JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
I don't think you are thinking this through. Iran sinking a tanker bound for China would have the immediate effect of seriously pissing off the one nation that might actually be both willing and capable of helping them fight the US.
Meanwhile the obvious counter-play from Trump is obvious, send Xi an invoice.
No, we'll nuke them for touching our (and other peoples') boats just like we did Japan.
In all seriousness though I don't think it will escalate to nukes unless the Iranians pop one off first.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
Iran has been slinging bombs, missiles, and drones at its neighbors either directly or via proxies on a near continuous basis since the Shah was deposed.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
I feel like you and several others in this thread have seriously confused cause and effect. The Iranian Regime is not a going to suddenly start sinking tankers because Trump offered to insure them. Trump is offering to insure them (and provide escorts) because the Iranian Regime has already been threatening to sink them.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
10d ago
It stymies the Iranian regime's immediate war-goal of closing the Straight of Hormuz while simultaneously undercutting Russia's ability to capitalize on a spike in energy prices. It also has the side-effect of diverting money and market share from the EU financial sector to the US's, and all this can be had for the low-low-price of doing what we'd already decided to do anyway.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
11d ago
The cost of putting a satellite in low earth orbit has declined by an order of magnitude over the last 15 years or so, and if the Starship/Super-Heavy stack delivers on even a fraction of it's promised performance it is likely to do so again in the next decade. At that price point something the like Tiangong or the ISS goes from being a international prestige project to something that a lot of private organizations could realistically fund out of their own pockets.
It's not about believing in greatness "harder" or "softer", it's about whether or not you believe in greatness at all. It's about choosing to enter the arena rather than be one of those cold timid souls who knows neither victory nor defeat.
Or for those who've been following recent internet trends, it's about "Embracing the Penguin".
To the populist right the image from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World of a lone Penguin striking out towards the mountains speaks to deeply held beliefs about free-will, speaks to the desire to forge one's own path and to test themself against the world. It's a metaphor for a romantic heroism that not only feels increasingly absent from modern life, but in many spaces is actively derided.
To the technocrats and anti-populists the penguin is clearly out of his gourd. He's going to die before he ever reaches those mountains. Even if he does make it, what is he going to do then?
One's vision of "free-will" is the other's vision of "suicidal insanity".
People keep saying that the right lacks a positive vision for the future, but I've always thought that knife cut deeper going the other way. Sure the left talks a lot about climate change, universal healthcare, reparations, wealth redistribution, etc... but that feels more like "management" to me than "vision". And to the degree that the left does have "vision" I question the degree to which it is a "positive" one. They seem to see the frontier as something to be protected rather than explored. Growth is bad for the environment they tell us. Embrace consensus, reject risk, and you too will be allowed to eat and drink your fill. This is not a vision that appeals to me.
In conclusion, you're trying to convince people to abandon their dreams of a new frontier by appealing to material goods and comforts, but the sort of person who dreams of a new frontier is not going to be motivated by appeals to material comfort.
As for the physical difficulties, those come down to questions of engineering and I have far greater confidence in SpaceX's ability to build a moon-rocket than I do the state of California's ability to build a railroad.
This is the sort of "Khesterex" thinking I was talking about in the conclusion of this post
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
And earlier you said...
Where did I say that?
No, what we have is two mutually exclusive attitude that US policy keeps ping-ponging between due to the difference mapping reasonably cleanly to Republican vs Democrat and Populist vs Technocrat.
The broadly Democrat-coded attitude is one of sympathy (if not active support) for Islamic revolutionary movements. These views are framed in terms of "Decolonization" their opposition to the left's hated enemy the right. The right is the outgroup, revolutionary Islam is the fargroup and if revolutionary Islam can inflict some casualties on the right that is a "win" in the left's book. This is why Carter left the Shah hanging out to dry, this is why Clinton and Obama offered backing to the various "Moderates" who would become ISIS/ISIL, this is where "Queers for Palestine" come from, and it is why they think that the killing of Qassim Soleimani is something the rest of us ought to be upset about while the killing of John Christopher Stevens is not.
The Republican-coded attitude is one of "Fuck Around and Find Out". That is that if the if US is going to occupy the role of hegemon we ought to play the role. To the extent that there has ever been a consistent through-line to US foreign policy, that line has been "Don't touch the boats", and in the eyes of the MAGA crowd that is what this is ultimately about. The Iranian regime thought that by laundering their attacks through proxies like HAMAS and the Houthis they could immunize themselves from retaliation, turns out they were wrong.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
...and you're ignoring the fact that the build-up was itself a response to the Iranian regime gunning down protestors after being explicitly warned that doing so would have consequences.
Trump is not Obama, when he sets a "red-line" he means it.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
12d ago
If you're hanging out at a party or a bar and you notice that your friend is getting (or has already gotten) himself into an altercation that may escalate to violence, do you put down your drink and get ready to back your friend's play?
If not, how good a friend are you really?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
13d ago
I missed it the first time around so I'm happy that @TitaniumButterfly's post is getting the signal boost.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
14d ago
Are you really trying to pull the "joke's on you I was only pretending to be retarded" meme in real life?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
14d ago
And how do they know it's sure to result in victory?
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
The actual quote from Sun Tzu, is "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight, even though the ruler forbid it; if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight even at the ruler's bidding."
I was about 50/50 on where that link was going and I was not disappointed ;-)
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
14d ago
Knowing Hegseth "Operation Teabag" was either overruled, or has been reserved for some future effort to liberate the British isles
In his war memoirs Julius Ceasar gives one of the Gallic cities a deadline of "you have until the ram has touched the wall", IE we are preparing to attack, and you have until the attack begins to negotiate terms. The idea being that trying to stall for time will only result in a worse terms (or no terms at all) compared to what was already on the table.
Edit: Credit to @TowardsPanna who beat me to it.
...and peace requires both parties to be agreeable.
Iran was already on the back foot, if one is of the opinion that Iran was not trying to negotiate a peace but rather negotiate themselves sufficient breathing space to regroup and resume combat at a later date, it would be foolish not to press the attack while the regime is weak.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
18d ago
I had a longer effort post that got eaten by the gateway monster but as a change of pace from all the LLM talk I'm curious if any one was watching the SOTU. My reflexive read was broadly positive but I also felt a bit uneasy with there being not just one but two CMHs and two Purple Hearts and a Legion of Merit. My feeling is that this was not the proper place, at the same time I think that Trump may have scored a significant mid-term coup by by calling on people to stand if they felt that the first duty of the government is to the citizens of the nation, "why wouldn't you stand for that" feels like something that will be showing up in campaign commercials come August.
Are you familiar with the old motorcycle line about there being two types of riders, those who have gone down, and those who will.
The meaning and value of such a statement isn't so much in it's literal semantic content so much as what follows from it. You may have never had a wreck, but that just means that you're due. Every time you ride you are rolling the dice, and if you keep rolling dice eventually you are going to roll snake-eyes. To dismiss it as offering no predictive value on a given dice-roll is to completely miss the point.
In their addendum @FCfromSSC posits a specific mechanism by which "Good times make weak men, and weak men make hard times", that being the unmooring of status and rewards from performance. In doing so they provide a valuable insight into precisely what it is they mean by "good times" and "bad times", and by "strong" and "weak". Through FC's addendum we can even derive a possible working definition of the term "Decadence" IE the degree to which status is no longer reflective of performance. This greatly narrows the scope of the debate, and presents us with possible examples both fictional and historical to play with.
Of course this addendum is problematic for Devereaux and his supporters as by offering a mechanism and the merest hint of a definition FC has shot the whole "Decadence lacks a coherent definition" argument to pieces.
FC posits that it's an inspiring claim. Telling a child that he's Spiderman is inspiring, but it might lead to him jumping off a building (a friend of mine did exactly that as a kid, thankfully he landed in a bush).
Please point to the specific place where @FCfromSSC stated anything to the effect that something being "inspiring" was the same as it being "true".
In the main series, Devereaux is pretty explicit that “Fremen” is a label for a trope and for outsiders’ perceptions, not a claim that the referenced societies really are “barbarian primitives.”
I assume you included the qualifier "In the main series" because you were aware that Devereaux had devoted an entire interlude to how poor and unsophisticated the Fremen are, and wanted to cover your ass in case I brought it up.
I reiterate my position that Devereaux is attacking a strawman, and by extension I believe that you, @self_made_human, are attacking a strawman. I don't really see what else there is to say.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
22d ago
I feel like there's a lot of sloppy equivocation going on in this thread at both ends of the spectrum. Between people in the upper 90th percentile of income and multi-billionaires at the high end, and between "working class" (janitors, waitresses, delivery drivers, et al) and people who don't work at all at the low end.
It may not be a clean one-for-one map but I do believe that @IGI-111's distinction accurately captures some key differences in how the two major US coalitions approach questions of politics and culture.
One of the most common criticisms that I see leveled against Republicans both here and in the wider world is that they are not sufficiently utopian, not sufficiently technocratic, and that they have no "positive vision" nor "will to power".
This is a fundamentally "Democrat" coded complaint because Democrats don't see the collective power of the state/society as some dangerous beast to be restrained distracted or appeased, but more as a benevolent god who answers prayers and smites enemies.
If you are of a sort, you will have some sense deep in your gut that "power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that sense is to lead you to view anyone who would make such critiques a jaundiced eye. You say that nobody on either side is reading 17th 18th or 19th-century philosophy. My response to you is that they don't have to. The philosophy is already "in the water". An axiom need not have been read from a book (or debated on the internet) for it to shape a person's beliefs, or sway how they vote.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
23d ago
Perhaps senseless tyranny is the end goal.
Twelve years of bombing Houthis did nothing because the Houthis were never the root cause.
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