quiet_NaN
16hr ago
The UK did not have to declare war on the rest of the world because the rest of the world was in no position to break their blockade.
Germany tried something similar with their unrestricted submarine warfare. Now you can argue that this was less of a proper blockade (U-boots are not suitable for searching vessels for contraband, so their only option is to sink any vessels). Still, it is kinda the same thing.
The US was very much not considering the sinking of their trade vessels as blockade runners a legitimate tactic, and rather promptly declared war on Germany. I have met few people who consider this an error in judgement. Sinking the ships of any nation is likely to piss them off and attack you.
If one Latin American country was blockading another one and courteously informing the US to keep their merchant vessels out of the blockade zone, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the US would simply shrug and say 'well blockades are a legitimate wartime tactic, they surely mean no hostility towards us'. Instead they would send a carrier group.
Also, both the U-boot warfare and the blockade of Germany would be war crimes by the standards of today, because we have decided that using hunger as a weapon of war is bad. From this, one could construct an argument that a belligerent should be allowed to sell sufficient civilian goods to earn the funds to buy humanitarian goods for their population.
Personally, I find broad economic blockades distasteful because they are simply not very targeted measures. It is basically like bombing a tenement and hoping that some of the people you hit happen to be enemy soldiers. Targeted blockades (for example, rf transceivers used in drones) seem a lot less bad -- though obviously also hard to pull off, because a single container of rf transceivers will probably supply the Iranian army for a long time.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
Thanks for digging up the actual tweet, I think it speaks for itself. Also, if he meant the Ayatollah regime with civilization, he would not express regret but glee at their removal.
@Poug: I am not claiming that he threatened to murder every last ethnic Iranian. (Doing that with Iran would surpass all historical genocides in scale, I think.) However, the crime of genocide does not require that you kill everyone.
The act of genocide is the intentional destruction of an ethnic group as a distinct culture -- which is damn close in concept space to 'destruction of a civilization'. Outright murder is a typical strategy, but not the only one. Mass sterilization or the forcible transfer of children to other ethnic groups are likewise ways to destroy a group.
However, context matters, and the context does not do Trump any favors here. The 'softer' variants like cultural genocide generally do not work overnight. Nobody could mistake Trump's threat as "we will occupy Iran, outlaw Shia Islam and the speaking of Farsi, force everyone to speak English and eat at McDonald's to destroy any distinction of the Iranian people and turn them into generic Americans" -- not that that would have been acceptable.
The only way Trump could possibly destroy the Iranian civilization overnight would have been to nuke their cities, killing most of their urban population and industrial base, so that the survivors would find themselves in a mixture of Fallout and rural Afghanistan, neither of which qualify as civilization. This would still dwarf the Shoa and the Holodomor in total deaths, even if the Nazis were more meticulous about murdering every last one of their victims.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
You should. A nuclear exchange would be a disaster for humanity. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Iranians would be a huge loss to the world. The loss of human capital and consciousness would be a tragedy, the suffering would be immeasurable.
You are correct, of course, my not caring is about their polities qua polities. My frustration is that there is little one could do to ensure better outcomes. Similar how life under the Taliban is obviously terrible for a lot of people, but there is preciously little the rest of the world can do to fix it. We do not have the will to permanently occupy Afghanistan, Israel and Iran permanently (or until they wisen up and become slightly less murderous in another century or so), and I don't require an EA impact analysis to notice that past occupations have been terrible on a QALY-increase per dollar spend metric (and a lot of other metrics beside that).
I would liken dealing with such countries to dealing with a chronically suicidal ex-partner. Of course you care if they suicide (or nuke each other), but you also don't want to spend the rest of your life doing crisis intervention. Bombing Iranian enrichment facilities, or having your ex committed to a psychiatric hospital for some time is a stop-gap measure which kicks the can down the road, but makes the problem worse in the long run.
Nobody has the stomach to occupy Iran or have someone long-term committed for suicidality. If someone wants to kill themself, or a regime is willing to pay the price of tens of millions of their civilians being murdered in reprisal for them murdering tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians in turn, that is hard to prevent.
Personally, I would have preferred to take my chances with a timeline in which Iran gets a nuke earlier but also does not have a history of Israel and the US bombing the shit out of them for a few decades to delay their nuclear program, and hope that both sides would be rational enough to play cold war like responsible adults.
As for the blockade war, I can see the logic, but a lot depends on China and India. If China sends a naval escort for a Chinese flagged ship, what happens?
With Trump in charge, your guess is as good as mine.
Generally speaking, I think that China is unlikely to start a war in a theater it can not win, and I do not see them winning a naval war in the ME against the US (though I am also not very well informed on relative naval capabilities).
quiet_NaN
1d ago
On the failed peace negotiations and the US blockade of Iranian oil
This started out as a reply to last week's CW post about the Islamabad negotiations having failed, but then I got into the blockade and decided to drag this to the new CW threat instead.
When Trump chickened out of becoming one of the top four genociders of all time by ending Iranian civilization, he called the Iranian ten point plan a "workable basis on which to negotiate". I was a bit surprised by that (call me naive for being surprised by anything out of of the White House), given that this plan was basically the wish-list of Iran, but then again I am not a "stable genius" master negotiator.
Honestly, I thought this was the best outcome the world was going to get. The world gets their dirty energy fix. Iran gets on the order of a dollar a barrel in transit fees, whatever. Perhaps Iran and Israel nuke each other in the next decade, but at this point I can not really bring myself to care -- religious crazies will do as religious crazies do, and the best thing the civilized world can do is to stay the hell out of it.
Presumably, at some point, someone in the White House thought to actually read the ten point proposal, and noticed that it would place Iran in a strictly better strategic position than before the start of Trump's special military operation. I am kind of amazed that they took 21 hours to realize that they had no overlap. I think Vance rejected anything which was not the miracle victory Trump would need not to get slaughtered in the mid-terms, and Iran was unlikely to budge on key issues such as the control of the strait or their nuclear program, whose strategic importance Israel and the US had just made blatantly obvious.
People have been pointing out that the Trump timeline was obviously never meant for production use for a decade, but lately things have been going to shit at an accelerated pace.
Now Trump has apparently announced that the US is going to block the strait of Hormuz. I wonder who could have given them that idea, and expect Trump to announce that the US will start enriching uranium next week and the US will start funding Shia proxies in May.
More seriously, a blockade is an act of war. Arguably, it is not only an act of war against the country being blockaded, but also against any neutral country who wants to peacefully trade with the blockaded country.
Not all blockades are created equally. When Kennedy blocked the peaceful trade of medium-range ballistic missiles between the USSR and Cuba, he could point out that actually this was a rather narrow blockade aimed to interdict a specific strategic weapon.
Iran's blockade is much harder to justify. Saudi oil being sold to Europe or Asia is not of direct military importance for any conflict Iran is currently fighting, their blockade is a weapon aimed at global trade itself. This makes them a rogue state and gives any country which trades oil with the gulf states a legitimate casus belli against Iran: simply send a single tanker under your flag through the strait claiming innocent passage. Either Iran sinks it, in which case you have war, or it does not, in which case you have no blockade.
The problem is that Iran does not exactly care, which is sound strategy given their situation. Blocking the strait is their one way to squeeze the balls of the world economy to exert pressure on the US, of course they are doing it.
Some strategists might notice that the United States find themselves in a slightly different situation than Iran. So far, they have not been considered a rogue nation willing to wreck the global economy to exert pressure on their opponents.
A US blockade of oil tankers bound for Iran would be as little justified as the Iranian blockade, but like the Iranian regime, they would probably get away with it. China is sadly not in the position to champion the free, peaceful trade between nations by sinking a few US aircraft carriers blockading Iran. Everyone can see that trying to end Iran's capability to block Hormuz will be a military mistake, trying to attack the US over their blockade will end just as badly.
Of course, this strategy will also not work very well for the US.
The Iranian blockade works because the median US voter reasonably cares more about the prices of gas than the regime in Tehran. Oil is the lifeblood of the economy, even a modest disruption will wreck the economy to a far greater degree than what a US presidency can survive.
The US blockade will not work because the Iranian regime cares a lot more about who rules in Tehran than their quarterly growth numbers. The US and Israel just spent tens of billions in bombing the shit out of Iran, with the net result of hardening their will to resist (if only someone had warned us!).
The idea that economic constraints might achieve what getting bombed did not seems absurd. Put bluntly, the regime in Tehran can survive a year with Hormuz being closed (especially as there are countries in whose strategic interest it will be to support them, even if they can't buy their oil, in the same manner in which NATO countries support Ukraine). The one on DC can not.
A chess grandmaster often has different objectives he achieves with a single move. Likewise, Trump has an uncanny ability to make strategic blunders which hurt American interests in a lot of different ways.
In the grand scheme of things, Iran does not matter. However, the US is just establishing that they consider broad trade blockades of enemies a legitimate strategy. This seems foolish not just in principle but because there is a country which matters which might be vulnerable to blockades, which is Taiwan.
(So far, China has been the adult in the room, refraining from any special military operation adventures. The CCP might be evil and bend on world domination, but at least they seem competent. Xi Jinping seems to have object permanence and an inclination to stay out of social media, both qualities which I find aesthetically pleasing in world leaders, and as far as avoiding a paperclip maximizer goes, I trust the CCP more than I would trust Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk. Still, looking at this timeline, it seems sadly possible that Xi Jinping might decide to walk in the footsteps of other elderly world leaders and decide to fuck up the world a bit before he exits the stage.)
Purely on capabilities, it does not matter if there is a precedent for a blockade of Taiwan or not. But narratives matter, especially when allies are concerned. Before, China blockading trade to Taiwan would have been an outrage. Now, they can simply point out that just as the US prohibits Chinese oil tanker from approaching Iranian ports on pain of war, China is blockading western container ships approaching Taiwan.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My immediate takeaway from this is that you can no longer assume a named model and version will maintain the same capabilities over its lifecycle.
It sure looks like that. Anthropic might not be evil in the actively-building-the-torment-nexus way, but from reading the comments on github they are either saving compute or intentionally sabotaging existing models so that their users will upgrade when the next model comes out, both of which are things one would avoid in companies one does business with.
The obvious solution would be to separate the development and the hosting of the models. So you would pay Anthropic for the license to run the model and Nvidia (or whomever) for the inference, with the idea that the computation provider has no incentive to care whether you prefer this or that model, and will thus simply run it without cutting any corners. Just like Intel does not really care if I run Linux or Windows or whatever on my CPU.
One of the problems would be that the data center would obviously need the node weights (which are probably worth billions to China in a way the binaries of Windows are not), but there are already solutions for that for using LLMs for classified government data. You would not need hundreds of compute vendors which have access to Claude's weights, but perhaps three or four. And of course LLM vendors might whine about having to fix jailbreaks of their models so that they can't be used for bioweapons research (or whatever the scary thing of the day is), but at least people would be notified that their model got mandatory updates, rather than "as of March 8".
I imagine that a LLM company is always living on borrowed time. A business decision which will make you appear as a trustworthy partner, but also decrease the hype for your product and thus give you a few tens of billions less of money to burn might result in you losing your lead and getting sidelined. So instead you hype-maxx, whatever that takes, and if it takes selling tokens below cost to establish that your LLM is the best in a domain, and then later pulling the rug from under your customer base then you simply do that.
This also makes me slightly more pessimistic about ASI alignment. Charitably, it could be "Anthropic cares so much about ASI alignment that they are beyond any lesser concerns than winning the AI race." But realistically, if one side in a civil war decides that their victory is more important than anything and every crime they commit will be worth it a hundredfold once they have won and established their utopia, at least nine times out of ten their envisioned utopia will be some sort of hellscape. Empirically, there seems to be a limit to instrumental convergence in humans, and you can learn a lot about the character of your date by observing how they treat the waiter, or a general by what lines they will cross.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that people making decisions on bad 'data' is nothing new. It probably predates the replication crisis by tens of millennia.
People with an intact epistemic immune system (who may or may not be a null set, effectively) should not be affected by this at all, because they will not update their world model upon reading the results of a study or poll (apart from what topics are en vogue right now, perhaps), until they have studied the methodology section of the claim (or it comes from a source which is generally trustworthy, if they have any such sources).
The very idea to study maternal death rates with a 'poll' of all things is already a giant red flag, of course. You might as well try to learn more of the Higgs mass by polling people, real or imaginary -- or LLMs roleplaying Higgs bosons, for that matter. In fact, death rates are one of the few things in the epistemic frontierlands called medicine where I am convinced that good data actually exists. We might not have great data if this or that intervention really helps, but 'how many women die due to pregnancy-related reasons' is the kind of question people have gathered data on before.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Mission accomplished: X is free enough, or has low enough walls to the garden, where we (EFF) can leave to focus efforts elsewhere. It doesn't really make sense in context of posting to additional platform, but could be one explanation why "X is no longer where the fight is happening."
I think that there are two different things the EFF could do wrt twitter: (1) using the platform as a platform to promote their mission and (2) making the platform the focus of a campaign. Both are roughly orthogonal to each other.
It makes no sense to retreat from a platform which is too aligned with your goals. The EFF will hardly give up E-Mail simply because E-Mail is a widely supported open standard implemented by myriads of vendors, just as they prefer things. For any platform not aligned with your goals, there is a tradeoff between making use of the reach of that platform to push your agenda and lending the platform legitimacy by being on it.
So one would imagine that the assessment of twitter by the EFF differs from that of a year ago because they either judge them more evil or less relevant, possibly both. How much of a defeat or victory this is for the EFF depends on which of these it is. If twitter was as relevant as ever, but less aligned to them, that would be a defeat, while if it became simply less relevant that would be a victory.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I would not expect them to go very well, likely Iran will end up with more rights and fewer sanctions than before the whole thing started. Iran was not the one who swerved. Trump set three (or so) deadlines (and chickened out of all of them), did a final bluff about destroying their civilization and then retreated to "actually that Iranian peace plan seems a good enough basis for talks, let's have a ceasefire".
The Iranian regime has proven that they can withstand getting bombed longer than the world can withstand the strait of Hormuz being closed.
That being said, Melania denying Epstein contacts is more of a distraction which lasts half a day. Even her coming out as trans or getting shot in an anti-ICE protest (both of which seem very unlikely) would not offer sufficient distraction from Iran.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
That is merely a difference in magnitude, and I would argue that it is not that large.
Personally, I would rather have one year as a woman in freedom than ten years as a woman married to some Taliban. If this attitude is typical, being enslaved by the Taliban robs a woman of 90% of her remaining QALYs, while being killed on the spot robs her of 100%.
My Western attitude might not be entirely representative, there is probably a woman somewhere in Afghanistan whose kink it is to get raped and bred by her Taliban husband, and whose utility would decrease under a more liberal system, and some probably get lucky in that they have a husband who is not maximally terrible, but by and large we can assume that if some alien placed these women in an enlightened state and asked them if they wanted to spend their live in Afghanistan or in a fictional version in which the Taliban believe in gender equality, they would prefer the latter by a lot.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The number of sedevacantists is unknown and difficult to measure; estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
And yes, I was going for their high estimate (hundreds of thousands) to make my point that there are many orders of magnitude more Catholics than that without getting accused of cherry-picking the numbers to fit my argument.
For all know, they might also be less than 10k in total.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
You might not be aware of it, but Trump frequently posts on social media. I would say he comes off as unhinged. He is not wearing the clown suit, he is the clown suit the US is currently wearing.
Anyone who is pretending that his behavior is normal presidential behavior is just enabling him at this point, and I can totally see why the pope would prefer not to do that.
I agree that the Allah thing was a joke (though not an especially funny one, to my tastes), but the thing about destroying Iranian civilization was a threat. A threat which none of the other presidents in my lifetime would have made. The fact that hours later he chickened out and decided that the peace plan offered by Iran was a good enough basis for a ceasefire does not change this.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Fingerprints and photographs are clearly dual use.
On the one side, you can use them to establish that the person in front of you is the same person who was previously in front of you, which seems like a legitimate concern when IDing people.
On the other side, having fingerprints and photographs on file is also a great way to ID people in less formal settings, such as on surveillance cameras or on pieces of evidence they touched. I think this is directionally bad, a state having the fingerprints of all residents/citizens on file will give it more power for good or ill, and I do not really trust states with more power, generally.
I think a better approach would be to have an iris scan of everyone on file, which can be used for explicitly IDing, but not to ID people in less formal settings (until we get further into the dystopian future, anyhow).
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is like Death's 'atom of justice' speech, and it's wrong for the same reason.
I think this is unfair to Death, because unlike @Lizzardspawn, he is not arguing for a nihilist materialism.
The model of a living being is a gross but useful simplification. It does not exist in the fundamental description of the universe. Any paradox about Schroedinger's cat or people being revived is strictly with the model, not reality.
For moral conceptions like justice, you can argue that they sometimes make models which can describe the behavior of humans, but that will not convince anyone to behave according to them. I am sure that @Lizzardspawn would concede that "human rights" are as much real as "Huitzilopochtli" in that both concepts explained some of the behavior of humans who believed in them.
As a noncognitivist, I tend to agree with Death that (prescriptive) ethics is not about what exists in the world (or even in more abstract realms like mathematics), but what you should or should not do.
People can have consistent (if horrible) moral systems which deny that one should not rape or even have no concept of consent at all, just as they can affirm or deny the axiom of choice, and there is no observation of reality which could falsify their system. But of course others can coordinate and build and enforce less terrible moral systems, where rape is defined in some law and punished.
For human rights, there is obviously no god who will strike you down with lightning if you break them, nor some special forces which will extract you to the Hague. Sometimes, the only difference will be how much the liberals will whine if someone kills you, few shed tears for Saddam.
But human rights as we have them today are also a preview of a work in progress. A mere 100 years ago, wars of aggression and reprisal killings were still considered normal. There is still more coordination to be done, more case law to be established.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Citation needed.
I think it is possible that a majority of popes would be fine with Iran being Christianized at sword point, but then again, the RCC was badly corrupted by power for most of its history. You might likewise find them to hold other ideas which we consider horrible (like supporting the death penalty for heretics, or serfdom, or the subjugation of women) or laughably wrong (like 'man was not meant to fly').
I am sure you can find some particular genocidal ones who would glee at the thought of nuking their opponents without even trying to convert them first. But in general, Church doctrine would hold that anyone should get the 'chance' to be saved through accepting Christ and his Church, and glassing cities is for God, not man.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
A USG-sanctioned breakaway hierarchy might be our only shot at getting real Catholicism back.
Schisms have happened before and might happen again. However, I doubt that most of the Catholics, American or otherwise share your frustration with the Vatican.
The closest thing to what you propose might be the Anglican Church. But the British Royals made much more reliable partners than the USG. For one thing, they are not customarily replaced every four years or so by one of the opposite side of the culture wars. For another, they did not have a constitutional obligation not to interfere with religion.
While you are right that Rome is probably not essential to Catholicism -- if it were hit by a meteor, I doubt that Catholics would just declare their religion over and accept damnation -- it does make an excellent Schelling point. It is also part of their brand: there are a zillion Churches which were inspired by Jesus, but only one can credibly claim to be the church Peter founded in Rome (though five more claime to be the one he founded in Antioch).
Catholics are generally the ones who do not schism every Tuesday. This joke would just not work for them. Generally, there are Catholics who hate Vatican II but still remain in the RCC, and there are a few fringe groups who hated it enough to quit the Church and make their own, with blackjack and hookers. But the sedevacantists and conclavists are a tiny minority. There are 1.3 billon Catholics and generously a few hundred thousand sedevacantists if WP is to be believed. Sometimes a few of them have a conclave and elect this or that guy as a pope, and I don't think that simply having the blessing of Trump would convince even the other renegades to accept that claim.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
We do not even need to go there, obviously America does not even have the power to do what it wants with Iran.
Or perhaps more accurately, while it might have the military power, it lacks the power to stop the negative consequences and the will to suffer through them.
I mean, I could easily murder my neighbor. Most humans are utterly unprepared to defend themselves from assassination attempts in their daily life. But even if I thought that this was a great outcome, it would not be the end of the story, but there would be adverse consequences for me. I might hate my hypothetical neighbor enough that I was willing to dedicate a week or months to planning their death, but I would lack the will to go to prison for a few decades as a consequence.
Likewise with the US and Iran. The US has the military power to occupy Iran, obviously. If 300M Americans woke up tomorrow with the firm belief that occupying Iran was their topmost priority, before their lives, family, career, investments, human rights, community, other geostrategic issues and so forth, there is no doubt that the US military would succeed.
But that is not the reality we live in, where whatever happens in Iran ranks well below the gas price for most Americans. In this reality, the US military does not have effective power to do what they want with Iran, as the last weeks have shown.
An invasion of China is something where I am doubtful if the US could pull it off even if they were utterly convinced that it must happen no matter the costs.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is a serious insult to an entire country over a political dispute involving a transient administration.
Not really. Do you really think that a Harris-voting Catholic would feel that the pope declining celebrating the anniversary with Trump would be an insult?
If you show up in any serious meeting dressed up as a clown, it is unlikely that people will take you serious. And whining about how your clothes are merely transient and they should respect you as the person you are underneath them is not going to convince anyone.
I am an atheist, but it seems to me that modern Catholicism -- for all its faults -- still contains some nugget of the ideas of Christ, while the religion loudly preached by the Trump administration -- Hegseth first and foremost -- would work equally well if you placed Mars, Odin, or any tribal deity as the figurehead instead.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
While I think your plan to get rid of Trump has a certain charm, I thing relying on China to blow him up has some serious downsides.
I mean, MAGA is more like Venezuela than like Iran, a very personalized regime, removing Trump would certainly change US policy. On the other hand, an assassinated Trump would be as much a martyr for his cause as the Ayatollah. All the valid reasons for not blowing up the Ayatollah -- he is old, will probably die soon anyhow, will be replaced by another hardliner -- would also apply to Trump. And crucially, the effective military capabilities of the USG would not be hamstrung at all from this.
For the US, there is the option of a bloodless regime change in the midterm elections (after which he will be severely limited in his ability to make policy) seems much preferable to violent foreign interference in the US.
Now, I know your counterargument, both the Ayatollah and Trump have committed crimes against humanity (like the slaughter of protesters for the former, or the state-sanctioned Pretti shooting and the bombing of school girls for the latter) for which they should answer in the Hague, and sometimes a violent death might seem like the best available approximation to that if getting them to the Hague is not feasible, but with heads of state you always the primary concern is always the larger impact on their society, not if they personally get their just rewards or not. Once they are disposed, you can safely put them to trial.
Killing Trump would likely drive the American people further down a road of international isolation, religious fanaticism and nuclear and conventional militarism. It would also further establish your preferred precedent of just murdering heads of state which are generally disliked, and I think rather than making other leaders try to be less like Trump or the Ayatollah, they would instead work to install mechanisms where their sudden demise would create widespread negative outcomes.
It looks like the price for killing the Ayatollah was that the next one took control of the strait, if China blows up Trump that might just be the justification which Vance needs to take Greenland (to safeguard it from China, or because one of the killers wore a ski mask or whatever).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Agreed, I think the median 0day the NSA exploits is one they found or bought and not one which they made some US company insert on purpose.
That being said, I think that it would be overly naive to suppose that a big US company with ties to the USG stumbles on a treasure trove of 0days and decides that obviously they will report all of them, rather than keeping a few choice ones for the spooks.
Even if this was their intent originally, obviously the intelligence community has moles and ways to coerce cooperation. "This is a matter of national security!!11", literally convinced the Americans to let them torture prisoners on the record. Few companies would be foolish enough to trust the court system to protect them from their ire.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
To be honest, I did not think that Trump would be able to scare the Iranians into opening the strait, and that they were more willing to sacrifice their population to induce a regime change in DC.
But yes, let's see if they let through ships at a similar scale than before the attacks first before praising the master dealmaker.
And an outcome where Iran gets to take fees for passage is strictly worse than what we had before the war, I think the technical term for such an outcome is 'defeat'.
For now I am happy to not find out what war crimes Trump and the US might be capable of.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I can only speak for myself, but this is one of the questions, alongside with other great questions of mankind like What does it feel like to stick your penis into a toaster? where I am perfectly willing to keep my ignorance.
Even if China was merely an upscaled Iran who took a beating while lobbing missiles at regional US allies and disrupting the SE Asia trade, attacking them would dwarf any other Trump decision in stupidity by orders of magnitude. And in reality, they are certainly not just an upscaled Iran.
Of course, the other unknown is the US military, which has not been in a conflict against peer adversaries since WW2. A lot of the funding of military hardware seems to be as much about state politics as it is about enhancing capabilities, and if it turns out that their hardware is not so much better that it makes the Chinese hardware moot, the production capabilities of China might prevail in attritional warfare.
The US easily beating Iran on a tactical level (and only there!) does not prove anything, they are spending more on this war per week than Iran spends on defense per year. At this level of disparity, anything less lopsided would indicate total incompetence on the part of the stronger party. (Nor would these figures stay the same if the US foolishly tried to occupy Iran.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think both what you and @Goodguy wrote is true.
On the one hand, the US can clearly bomb Iran with impunity, their air defense seems to do little to keep the bombers away. (The aircraft carriers are indeed hiding, but that might also be an abundance of caution. Are they effective from where they are currently anchored? If so, it is probably clever to keep them out of harm's way, if not, that would indeed showcase the (presumed) effectiveness of Iranian anti-ship missiles.) They probably killed more senior leadership in a few days of war than what the Allies managed between 1933-45. They managed to pull off an impressive rescue operation. The casualties have been just as lopsided as in the Gaza war.
The problem is that you can win every battle and still lose the war, tactical victories are meaningless without achievable strategic objectives. So they turned the Ayatollah into a martyr and are instead dealing with Ayatollah Jr, whose father and wife they just killed in an airstrike. How is that an improvement? They have the firepower to level Tehran, but that would only get them a cozy cell in the Hague, not prevent IRGCs from continuing to launch missiles from 100km of coastline against any oil tanker for the forseable future. They are spending a shit-ton of taxpayer money to dominate a battlefield while also being totally unable to prevent Iran from wrecking the world economy to a degree which is presidency-ending.
I mean, even Operation Barbarossa took six months to go from optimism to 'why are the Soviets not sticking to our plan?', and a further six months to go to 'oh shit'. Trump's plan went well for the day when he killed the Ayatollah, and then he was completely unprepared for Iran not being Venezuela and surrendering at the earliest opportunity, but instead closing the strait (as everyone had predicted they would).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Finding a 27y old vulnerability in FreeBSD is up there next level skillz.
Per the quote, it was OpenBSD, which is an operating system with a very strong focus on security. (By reputation, I am not paranoid enough to run their OS personally. I do run their ssh server, like everyone does, and have no complaints except for that one Debian 'fix', and I can't blame Theo et al for that.)
Your president threatened to destroy the Iranian civilization overnight.
Most people who use language try to transport meaning rather than just fill the silence. Do you think Trump tries to transport meaning with language?
Generally, a threat is only effective if your opponent believes that you are willing to act upon it. If I threaten to cast a fireball at someone, that will weaken my negotiation position because they will assume that I do not have the ability to conjure fireballs. This will increase the probability that any other threat I subsequently make will be likewise idle.
Do you think that Trump was willing to follow through with his threat to end the Iranian civilization? If so, that would make him one of the most evil men in history, and you might as well claim that people in the 1940s had a Hitler Derangement Syndrome.
Or do you think he was bluffing? If so, do you think Iran bought his bluff? Why would they not recognize the bluff when you or I would probably concede that it was unlikely that he was going to nuke Iranian cities? How does the inability of the president to make credible threats help the US, strategically?
In general, what is the purpose of him setting deadlines and making threats on social media? Presumably he has a more direct channel to Iran. Iran certainly seems to be able to conduct their war and negotiate without making dramatic tweets and flip-flopping in public every few days. Is he intentionally trying to come across as unhinged and unreliable? Why?
Or take the Greenland debacle. Trump could have achieved the same outcome, i.e. learning that Denmark is unwilling to sell Greenland to him entirely through diplomatic channels without it ever making the news. What does he get out of it? Is the goal to seem like a buffoon who has no idea how the world works? Or was it net-positive for the purpose of signaling something to his constituents?
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