JTarrou
21hr ago
The first casualty of war is truth, they say. War covers a multitude of sins. That's one of the reasons people like them. If you think you're going to get some clear-cut war like the "good ol days", you missed the second half of the twentieth century. War is fought in the media, everyone is lying. Trump is lying about Iran, Clinton was lying about Kosovo, Bush was lying about Iraq, Kennedy was lying about Vietnam.
JTarrou
21hr ago
All depends on when you start the clock, I suppose. If you think the war started in 2026 versus 1979 versus 1953 versus 1952 for instance.
JTarrou
21hr ago
Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.
JTarrou
1d ago
I think you're just completely misreading what's happening. The US touch overseas is lightening, not tightening. Kidnapping heads of state is orders of magnitude more complex, difficult and lower casualty than a bombing campaign. The previous Iran bombing campaign, very targeted, very precise, little in the way of collateral. The current run is certainly higher volume and less precise, as any escalation must necessarily be. But that isn't the tale of a US government obsessed with "lethality", much the opposite. You've got one or two out of thousands upon thousands of missions and millions of bits of ordnance to complain about.
JTarrou
1d ago
The Gulf states will be angry with Iran, but will ultimately draw closer with it out of necessity.
Could you explain this? The US is helping the Sunni nations of the middle east, which are in the midst of a multi-decade project of ethnic cleansing and religious persecution intended to remove all minority groups from their "Ummah". Iran, which has been trying for decades to out-anti-US the arab street, has been left in the lurch when the Sunni nations moved toward the US and Israel. This is why Iran green-lit the Oct 7th assault, negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is why Iran is just raining missiles on anyone and everyone around the gulf who isn't the US and Israel. And this approach is going to bring the Sunni and Shia together again?
Seems counterintuitive, say more.
JTarrou
1d ago
The US could easily beat Iran and rule it as long as we wanted, in military terms. In political terms, it's entirely impossible to do with a "democracy" of oligarchs who will change policies at the drop of a hat if the media whines a little.
JTarrou
1d ago
Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike? War happens. All this struggle session about it is lame.
Let me just get this out there. When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers. If you're very (un)lucky, you'll be facing a world superpower with good enough targeting to keep that ratio low. In a standard conventional military without smart munitions, the civvy/oppo ratio exceeds 5:1 for conventional operations and 10:1 for irregular warfare. Which is why irregular combatants are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.
This is what war is. There are, ultimately, no rules to the war game. Anyone cherry picking the one-off mistakes of any country in an armed conflict is doing so for their own reasons, not some established corpus of imaginary "international law" of which they seem to be the only lawyers.
JTarrou
6d ago
On choosing your destructor.
An outgroup is any group in which status change is mirrored by another group.
The best endorsement any potential leader could have is the fear and enmity of the outgroup. This in turn means that every group has a significant (though not decisive) voice in the leadership and direction of their outgroup. The political lesson of the Trump era is that the hatred of one group is as good as an endorsement for their outgroup.
If you ask me, the reason both Trump and Mamdani won election is that they sought and exploited the condemnation of their side's outgroup. This leads to a lot of rhetorical brinksmanship which is completely divorced from actual policy, and acknowledged as Kayfabe publicly by both men.
JTarrou
6d ago
This is what I'm talking about.
Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.
JTarrou
6d ago
Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.
JTarrou
6d ago
Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.
Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?
Most "modern democracies" are vassal states (allies) of the US, forbidden to fight anyone without our approval, and most of those have divested themselves of any real military capability. This was not done through democratic means. Our forefathers knew democracies had spent the last century invading each other, especially the French. When they set up the postwar system, the EU gave up its essential sovereignty in military terms to the US. So they could all be peaceful "democracies" under the aegis of US military protection. So too with Japan and South Korea. They aren't peaceful, they're disarmed. When they weren't, as in the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, they immediately fell into wars until the US asserted military supremacy over eastern europe.
Yes, being the global military guarantor of the trade routes routinely requires military action in far-flung parts of the world. Especially against regimes that have aligned themselves politically against your hegemony. This is something every superpower has to do, because that's what allows the entire global economy that has lifted our race of humanity from the endemic poverty of 99.999999% of our collective history. Some do better jobs than others. If you want to compare the US empire, compare it to the constellation of other great powers who ran it before us. Is our middle east policy really worse than France, Russia and Britain's? Was theirs worse than Spain and Portugal's? Or the Ottomans?
Actually, the Ottomans might have been the last great empire to have a better middle eastern policy, but nobody's going for the "Use Albanian slaves to crush all resistance" tactic anymore.
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