VIM
3mo ago
Saddam Hussein fired chemical weapons directly into Iranian cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people yet the Iranians kept fighting for years in the hope that they could seize some territory in compensation.
It seems pretty doubtful that blowing up some civilian infrastructure would achieve much of anything
VIM
3mo ago
Was Operation Rough Rider a great demonstration of American invincibility too? They brought in multiple carrier groups, bombed Yemen endlessly and assassinated plenty of Houthi leaders even up to the Houthi Prime Minister but the Houthi missile/drone capabilities were basically untouched and Trump effectively gave up after a month when stockpiles started running low.
So if this goes the same way and Iran is still firing missiles and drones a month at every country hosting American military assets, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly obliterating all of the soft oil infrastructure between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea would you still consider it to be a great victory for Trump?
VIM
4mo ago
As YA said, the polls had the race coming down entirely to age differentials. Quantus, the most accurate, had Massie leading the 26-35s by 50 and Gallrein leading 65+ voters by 30.
The Trump/MAGA coalition of 2026 isn't the same one he won with in 2024.
VIM
4mo ago
It isn't that much of a mystery; his support has been falling with nearly everyone except elderly Republicans, the dominant force in Republican primary elections (let alone midterm primary elections). You can be wildly unpopular and still dominate Republican primaries if you have an iron grip on the olds. At least for now.
VIM
4mo ago
Look, you literally said
Hamas livestream themselves via GoPro gang-raping Israeli women on October 7th
I ask for evidence of this happening and it turns out that, in fact, you have no such evidence whatsoever. No such livestream exists. You lied. You made it up. Why did you do that?
Instead you pivot to an "investigation" by an Israeli "Civil Commission" which, if we're being objective, should really be given about as much credibility as an "investigation" by the "Hamas Health Ministry". Yet even the "Civil Commission" doesn't claim Hamas live streamed themselves raping anyone; in the section actually covering "Filming and digital dissemination of SGBV" they don't even make that claim. They claim to have found secondary evidence of rape after the fact but even this dubious Israeli investigation isn't claiming to have it on video, let alone on livestream.
The word "rape" appears 309 times in the report, 29 of those as part of the phrase "gang rape". The section "Rape, gang rape, and other forms of sexual assault" is five pages long, while the section on "filming and digital dissemination of SGBV" is three pages long. None of this is open for debate.
Why are we expected to unquestioningly believe Israeli war propaganda without debate, exactly? Putting aside the fact that it isn't even claiming what you claimed.
It is so, so tiresome how you immediately pivot to arguments-as-soldiers mode. You demand evidence that Hamas did the things I claimed, I provide it, and you instantly pivot to "well Israel is just as bad so who cares". We weren't debating whether Israel was just as bad as Hamas, or who is worse: we were debating whether Hamas really did the things they filmed themselves doing and disseminated. It is a simple factual question, not an ethical one.
Nope, you made a false claim, you provided "evidence" from a dubious source that doesn't even back up your false claim and now you're going on a hysterical rant about things I never said.
Only if your worldview depends on you failing to understand what's right in front of your nose. The rape, gang rape, sexual abuse, torture and humiliation committed on October 7th was exhaustively documented, perhaps an outright majority of it by the perpetrators themselves.
I mean, if Hamas livestreamed themselves committing gang rape then surely a link to it exists somewhere, right? Why are you unable to provide this clear, irrefutable evidence that would instantly resolve this dispute, rather than paging through entirely secondhand Israeli war propaganda reports?
VIM
4mo ago
Footage circulated by Hamas and its collaborators depicts women and girls being violently dragged, humiliated, and abducted; female corpses being abused, mocked, or burned; and female hostages being tormented, abused, taunted, or humiliated on camera.
None of this is "rape", let alone "gang rape".
Also with the possible exception of the abuse/mocking/burning of female corpses basically all of these accusations would hold true if you replaced "Hamas" with "Israel".
Hard to avoid the conclusion that there's a double standard being applied here.
VIM
4mo ago
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Clearly they've never heard of the Toy Box Killer. Anyone claiming "anatomical impossibility" can be dismissed out of hand as a liar or a hack.
If the Israelis really wanted to disprove allegations of abuse at their facilities it would be absolutely trivial to organize some sort of impartial third party investigation. Even the Nazis had the sense to bring in the Red Cross and get out of the way when they were falsely accused of committing the Katyn Massacre.
VIM
4mo ago
Hamas livestream themselves via GoPro gang-raping Israeli women on October 7th
Did they? Where is the proof of this?
VIM
4mo ago
Ok, so you admit that you are unable to support your claim that the US attacked Iran in 1941?
I like how you completely glaze over the definitive evidence for the '53 coup, which is what actually matters here.
Ok, just to be clear, your evidence that "Iran wanted peace in 2001. The US refused it." is your own (unsupported) claim that "Iran was warming up to the west after 9/11"?
No, he posted the evidence right below. Are you blind?
Maybe it matters a little, maybe it matters a lot. But part of your Gish Gallop included this claim:
You're the one Gish Galloping by demanding infinite evidence and then refusing to budge an inch when said evidence is provided.
I'm just asking if this includes Iran's attack on the Jewish community center in Argentina. It's a very simple yes or no question. Why won't you answer it?
You need to prove that Iran did it, to start. But once again, he did answer it:
One bombing in the 80s fundamentally doesn't matter that much when millions have died in the middle east.
Again, do you have faulty vision? Do you suffer from severe brain damage? Is your IQ below the level of legal retardation? Are you suffering from severe inbreeding? Are you just trolling?
VIM
4mo ago
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so.
In the current conflict the Sunni countries (excluding the UAE) pretty much just sat there and took it as Iran obliterated their air defenses, military bases and essential infrastructure with missiles and drones. Whether this is because they fear Iran itself or because they fear their own people rising up if they get too cozy with Israel, either way their oil output has cratered and Trump's blockade currently aims to drive Iran to the state that Iran has already driven every other Gulf nation to (except Oman).
If anything it looks like it's the US that's going to be systematically excluded from Middle Eastern affairs as Gulf countries discover that cutting a deal with Iran is the only way to get oil to market without getting struck by Shaheds. In the long run the Aya-toll-ah could generate more revenue for Iran than oil exports ever did.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
None of those groups were "Shia-aligned"; those are American-aligned groups, and their slaughter is a demonstration of the impotence and short-sightedness of American imperial policy. Yet more proof of Kissinger's old adage that to be America's enemy is dangerous but to be America's friend is fatal.
If Iran were to make a comeback in Syria it would be through funding pissed off (mostly) Sunni Syrians in the territory that Israel occupied after the fall of Assad to create a kind of Hamas-Hezbollah hybrid. If anything, fighting the US directly creates more opportunities for this sort of cross sect collaboration; the Houthis started working with Al-Shabaab and AQAP after they achieved "street cred" fighting the US Navy during Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider.
VIM
4mo ago
The air campaign against Serbia was largely ineffective. Milosevic didn't fold because he was getting bombed, he folded because the Russians cut him loose.
VIM
4mo ago
What are the strongest ideas that make the anti-war side's case in terms of what should be done about the situation?
The geopolitical realist position held by Mearsheimer and Pape is that Trump set America down the path to defeat the moment he chose to start a war with Iran. There is no "positive outcome" available, just bad and worse outcomes. Cutting a deal with Iran or leaving them in control of the strait is bad, fighting an inconclusive war for months if not years that leaves all of the Middle East.
LBJ refused to accept a small embarrassment in Vietnam and in escalating he turned it into generational disaster. Had he taken the L at the beginning America would have been immeasurably better off.
VIM
4mo ago
If it's obviously true then do you agree that Trump leaving right now would be a good move, since Iran is already beaten?
VIM
4mo ago
Would you say the Russians were foolish to not start nuking the Ukrainians after they failed to achieve total victory in the first month?
VIM
5mo ago
The fact that the current plan is to fight to return to the status quo ante suggests that the plan has gone wrong
Does Iran know that? They inaugurated a cardboard cutout as supreme leader the other week btw
So America is getting humiliated by a cardboard cutout?
VIM
5mo ago
I cannot help but notice that you aren't very good at logic if you think blowing up a bunch of Marines on foreign soil is in any way comparable to blowing up American civilians in an NYC skyscraper.
If Reagan thought Hezbollah just wanted to indiscriminately kill Americans then why did he withdraw from Lebanon and how did said withdrawal succeed in ending Hezbollah attacks on Americans? It's almost like your argument makes no sense whatsoever except in some sort of counterjihadi fever dream
VIM
5mo ago
"Our airstrikes have achieved total success! The enemy supplies of chariots, crossbows, even their stores of black powder have been totally obliterated! Unfortunately we still need to figure out a solution to the ballistic missiles and suicide drones but if you exclude all of the weapons the enemy is actually using to attack us then we've destroyed their military"
VIM
5mo ago
In increasing order of importance,
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Because hitting power plants discredits Iranian internal opposition and makes Pahlavi look like an archtraitor
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Because of legal issues and the risk of future prosecutions for war crimes, some proportion of the military might refuse the orders, possibly a significant enough proportion to make carrying out said orders untenable
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Because Iran is a big country with a decentralized power grid whereas the Gulf countries and Israel are tiny countries with highly centralized grids (and much greater dependence on desalination), the anti-Iran coalition doesn't have escalation dominance in a "War of the Power Plants"
VIM
5mo ago
Past precedent suggests that unilateral disarmament ends in your regime winding up like that of Gaddafi, not Saudi Arabia.
VIM
5mo ago
But it's not only that, and you are putting forth a strawman. I'm sure the men who drove a truck bomb into Beirut and killed two hundred Americans knew exactly what 'Death to America' meant: killing Americans.
No, they didn't just kill two hundred random Americans, they very specifically killed two hundred Marines who were associated with the Israeli invaders of their country. Then when Reagan responded by withdrawing from Lebanon they ceased further attacks rather than pressing the advantage to start targeting defenseless tourists
Kind of proves the point of the fellow you're replying to: "Death to America" is shorthand for "Death to the American government", which is shorthand for "Death to the American Empire", which is shorthand for "Death to the American Empire in countries with Shia populations that are occupied against their will". If it just meant "kill Americans!" then they'd go for tourists rather than Marines and they'd do it all the time rather than almost exclusively against armed troops in Shia countries.
VIM
5mo ago
Indeed, though rather than applying to the US or Iranian governments it more aptly applies to the Occupiers of the Government who chose this war vs the Occupied tax cattle expected to pay the price for it.
VIM
5mo ago
As far as I can tell the "negotiations" were just an excuse to avoid having to carry out "Power & Bridge Day"
The current cunning plan is to blockade the blockade and prevent Iranian or Iranian-approved ships from leaving. One might give this plan more credit if a month prior the same admin hadn't given Iranian oil sanctions relief under the pretense of reducing the pressure on oil markets. To flip-flop now guarantees the worst of both worlds: Iran still made billions from selling into the oil price spike and now the market is going to be hammered going straight from "peace in sight!" to "Strait even more closed than before!"
At least some oil bulls will get to eat lobster
It seems more likely that the Dollar's reserve status would be displaced by a commodity rather than any specific country's currency.
In unrelated news, "Gold has overtaken U.S. Treasuries as the World's Top Reserve Asset"
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