Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
Maybe I'm being uncharitable/overgeneralizing, but my experience is that the sort of person who says this sort of thing doesn't want women to do this kind of work, they want it as something to justifying subordinating women.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
I'm talking about children young enough to not be enrolled in school. The truant officer isn't going to come and arrest you for bringing your 1-year old to the office, but your boss will probably be annoyed if you keep doing it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Doing things you don't care about for the sake of someone you love who does care is not institutionalized untruthfulness; it is the foundational element of a genuine relationship (romantic or not).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The obvious difference is moving from an environment where it is easy to watch children to one where children are effectively prohibited. A pre-modern woman doing domestic labor is working fairly hard, but it's work that (for the most part) allows you to keep one eye on the kids and can be easily interrupted. As work increasingly moves out of the home, that stops being practical. This isn't that big a deal when men do it, because they weren't doing much childrearing anyway, but when women do it forces a choice between working and taking care of your children.
A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting - but making every day Bring Your Child To Work Day doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. And I imagine managers and business owners would not be thrilled about it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
It's often forgotten, but Ukraine was fighting a low-intensity conventional war against Russian proxies for eight years before the big Russian invasion in 2022, which put a lot of pressure on their military to sort itself out. The ZSU performed quite poorly in 2014, IIRC. Meanwhile, Russia basically sabotaged its own military reforms. The result was that their plans combined both strategic and operational incompetence, leading to the disastrous early days of the war. Russian planners assumed Ukrainian resistance would disintegrate and the Ukrainian state would collapse. They were operating on delusional assumptions about how Ukraine would react and what their own forces were capable of. At least at the outset of the war, Ukrainian troops appear to have been qualitatively superior, and while Russia had (and has) a number of capabilities Ukraine can't match, they didn't have the intel to use them effectively.
To compare and contrast, the US appears to have had similarly delusional strategic expectations, but can at least lean on the fact that the US military is really good at the nuts and bolts of combat while Iran has fairly limited ability to come to grips with the US and is way behind qualitatively. I don't know if this is a function of corruption or just the inherent deficiencies of a regime of globally isolated religious fanatics more concerned with internal security than defense.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
YMMV - I am extremely high on the Tyrant Philosophers, though that's fantasy so maybe it doesn't apply.
My biggest criticism of Tchaikovsky is that his narrative voice is kind in a sour spot; it is strong enough that it stands out and overshadows character voice, but it's not really distinctive enough to carry weight (contrast with, idk, Neal Stephenson).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
One has to wonder what the issue with Gabbard is, given the Trump admin's otherwise general lack of sensitivity to scandal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
It's not nearly that bad - we don't have Ranger battalions losing pitched battles to armed civilians - but it reflects the same basic mindset and strategic ineptitude. It's just that the US has greater technological and operational competence to compensate.
It seems fairly likely to me that, as with Putin in Ukraine, the Trump administration expected IRI resolve to crumble immediately in the face of overwhelming power, and are fumbling now that it hasn't.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
You think the US is going to nuke Iran over a gulf blockade?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
What's really fascinating about this whole affair is that it really illustrates the whole "Trump lies like a used car salesman" idea that was popular around here a while back. Over the past two days, it's been regime change, definitely not regime change, degrading Iranian capabilities, getting compliments for Trump, preempting retaliation triggered by Israeli strikes, and protecting the US/Israel from an imminent threat. And I've probably missed some other statements coming out the administration's senior leadership. It's all nonsense, but I don't know that it's meant to be believed so much as to disorient critics.
My gut instinct is that they thought they were about to pull a repeat of the Maduro operation or Midnight Hammer. Everything was going to be over and done too fast for the haters to do anything but wring their hands. The Iranian government was going to be cowed into submission and make a much more favorable deal than the one Trump tore up. Only it hasn't been quite as clean or decisive as anticipated. We'll see how it ultimately shakes out, but I wouldn't be shocked to see them double down for fear of looking weak.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
I think the metaphor is deceptive, not clarifying - it recasts the various actors in this conflict into roles they do not actually occupy.
This contradiction seems to be Trump's typical MO: https://scholars-stage.org/on-bombing-iran/
This should be taken as evidence that the Trump administration has no coherent plan, especially given that the stated rationale seems to change hourly, but we can look more broadly at their past record and see that current US leadership is not motivated at all by humanitarian concerns (corroborated by the rising civilian casualty estimates from these strikes, which will only continue to rise, alongside Hegseth's remarks earlier today).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
The US sees it more like intervening in a messy domestic dispute
I don't really see any evidence of this. The current US administration rejects humanitarian concerns as a basis for foreign policy and has explicitly disavowed the idea that this is a regime change war.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
It probably helps that Iran has been shooting at French and British targets as well, plus Middle Eastern countries that aren't Turkey or Israel are in the bottom rung of the West's "Are you a real country with real sovereignty?" tier-list.
The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground
This isn't new. Very little of this is new - the US has been in a massively dominant conventional position since the end of the Cold War. The reason we haven't done stuff like this in the past (except for when we have) is that it isn't particularly useful most of the time. Even in dictatorships, individual leaders are usually fairly replaceable, as we have seen in Venezuela (and will likely see in Iran), and actually achieving lasting results tends to require putting troops on the ground to enforce your will (as we've seen with the failures in Yemen) and a real plan for victory (such as was lacking in Afghanistan).
Precisely because the US has overwhelming conventional dominance, the number of foreign policy problems we have than can be solved by the quick, sharp exercise of conventional force is pretty limited. Nobody tries anymore because they know how it's going to go.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power.
This is, in fact, the problem. A lot of "isolationist" sentiment in the US is a mixture of short-attention span and anti-internationalism. The reason US public turned against the Iraq War wasn't because of some general opposition to getting involved overseas, but because it was a miserable slog that they felt had been entered into under false pretenses. A lot of them recover their adventurous spirit the moment they get to see the US military absolutely pasting the latest guy dumb enough to stick his head up. And lose it again when it turns out (as mentioned) that brute force actually has pretty limited utility against modern problems.
The actual military problems the US has tend to be intractable (terrorism, piracy, and insurgency) or really boring (ship building, munitions production, diplomacy). The reason people are correctly calling Trump a retard for threatening to invade Greenland is not that the US couldn't take Greenland but that the whole affair reflects a kind of short-sighted thuggishness that reflects poorly on Trump and his supporters.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough
They were talking about invading Iran. I don't think there was ever any question that we could bomb Iran with impunity. Maybe they were expecting need a bit more SEAD, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that Iran would be able to directly contest the air.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
I think it's good, actually, when people push back on their government killing civilians for bad reasons, and the bigger problem by far is that we're much too quick to accept nebulous assertions of national security as a justification for collateral damage. If the US were intervening to stop the IRI from massacring protestors, the comparison would have some bearing, but that isn't what is happening.
Notably, there was fairly little consternation over coalition-inflicted civilian casualties in Mosul or Raqqa because it was generally accepted that ISIS was Really Bad and coalition forces were trying to stop them (even if not for purely selfless reasons) and taking reasonable precautions while dealing with an adversary using human shields. US airstrikes more broadly were criticized because there was no clear aim/end beyond killing terrorists and the target selection was often incredibly careless/callous. By contrast, this current campaign looks like gunboat diplomacy at best.
I think it's a sign that most westerners are fundamentally unprepared to defend their societies from aggression and stagnation.
I think it speaks more to the damage the Iraq War (and to a much lesser extent Libya) did to the credibility of military interventionism. Many, if not most people have no faith that these actions aren't going to squander a bunch of money and lives for no worthwhile outcome.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
In related news, not everything is lost. Here is how Iran can still win. When all human wit and wisdom failed, listen to the cat girls.
This is a bit. Even KR isn't that retarded.
The failure case is that the US spend a bunch of money and depletes materiel stockpiles (not to mention reputation) to bump off a decrepit and ultimately replaceable theocrat while losing any chance of a negotiated solution to Iran developing nukes. If the US isn't going to mount a ground invasion, we're left hoping that either a revolution finally succeeds or that they can keep the IRI nuclear program in check forever with nothing but air raids.
The time to bomb Iran was a month and a half ago, but we were too busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
I'm not going to pretend to have a high confidence prediction of what will happen; merely what probably won't happen. Which is to say, it is unlikely that the outcome will be that the IRI regime will be toppled and replaced with a US-friendly one or that Iranian nuclear ambitions will be put decisively to rest. I think it is likely that whatever does occur, Trump will claim massive success, even if it is a massive shitshow.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
While we're inching closer every day, I don't think there's a major constituency for bombing Alabama yet.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Did the crackdown with 30k dead kill all the individuals or groups able and willing to engage in risky, intensive protesting? Did they break the will of most of those wanting the regime's downfall? Perhaps not.
Well, they stopped protesting, so they are likely quite demoralized. And an airstrike campaign is unlikely to resolve the fundamental issue, which is that the regime's enforcers have weapons and anti-government protestors do not. As long as the Iranian government can find people willing to shoot protestors, the government will be able to manage internal dissent. And, as you say, Iran is a big country. A lot of that population is pro-government. It doesn't even need to be a majority, just enough to staff the instruments of repression, a hurdle they clear easily.
The track record of airstrike campaigns alone achieving decisive results is basically nil, and any plan which entails "and then the people will rise up" is begging for embarrassing failure at best and bloody disaster at worst. It's possible this will all succeed, but the historical record is against it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Donald the Dove strikes again.
This seems... incredibly late to capitalize on anti-government sentiment. If you were going to try and provide military support to protests/deter their violent suppression, it probably would have been more effective to do it before they all got killed.
In the meantime, I don't see how a bombing campaign is going to succeed. I don't have anything sympathy for the Iranian regime, but if you're going to go to war you can't just lean on "my adversaries are evil" to justify it. If you don't have a credible plan to succeed you're just squandering money and killing people without purpose.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
I expect that in the US context it began with not wanting to use "soldier" to describe someone who fights land battles for pay in the organised service of the state of which they are a citizen because it annoyed the Marine Corps.
I personally blame Dave Grossman, who created the wolf-sheep-sheepdog paradigm. Okay, that might be giving him, specifically, too much credit, but it seems like in the GWoT era, the Army and Marines both started to absorb the idea that military personnel, and especially combat arms, and especially especially Special Ops Dudes were an inherently separate and special class of people. This probably felt justified to a degree, given the way you had an all-volunteer military fighting a permanent war while the civilian population was completely tuned out. Easy enough to buy into the idea of a special martial elite when you come home and there's no visible expression of the nation being at war.
This was hardly universal - I know plenty of current and former military who make fun of this mindset - but it definitely caught on with a lot of people.
(as an aside, while I agree with the sentiment and the overall point, the ASO article is pretty sloppy on some historical details, e.g. longbows did not materially contribute to the decline of armored knights on the battlefield)
When people say Trump is fascist, you should take them seriously, not literally :V
It's not. Have you seen the context that quote is from? It's Miller justifying the US trying to strongarm Denmark into surrendering Greenland. It's not simply a bare description*, much as its proponents try to present it as such. It's a belief that power entitles you to do what you want, and that acting with scruples or restraint is weakness and stupidity. It is also why they become so petulant and angry when threats fail to secure submission - it's a violation of their understanding of order of the world and why the Trump administration is soft on Russia and China. It's why they seem to have miscalculated so badly with Iran. The IRI was supposed to be reminded of our overwhelmingly power and be awed into submission. Now they're fumbling because it turns out that "might makes right" is actually an extremely naive way of looking at the world.
"Bully worship" is an extremely apposite label. One of the reasons "bootlicker" has such resonance an insult is that it captures this attitude very effectively.
I am once again reminded that right-wing political violence is completely invisible to many. Either it's excused because it's carried out under a veneer or law enforcement or the perpetrator is written off as a crazy person who in no way reflects on the right more generally. Or the perp gets a pardon. The history of political violence in America did not begin on 9/10/25.
*even as a bare description it is wrong, but it has the appeal of sounding superficially correct and looking like edgy truth-telling.
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