asked this to another, I ask it to you: at what point do you think the US military asks Ted Cruz to handle logistics? This is not a Senator's role. The country's population numbers are not an important concern for him. They are trivia.
Hadad
1mo ago
And I'd argue it's a vast gulf. I'll take Christianity over Islam 100 outta 100 times.
Hadad
1mo ago
I don't think China's going to collapse global trade if we bomb Iran too much. They're rather reliant on it, too, you see.
Hadad
1mo ago
The goal isn't genocide. Genocide is just an acceptable cost. Nothing stops Iran from abandoning its nuclear ambitions before dying, much like how nothing is actually stopping Palestinians from not embracing a life of suicidal terrorism.
This requires no sociopathy, fyi. You're correct that I'm not sociopathic. But I'd absolutely push The Button. I'd mash it, and then continue to exist as a stable, psychologically well-adjusted person. The outgroup has no moral value to me. If you're convinced I wouldn't, well, okay. I say I would, you say I won't, guess the conversation's done.
Hadad
1mo ago
Fortunately, I'm not inviting you out to eat, and Ted Cruz isn't reading The Motte. Everyone wins!
Hadad
1mo ago
How do you imagine us suffering? What harm are you imagining China inflicting on us if we use too many bunker busters in Iran? China will never harm the US mainland, because mainland threats against nuclear powers don't happen. Perhaps, if we ran out of resources for awhile, we wouldn't be able to protect Taiwan. But, really, Taiwan belongs to China as it is -- same as Cuba is ours. We shouldn't really be protecting them anyway, we should be building our own domestic chip manufactories.
Hadad
1mo ago
I agree. But I look around at modern society -- hateful, demoralized, mentally ill, pumped full of medications, fat, not having kids, eschewing relationships -- and I struggle to think paternalism would be worse.
Modern liberalism is great at facilitating hedonism. That seems to be it. This, of course, makes it wildly popular, but I don't think that's a good thing.
Hadad
1mo ago
All fair concerns for you to have, just not ones I share. I genuinely don't think it matters at all if Ted Cruz knows the population of Iran, because its population isn't one of the relevant metrics for our decisions.
Hadad
1mo ago
I'm sympathetic to fatties, I'd say there's plenty of reasons. But it also goes for smokers, drinkers, for people who get into toxic relationships, etc.
Comfort is seductive. Pleasure is seductive. No matter the costs, people gravitate toward them. This is why society should try to restrict them, not facilitate them -- nobody needs help pursuing vices.
Hadad
1mo ago
Healthy lifestyles are harder work than unhealthy ones, and people are accustomed to self-destructive hedonism. Why don't fat people just eat less?
Hadad
1mo ago
If that's true, then you're fucked no matter what happens in Iran. You'll eventually be washed away in a tide of foreign brown.
Hadad
1mo ago
We can always make more. I'm not persuaded by material limits -- we're the richest people in the history of the species.
Hadad
1mo ago
Europe can, at any time, start enforcing its own sovereignty and defending its borders. I believe in you guys. I'm also not European, though, so if you fail, no skin off my back.
Hadad
1mo ago
So keep bombing them. Kill all their scientists, all their engineers. Transform the mountains into infernos. Let them all die to defend their ambitions.
Hadad
1mo ago
Even if the population of Iran has little-to-no bearing on whether military intervention is wise, it still has major implications on a million other relevant variables that accompany military intervention, like the death toll, the economic impact, the refugees, the counter attack,
These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military. The actual strategic planners and number-crunchers can figure out how many faceless Iranians need to die -- but no number will justify letting Iran go nuclear.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who confidently declares that he doesn't care about prices when selecting a restaurant, and then I point out that prices will impact the cost of going to the restaurant and prices are strong indicators of food quality and decorum and may indicate how you should dress when going to the restaurant, etc., but the guy just keep saying, "I don't care, I have a lot of money, so no matter how expensive a restaurant is, I can afford it."
Yes, this is accurate. None of the things you think matter I think matter. I can go to the restaurant dressed however I please, and I don't care if the meal is especially tasty or not. I just want to get some food.
Or, rather, not get the food. In this case, I don't want to extract anything from Iran.
Hadad
1mo ago
No, the fallout would probably hurt their neighbors. I'd prefer we stick to conventional bombs.
Hadad
1mo ago
Unless you were a powerless woman
Women's reported happiness, mental health, and life satisfaction have been in freefall since the decline of Christianity, actually.
or a powerless minority,
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
or a powerless person of slightly the wrong proclivity for various things including but not limited to sexual orientation and opinions on celestial mechanics (at relevant times).
Still healthier and better off than today. Indeed, I bet the gay community at Christianity's height had far less AIDs, among other things.
I'd posit that if Christianity was the ideal human ideology that caused maximum flourishing, it wouldn't have declined.
Surely you understand how absurd this is, right?
"I'd posit that if the ideal human was healthy and ate well, no one would be overweight."
Or at least the places where it didn't decline would then be much better places (and presumably out-compete) than places where it did.
Well, it was at the height of western Christianity that it conquered the world, and to this day western nations have better quality of life than places that never were Christian.
Yes, he's advocating to the people who watch Tucker Carlson, and those people don't especially care about Iran's population either. They're not concerned about the minutiae of logistics. That's not something normal people concern themselves with.
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