quiet_NaN
48m ago
I think that this can not be reasonably discussed without mentioning student debt and artificial constraints on education supply.
In Germany, medicine are among the most favorite subjects to study. To be able to start to study directly after the 12th grade in school, you need to be in the top 10% of students or so, because there are not enough places in the university programs for everyone who is interested. Obviously there are people who will make fine physicians who were not in the top 10% of students (and indeed some of them are admitted after a waiting period). If instead you admitted anyone who you thought had a reasonable chance to pass the final exam, you would have tremendously increase the supply of physicians in half a decade, decreasing wages. I think this is exactly why this is not done.
In the US, I feel that it is linked to student debt. Doctors are expensive because studying medicine is expensive, because universities mostly do not compete on price but on amenities.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I was actually wondering about that, and think you are probably correct. My reasoning was something like 'if five people in Iran had known, Mossad would have known, and it seems implausible that the Israeli intelligence community would have allowed an atrocity on this scale to succeed for instrumental reasons'.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
And that this action makes the abduction, rape, torture and murder of over 1000 civilians a legitimate act of warfare and retaliation?
No. It was totally a crime against humanity, an atrocity. It totally justified occupying Gaza and ruling it as an occupation force for a generation. (It arguably did not justify starving Gaza, though.)
The question how much sponsors should be held responsible for their proxy forces is not as clear as you make it out to be, though.
Consider Operation Condor, where the US intelligence community sponsored violence against left-wing activists (some of whom were doubtlessly inclined to violence, while others were clearly not), violating their human rights in the process. Obviously the US did know what was going on and could have exerted pressure, which places them in a similar role as Iran wrt Hamas. Would it be fair to call the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance the part of the US military that functionally exists to murder Argentinian intellectuals, the implication being that attacking GIs stationed Germany is fine because US (proxy) forces are already committing acts of war against you?
I think no country in the world really follows consistent hard and fast rules about what kind of aid to enemies preserves neutrality (like Europe giving missiles to Ukraine) and what kinds of aid is an act of war (like providing nukes to Cuba, which Cuba then launches against the US).
I do not mourn Soleimani, but I think that his assassination did little to diminish the capabilities of Iranian proxies but contributed to further escalation, which ended up hurting civilians in Israel, Gaza and Iran. (One could also debate why he was not killed by Israel giving that the proxies he was coordinating were mostly murdering Israeli citizens.)
Sometimes violence is the best option. You gun down the bad guy and save the day. Sometimes it leads to utter disaster. By my reckoning, Franz Ferdinand was a piece of shit monarchist whom I would not have mourned. But killing them did not solve the relationship between continental Europe and monarchs, at least not until millions had died, so him not getting killed would have been of instrumental value. I feel similarly about the late Ayatollah.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
taking meth to stay lean
If he is 20 now he was about 14 in 2017 when semaglutide first was approved for medical use in the US. Presumably he did not advertise taking meth for weight loss on social media at age 14.
In a world where GLP-1 agonists exist, meth might not be strictly the worst intervention for weight loss (chainsaw-powered amputations are arguably worse), but it is pretty much out there. "Take meth for weight loss" is a take so outlandish it makes me wonder why he is not employed by MAHA yet.
I get that young men feel that the game is rigged against them. By the time they have earned a master, LLMs may well substitute for PhDs in earnest, the prices of housing is all messed up and dating is mostly agreed to be terrible.
Still, I think influencers and celebrities make generally bad role models because they do not scale. 99% of the people who emulate one of the most famous actors or influencers will not get successful to a comparative degree. Nor does 'looksmaxxing wins youtube' an argument for why it would work more generally. Appearing in a skimpy outfit (for example) might well work on social media, but if you are a truck driver or middle manager it will not get you a raise.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My take is a different one. 3k people killed in 9/11 is bad, sure, but his real success was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan. Not only did the Taliban kill another 3k US and allied troops during 'Enduring Freedom', they spent more than 150 billion dollars on it. (I consider W's Iraq trip an unrelated misadventure.)
Unless my math is wrong, that comes to 50 million dollars per 9/11 victim. This is simply not cost-effective when the marginal price of a QALY in US healthcare is on the order of 100k$.
Nor was Bin Laden a comic book super-villain who was much better at hurting the US than the next in line was. Nor are jihadists motivated by fear of retaliation, Bin Laden himself was (I think) a minor Saudi noble who could have happily lived without having to work a single day in his life, but instead spent it hiding in caves doing Jihad. I very much assume that if he had known that he would eventually get gunned down by US special forces, he would not have done anything different.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
My general understanding is that Iran would prefer to support partisan groups against Israel in a matter rather reminiscent of the US support for the Mujaheddin. While I am much more sympathetic towards Ukraine than Hezbollah, I find it difficult to say that e.g. Poland providing rockets to Ukraine which are predictably fired into Russia is okay while Iran providing rockets to Hezbollah which are predictably fired into Israel is a declaration of war on the part of Iran. (Of course, it helps that Ukraine has the ability to pursue their goals through regular military means rather than terror attacks. But there is a continuous spectrum between a soldier attacking legitimate military targets and a terrorist blowing up civilians.)
Israel has meanwhile run a decade-long campaign of slowing Iranian nuclear weapon development through assassination and bombing. As an undeclared nuclear power, Israel is the last country on Earth to have any moral standing for bombing to deny nukes to others.
Or take the assassination of Soleimani in Baghdad, which caused some weak-sauce retaliation against American bases. Sure, you may claim that he had no legitimate business in Iraq, but if instead Iran had killed an IDF general in the West Bank (who likewise would not have legitimate business there) you can bet that Israel would have retaliated as well. Of course, the real retaliation for Soleimani was likely Iran greenlighting the Oct 7 attacks.
Now, it could be that I am genuinely wrong and IRGC forces have habitually launched missiles against Israel, but I recall the Biden years to be rather quiet as far as direct attacks are concerned, presumably because Iran did not want to get into a pissing contest it knew it would lose. All the escalations since Trump took office seem to originate in the US and Israel.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This ignores (at least in the case of Afghanistan) the necessity of invasion.
From the perspective of US internal politics, one might argue that there was indeed a necessity. The voters were howling for blood after 9/11, and any leader who would not have given them some war would likely not have survived politically. But even then, the 20 years of occupation while trying to build a nation was clearly a wasted effort.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary. Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
For Saddam, the case was even more flimsy. Sure, he was an evil piece of shit, but so are a lot of strongmen in the region. Presumably, he had learned his lesson about attacking US allies after the first Gulf war. He certainly did not cook chemical weapons, as W claimed. His removal directly lead to the surge of daesh, which likely was much worse for human rights than Saddam.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would not go that far. It is very possible that more than one side in a conflict is shitty. The Iranian leaders are also not getting a Nobel any time soon.
Iran is clearly a repressive dictatorship, and it is also pursuing nuclear weapons.
But I do have different standards. First, the US and Israel are clearly the aggressors here. This does not make them bad per se, sometimes aggression is required. But it does clear communication out of what might be termed a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. If you talk about bombing your enemy 'for fun', you are making an excellent argument for yourself being evil.
Second, I remember the Iraqi propaganda minister during the W invasion. His statements were about as trustworthy as anything Trump has ever tweeted, yet the Western reaction was amusement, not outrage. This was simply because few people in the West had any expectations for the mouthpiece of a dictatorship not to be a lying sack of shit. By contrast, for the most part past US presidents have tried to avoid telling direct lies or calling their opponents names. Saddam was merely a regional problem, Greenland was perfectly safe from his reach. By contrast, the US under Trump is everyone's problem.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
That seems unlikely. In peace negotiations, you generally can't chose whom you are negotiating with. Iran can't say they would prefer not to talk with the US and talk with the UK instead, nor can Trump negotiate a ceasefire with Iraq instead.
But generally the host country is one which both sides can agree on. Iran can reject peace talks in Israel, and the US can reject peace talks in Lebanon. Pakistan was something both were willing to agree to, presumably because both thought that Islamabad would not fuck them over.
Generally, the host country has diplomatic influence on the line. If they fuck over either side, e.g. by misrepresenting the ceasefire terms, their diplomatic influence with one side will evaporate. With the Taliban trouble, Pakistan is unlikely to stab the US in the back. So in short, I would trust the host much more than I would trust either side.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I will grant you that this will give the ships of any country whose ships they deny a legitimate cause for war, just as the US blockading Iran gives any country whose ships they block an excuse to sink their carriers. In practice, third parties affected by either blockade will judge it in their interests not to start a war over it.
From a ceasefire perspective (which is what my quote was about), either blockade is an act of war, but the general narrative I heard was that Iran was willing to open Hormuz before Trump enacted his blockade.
The US has myriad option to impose their will on the world, from soft power to bunker-bursting bombs and invasions. Like the hedgehog, Iran only has one trick, but it is a very good trick. To expect Iran to bear the US blockade and not make the world share their pain by kicking the world economy in the balls would not be reasonable. This is not something specific to the Mullah regime, any country would do the same in Iran's place, international norms be damned.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If you want to start a social media company based on the premise that the users are verified using government IDs, by all means do so. If you want to tell your kids that they are only allowed to use such media, by all means try. If you dislike porn, I hear Disney runs websites which are rather porn-free. By all means lobby Microsoft to add Mandatory User Age verification to Windows Server.
The point being that you compete in the marketplace of ideas. Plenty of companies build walled gardens and gilded cages in the internet. Even the companies which verify identities can generally decide how much they trust operating system and if they require remote attestation of some TPM chip certifying that the video feed used for ID is actually recorded by a tamper-resistant camera.
But to constrain the marketplace of ideas you would have to demonstrate that the options you dislike are actively harmful, and you have done no such thing.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The steelman is that it will incentivize minors to run custom operating systems so they can watch porn, and they might learn something in the process both about tech and the government.
More seriously, the only reason besides utterly incompetence anyone could have to enact such a law is that they want to create a dystopia out of RMS's worst nightmares.
This law would be moot as long as people have the freedom to decide what software they run. At the moment, there are both walled gardens and platforms which with you can mess as much as you want. While anyone can buy a Raspberry Pi for a couple of bucks and run whatever software they want, kids can simply opt for a distribution which does not try to babysit them. Or run systemctl disable babysitd, for that matter. So you would need to mandate TPM chips in every device with more than four kilobytes of address space or something. Good luck with that.
And of course this would be required, but not yet sufficient on its own. How can an operating system know if the person in front of it is a minor or not? With AI, facial recognition can be tricked. Of course, the government could helpfully implant RFID chips in citizens to help the poor OSes figuring out who is who. I think the traditional location would be the forehead.
The internet has the advantage over real life that if you find yourself in a situation which makes you uncomfortable, you can just turn off the screen without having to learn how to dissociate first. Nor is this the purpose of such laws -- someone who prefers not to see unsolicited dick picks can use messenger apps which have options to block those. The purpose of such laws is to control what kind of content minors are allowed to search for. Like the internet, reality is not safe for children. Any ten-year-old riding a bike in traffic is just one bad decision away from a life-altering accident. However, kids (or those who make it, anyhow) thrive in conditions which are not entirely safe.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Anything is possible.
It is possible that aliens have landed in Greenland and any US president would therefore invade in 2026.
It is possible that an oracle has told Trump that America is doomed unless a majority of voters end up believing he is crazy.
It is possible that the Moon has turned into cheese since the last time we checked on it.
For a good Bayesian, anything is possible, but not everything is plausible. We have data how previous US administrations have dealt with Iran, and as you point out, we have Trump's public statements. Perhaps talking about regime change was a 3d chess move and he knew very well that killing the Ayatollah would not destabilize the regime, but had other reasons to do so.
Nor should we fetishize classified intelligence. Classified intelligence rarely changes the big strategic picture. Someone making an effort to follow a war from publicly available sources will generally get the gist of what is going on. Sure, once a century she might be completely blindsided by the US nuking Hiroshima, but most of the time the ministers and generals will have an information advantage of just a few weeks. Intelligence seems more useful in a tactical frame "we can kill the Ayatollah on that date" than on an strategic scale. If the US had military intelligence so great that they could avoid blunders, GWB would have invaded neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
Furthermore, your hypothetical big intelligence revelation would have to be something which involves Iran (so the Iranians likely know) and also known to the US (otherwise they could not have acted on it). It seems unlikely that it would be in the interest of neither party to tell the world about it. As a counterexample, when NATO intelligence had reason to believe that Putin would attack Ukraine, they made their concerns public.
Personally, I think that Trump's behavior can be adequately explained by his personality traits. We all remember the tweets how he predicted that Obama would attack Iran to boost his popularity. Of course, Obama did no such thing, but this is adequately explained by Obama in 2015 having at least 20 IQ points on Trump in 2026 (plus a staff of technocrats instead of brown-nosers) and thus knowing that would turn into a fiasco.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Lol, you seem very optimistic (from US perspective) about the amount of hurt Iran can withstand.
Obviously the war so far has hurt Iran far more than the US. It does not matter jackshit. Those who support the the regime mostly believe in their religion, I imagine. The Ayatollah is certainly aware that a continuation of the war will likely cause the deaths of further family members of him.
As a model of Iran, consider Gaza. Both the IRGC and Hamas are militant Shiite extremists. Israel did a lot worse than some economic blockades after the Oct-7 atrocities. They killed Hamas members, turned most of the buildings in Gaza to rubble, starved the population, and so forth. At the moment Hamas seems quiet, but they have very much not gotten rid of it. Even if regime-supporting Iranians are less fatalistic than Hamas, I do not have a good reason to assume that they are less willing to take on hardships than Ukraine.
The idea that the IRGC -- which has just withstood a bombing to the tune of a few dozen billion dollars -- might buckle under a few months of economic hardship seems implausible. "Due to sanctions, I can't buy my kids a new Xbox" is not sufficient argument when you feel your way of life is on the line. Nor will the kids of the IRGC starve.
acoup on the topic. The gist is that locals care a lot more about a war which might destroy their polity than the people in far-away, much stronger nations.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
If the median US voter believed that the survival of their way of life was at stake, I am sure that they could withstand the economic hardships of Hormuz being closed indefinitely. But they have enough of a grasp on reality to know that this is not the case. They were skeptical about the war form the beginning, and will not gladly suffer higher gas prices for some dubious geopolitical goal half a world away.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced. If Trump or Iran had merely blocked weapon systems from passing through the strait, that would be different.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
In social justice progressivism, it is racist to claim that a non-white person is racist or sexist. (It might be ok to express discomfort with the Taliban's treatment of women as long as you amend it with a claim that the GOP is at least as bad.)
Basically, racism/sexism is a cultural thing and to disapprove of aspects of non-white cultures is racist.
There is probably a scissor statement for SJP when you pick a minority somewhere in the middle of the totem pole of oppressedness. Like 'Is it racist if a Romani prefers his daughter to marry a Romani man to marrying a man from Ghana?' SJW1 might round 'Romani' to 'white' and decide that it is racist, while SJW2 might round it to 'oppressed minority' and decide that saying that SJW1 is committing cultural genocide.
In my mind, there is likely something which is terrible about any culture. These are terrible to women, those have a caste system with little intermixing, these cut off parts of kids genitals, those are gerontocratic, these have a culture heavy on organized murder, those are mostly zealots, etc.
With regard to the WaPo article, what strikes me as particular cringe is the tagline of Bezos' newspaper -- "Democracy dies in darkness". The WaPo as a light in the MAGA darkness (which is how I read the claim) would be more believable if Amazon had not just spend 40M$ on Melania.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The Democratic Party is working hard to give MAGA the mid-terms despite everything.
The US House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have prevented further military action against Iran, as Democrats united against continued US involvement in the conflict amid peace talks that have yet to make a breakthrough.
Apparently, the resolution failed by two votes. However, my understanding is that this would have been largely symbolic, as a bill would require both the House and the Senate to vote in its favor, and actually require 2/3 majorities to override the presidential veto which can be taken as granted.
Strategically speaking, preventing Trump from continuing his war seems like a classic case of interrupting your opponent while he is making a mistake. It seems clear that MAGA is searching for an off-ramp whose taking they can sell as a win. But the next best thing to a win is a scapegoat. If Congress stops Trump from bombing Iran, Trump will surely claim that his strategy was going great and Iran was just about to surrender unconditionally when he was stabbed in the back by the radical leftists. Half the country will end up believing that sure, Trump's war raised the gas prices for a while but it was the Democrats who made sure it was all for nothing.
From the perspective of the Democrats, MAGA should obviously be a much larger threat to the US than even a nuclear armed Iran. Who knows how many lives a pandemic managed by RFK Jr would claim, or what blunders Trump might commit while conducting (or failing to conduct) a war over vital interests of the US through social media? By contrast, the damage Iran is likely to do seems limited, even if they take tolls for passage that would not a much of a threat to the US, plenty of countries with questionable regimes have nukes.
Obviously the Democrats would not want Trump to earn a triumph for his war, but I doubt that there is much chance of that. The most powerful person in Iran had his father and his wife killed by US strikes and also adheres to the same religion as Hamas does. I seriously doubt that he will be willing to make large concessions to the US.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I would argue that abortion is the motte of the side of the CW whose bailey is restricting sexuality, and their strategies reflect that.
Before effective birth control, pregnancy offered a large disincentive for women to have sex outside marriage. 'If you fuck cute strangers, you will get pregnant, nobody will marry you and you will raise your child in poverty as a single mother, probably through prostitution.' So the best strategy for women was to not have sex until marriage, which is incidentally what the Christian Right prefers.
Then effective birth control arrived, and women suddenly had pretty good odds to have sex without consequences.
I will grant the Christian Right that they actually care about the fate of the fetuses somewhat, but I think most of the issue is an instrumental vehicle to punish women for having sex.
If abortion is murder, then trying to conceive is depraved heart murder.
Suppose you have a 35yo infertile woman who wants a child, so she flies to some African country, procures a baby, places it in her check-in baggage and flies back. There is a 50% chance that the baby will die of oxygen deprivation, the cargo hold of an airplane is simply not a good environment for newborns. If it does die, she claims that this was God's will and tries again with the next baby, until she succeeds or is arrested.
If an embryo is morally equivalent to a baby, then any 35yo woman trying to conceive is doing exactly that. A significant fraction of fertilized eggs will not implant and subsequently die -- just like the babies in the cargo hold.
Yet I have not met anyone who worries about that. Sure, there are some on the CR who frown on IVF for creating embryos which will not become babies, but if there are any Church groups who encourage wives to only have anal sex after a certain cutoff age, I have not heard about them.
If the fate of the embryo was the only concern of the CR, they would fully embrace whatever forms of birth control do not produce embryos.
My baseline for serious people who care is EA. An EA org which was utterly convinced that abortion was murder would not decide that fighting a culture war is the right way to go about it. Lobbying for the pill to be made available on the taxpayers dime (or through anti-abortion charities) would be an easy win, try to convince any woman who menstruates to go on the pill whether she has sex or not, try to convince every guy to freeze sperm and then get a vasectomy. Accept that teens will make questionable decisions and simply mitigate the consequences. Lesbians, Gays and Trans people under HRT are all much less likely to be involved in an unplanned conception, so you would want to make sure that none of the queers are pressured into having straight sex through heterenormative cliches. Research into improving implantation efficiency for people trying to conceive would be another big cause area -- a drug which increases implantation probability by factor 1.05 is not worth a lot to couples simply trying for a baby, who don't really care too much if it takes another month or not, but it would prevent a lot of dead embryos.
Basically, if someone loudly opposes Zuckerberg and Altman for being (((Evil Wall Street Capitalists))), but is strangely quiet about Musk or Thiel, and somehow very uncomfortable with Sanders and Chomsky, it would be reasonably to conclude that their opposition to Wall Street is really more of an opposition to an ethnicity masquerading as anti-capitalism. This is basically how I feel about the Christian Right and abortion, if the life of the fetus was the main concern, they would behave differently. "Abortion is murder" is not something people say because they believe that a fertilized egg failing to implant is equivalent to a kid starving to death, but purely because it is a useful argument-as-a-soldier in the fight against people having sex.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
People here really don't like when I phrase it this way, but this really is a form of TDS. America is presumed to be acting in all manner of irrational and stupid ways because Trump is the President.
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?
quiet_NaN
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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.
This is your obligatory reminder that gerrymandering is only so effective because you have a terrible FPTP voting system.
Proportional representation actually works quite well for legislative bodies, and mostly removes the incentives for gerrymandering. (But I am sure that every voting nerd has their pet proposal which is better than FPTP.)
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