Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
They can just rebuild it with the oil money they're getting :v
It's always hard to evaluate these kinds of statements because Trump is both a blusterer and a brute. It does kind of put the lie to any humanitarian pretense.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Ah, the "purist" view. So it's not a "real" strategic air win unless it comes 100% from the air
Yes. If you have to utilize ground troops to achieve your objective, it was not accomplished solely through air power. You cannot equivocate between a special operation with air support and and a pure air campaign.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Well, the short argument is that it worked quite well in Venezuela 3 months ago.
That argument would be very wrong, as would the analogies to Libya and Syria. The Venezuelan operation worked precisely because it put men on the ground to force the issue (and also probably because Maduro's subordinates sold him out). Syria and Libya had ongoing civil wars where western air power was merely supporting a favored faction. Gaddafi doesn't get overthrown if there isn't a massive rebellion on the ground; likewise for Assad. The Trump administration (at best) seems to be wishcasting a renewed uprising after standing by and doing nothing while the IRI massacred protestors, but available evidence is that it's not going to happen.
The US and Israel have had decades to plan this war, plus months to build up forces in the region
Which is why the US is currently rushing a couple of battalions of marines from the Pacific to (probably) seize a couple of outlying islands. The idea that this operation has been meticulously planned over the course of decades is cope.
There really isn't much a ground force could do that isn't already being done from the air
Unless you have ground forces to stop them, air power cannot stop the enemy from reconstituting once the bombing stops. There's a reason modern doctrine for the application of air power isn't "we're going to bomb until everyone's dead." The military value of air power isn't in raw killing effect, it is in the way air power allows you to precisely strike at key targets in a way that disrupts and degrades the enemy's ability to fight back. That can be an incredible force multiplier, but you still need ground forces to actually engage the enemy.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Greensburg, an FBI informant who was cooperating with the FBI to target Gaetz and others
The technical term for this is an "investigation".
Gaetz claims he only had sex with a 19 year old introduced to him by Greensburg
What do you expect him to say? "Yes, I did have sex with a 17 year old prostitute?"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Don't they? I feel like blowing up all of their leadership and military is pretty compelling.
The record of air power in delivering conclusive outcomes is... very bad.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Of course, they could pass the blame by pointing out that given the evidence in the warrant application, it seemed justified
A pervasive problem of bureaucratic institutions (public or private) is that they disperse and attenuate responsibility such that almost everyone can claim to have acted reasonably given the information and responsibilities they had.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
This is a reverse Nirvana fallacy, justifying predictable missteps with a shrug and saying 'nobody is perfect'.
People demand a credible justification, a coherent goal, and a plausible argument that the goal is achievable. Comparing OIF to OEF is illustrative, in that Bush leveraged high public confidence and made a huge effort to sell the endeavor both domestically and internationally: Saddam is developing WMDs, we can stop this by getting rid of him, and we have the military force to do that (a lot of people still called BS and it turned out they were right, but public support at the time was high). By contrast, Trump has had his officials contradict themselves and each other several times a week as to why we're doing this, the goal is pretty vague, and their plans, such as they are, seem very reactive to extremely predictable problems. And this was carried out with zero effort to build support during a time when public trust is incredibly low.
I guess that's what attracts people to socialism
The appeal of socialism is primarily that it promises free stuff economic security and remediation against exploitative elites. Nobody cares about the plan.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
There isn't one. The plan was to pull Venezuela redux, but a) the IRI regime is made of sterner stuff than Maduro's clowns b) they appear to have killed a lot of the people they imagined stepping in to fill the void.
Okay, it's not quite right to say that there isn't a plan, but the backup plan seems to be that we (the US) are going to apply pressure to Iran until they cave. The Trump administration is stuck, because they don't want to look weak by packing up and there's a lot of pressure to resolve the crisis they started, but they don't really have a good way to compel the Iranian government. While the IRI ability to fight back is pretty limited, it's not nothing and (as demonstrated back in January) they are far more willing/able to force their populace to endure hardship than the Trump administration is.
(Also, Israel appears to have distinct goals - if I had to guess, they see the window closing on their ability to borrow strength from the US and are trying to cash that in to do as much damage to Iran as possible)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
I think the argument is that #MeToo accusations are strategically delayed to minimize harm to the left and maximize harm to the left's enemies.
My point is that's nonsense. These allegations most heavily impacted men in left-of-center spaces because those are the spaces where #MeToo-style accusations carried weight. Attempts to wield these kinds of accusations against right-wing figures by the left have largely been a failure.
Al Franken was a sitting senator when he resigned, but the accusations were from 2006 and didn't come out until 2017.
The allegations coming out when they did was probably what wrecked Franken's career. They were pretty tame on their own, but the Dems were presently trying to hammer Roy Moore down in Alabama and wanted to avoid the slightest appearance of being soft on sexual misconduct.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I'm not really sure how that's relevant to the question of whether or not left-wingers are uniquely prone to elevating sexual predators to positions of authority.
(Also, Hastert did have stuff named in his honor. Not so much any more).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
The trouble with comparing Soviet and Nazi atrocities is that the Soviets did what they were going to do while the Nazis were stopped. There really isn't a serious counterfactual where the Soviets do a whole lot worse than they actually did. By contrast, the Nazis plans for if they won in the East involved tens of millions of deaths on top of everything they actually did, and we have every reason to think they meant it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Eventually. Maybe. Decades later. And only if they're heterosexual.
I'm confused - are they not canceling people for sexual misconduct? If all the consequences are low probability and delayed by decades, why were so many people worked up about this?
The entire backlash against #MeToo only makes sense in the context of it actively going after currently prominent individuals.
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles.
I think it's more that left-of-center people are significantly more likely to care if a prominent member of their organization turns out to be a sexual predator. A remarkable number of right-wingers seem to think that banging dubiously consenting 16 year olds and sexually harassing your subordinates is just the Big Man's due (and are generally significantly more prone to dismissing/denying claims of sexual abuse).
The fact that these interrogations are being carried out even against dead icons suggests there's an actual principle at play - pushes against living figures could be argued to be power plays, and going after the other team's heroes is just playing politics, but there's really no reason to go digging up these kinds of skeletons unless this is something you actually care about.
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders."
Umm... ah... what?
Let's leave aside the allegations against Mr. Trump or people like Matt Gaetz for a moment. Remember Mark Foley or Dennis Hastert? The fact that a long-serving GOP Speaker was a pedophile has been largely consigned to the memoryhole. How about Roy Moore? The Catholic Church has had a parade of scandals (though they're woke now, so idk if that counts anymore). Southern Baptist churches have been subject to a slew of sexual abuse scandals. I know I could do some actual research and come up with more examples, but the point is less to establish who has more pedos and more to illustrate the existence of a history of right-wing leaders getting caught up in sex abuse scandals and the conservative movement downplaying or forgetting about it.
The actual pattern I can discern is that if you put men in a position of power, influence, or prestige, a significant subset of them will try to exploit it for sex (whatever prior commitments they may have re: celibacy or marriage). Of those, many will get outright coercive or direct their attentions towards inappropriate subjects (e.g. minors, subordinates).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Once upon a time Germans were stereotyped as romantic and sentimental while the French were seen rationalist and bureaucratic rules-followers.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
If it's any consolation, the proliferation of factoids is endemic and not a particular defect of this forum; basically the only way around it is to assume everyone you talk to is either lying or doesn't know what they're talking about (granted, this assumption is usually true, but it's a hard way to live life).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Iran is a democracy, full stop, with certain elements that manage democratic change, similar for the most part to the US Judiciary. The Supreme Leader is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, who are directly elected. The Guardian Council, which vets candidates (including the Assembly of Experts) are appointed by the Supreme Leader.
That does not sound particularly democratic. It sounds vaguely reminiscent of "democracy" in the Soviet Union, where you could vote for any Communist-approved candidate you wanted and all actual power routed through unelected figures in the Party or executive.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
These comparisons are laughable. One off comments, random local issues, and material complaints about voting access are being compared to a top-down campaign by the Republican Party's elite.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
The Vietnam War was the last time anyone deliberately took on the US military in a conventional fight (Noriega and Saddam Hussein made some very bad decisions that led to a conventional confrontation, but that was very much not what they expected to happen). North Vietnam a) got pasted in basically every head-to-head engagement with US forces (and that while quality of the US military was at a low ebb) b) ultimately succeeded.
One of the consequences of US conventional dominance is that no one wants to fight us. This is good, but it also means that the amount of foreign policy problems the US has that can be solved by the brute application of conventional force is fairly low. This is compounded by the accumulated psychic damage of Vietnam and Iraq, which has greatly attenuated the ability of the USG to count on popular trust to justify a sustained war effort (which is to say, I think complaints that the public has gotten soft are misunderstanding the problem).
That is a major stumbling block for people who want the US to pursue an aggressive, hard power-oriented foreign policy. Most potential adversaries know that even if the US goes ham in the air, it isn't going to put troops on the ground to force the issue. So if you can bunker down and ideally turn up the heat in response, America will lose interest because Americans do not believe in US foreign policy. Hell, one of the reasons the US foreign policy community has been guzzling the special forces kool-aid is because promises results without the cost, footprint, or media attention of large (whether or not it delivers is another matter).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
yet it's easier to identify cattle than people. Why?
Because cattle don't have rights (well, very few rights, and great difficulty exercising them). And because there are a lot of people who feel the population should be as illegible as possible to the government.
How could anyone be against that?
Whenever you ask "how could anyone be against this?" you should follow up by asking yourself "how could someone acting in bad faith leverage 'how could anyone be against this?'-style arguments?" That will usually provide a starting point for how someone could be against it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
This assumes that it's a both-sides problem, when the root issue is that Republican (and even more specifically Trumpist) political elites have found it useful to raise bad-faith claims of vote fraud. This renders attempts to satisfy their concerns largely pointless: the only way to convince their followers will be to convince their leaders, and their leaders know what they are saying isn't true.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
I am quite left wing you might say, and I am against it for now; given who is asking for it and how they are asking. Mister ""find 11,780 votes" wants to put his spoon in? I wonder why.
More or less summarizes my view on this. Voter ID proposals are facially reasonable, but the details inevitably end up being extremely questionable. The motte is "of course we should have voter ID, are you crazy?" and the bailey is a parade of capricious provisions aimed at making it harder to vote.
A perennial problem in US politics is that a lot of people simultaneously want the population to be less legible so the government has a harder time doing stuff they don't like but also want to do things that require making the population more legible.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I think you misunderstand me. If the plan was to have the Marines seize Kharg Island, you probably wouldn't send them in right away. But you'd have them staged nearby; you wouldn't wait two weeks then move them in from the Pacific.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Because they're not significantly at risk and they're actually ready to go.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I'd imagine if the plan was always to seize islands in the Gulf that you wouldn't wait two weeks after the beginning of your air campaign to start transferring Marines in from out of theater.
Conversely, we have a lot of reason to think the current administration thinks in terms of short news cycles and poasting.
You shouldn't. This forum self-selects for people with outsider right-wing beliefs. This means you get exposed unusual perspectives relative to, e.g., reddit, but a lot of those perspectives are crankish or blinkered.
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