JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7hr ago
This is is a worthy question that is difficult answer in detail without effectively doxing myself, but the broad strokes are that I grew up poor but my grandfather was a state representative. I managed to worm my way into the halls of power, only to recognize that "these are not my people" and that I was not theirs.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9hr ago
My point is that if you already have the tools, the difference is mostly how long you let it cook.
What are you trying to say?
Did you intend to imply that "paying the danegeld" is/was the virtuous choice?
The immediate effect of Iran having nukes is that any drone or ballistic missile launched from Iranian territory (or territory controlled by Iranian proxies) must be treated as possibly having a nuke onboard.
...and countries like Israel and the UAE simply do not have the population nor quantity of territory necessary to face-tank a nuclear strike the way the US or Russia might. As such they would be incentivized to react to any launch as though it were an existential threat.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
I don't really have anything to add but I wanted to thank you for the write-up.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
But those people are not attention-seeking so it is probably a pipe dream.
Has this always been the way of things? Those most worthy of the crown attention are often the least desirous of it.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
How would you evaluate the opportunity cost of allowing the IRGC have nukes, or letting Iran continue to arm HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russians, Et Al?
Also what "severely impoverished domestic policy agenda" would you be referring to?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
Why crack down on social media if mass movements are not a threat?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
Excuse me, but to borrow your own phrasing - who do you think it is that threw the Trump brick through the window?
A coalition of Tea-Partiers, Federalists, and disenfranchised "Bernie-Bro" (economically liberal but socially conservative) working class Democrats.
Also what the fuck did I just watch?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
If Trump had run on starting a war with Iran, would he have won the election?
I think a lot depends on what you think "this kind of war" is, as I said down thread I think a lot of people here misunderstand what exactly a lot of republicans (and more moderate Democrats) found objectionable about the establishment's handling of Iraq and Afghanistan.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
during my lifetime, no one had a more destabilizing effect on the world in general, and the Middle East in particular than the United States.
That doesn't answer the question. Do you think that a world where the IRGC has nukes is more stable or less stable than the counterfactual that we currently live in?
Secondly the only two countries to voluntarily relinquish an existing nuclear weapons capability that I am aware of are South Africa and Ukraine, who are you referring to?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
I'm glad you brought up the Kharg Island thing, because it is the perfect example of showy tactical dominance that accomplishes zero strategic objectives.
What if the strategic objective is to demonstrate that "we know exactly what you have and where it is and can strike at you with relative impunity without damaging the adjacent infrastructure?"
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
There is a trend I'm noticing where all of the "good" arguments for the war in Iran would also have applied to the war in Iraq.
People people here seem forget that what the "problem" with Iraq was not the initial invasion, the removal of Saddam Hussein, or even necessarily the first few years of nation building. The problem was that we ended up funneling a bunch of guns and money to allegedly "moderate" Salafists who would go on to become the Islamic State, effectively making shit worse.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2d ago
Good catch.
You state that Iran never had a nuclear weapons program but many organizations most notably the IAEA and the Iranian Government themselves have claimed otherwise.
You ask "Why would this be a proportionate response to their arming Hamas and Hezbollah?"...
...and my response is that I never claimed that it was "proportionate". In fact, I see no reason why it ought to be "proportionate". What I believe I said was that bombing them to a pre-industrial tech level was preferable to the letting the IRGC have access to nuclear missiles.
You talk about how a powerful Iran granting us leverage? My reply to you is that you're looking at the small picture, I'm looking at the fact that over 3/4ths of Iran's oil and just over a 1/4ths of the rest of the Gulf State's oil is bound for China and we want ensure that the Petro-Dollar stays a Dollar and doesn't become a Yuan because, once again, "if the US is going to occupy the role of hegemon we must play the role."
My question for you is do you think that allowing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to have nukes would have a stabilizing effect on world affairs or do you agree with me that it would have a destabilizing effect, if the latter how much of a destabilizing effect?
I think we can.
I think that without food, creature comforts, and legal consequence, many if not most people will revert to behaving like pre-civilizational savages in short order.
It's more like the difference between making Bacardi White and Bacardi 151.
The only meaningful difference between reactor fuel and and the core of a fission bomb is the density of U-235 in the sample.
As a Republican who was broadly onboard with toppling Iran well before the most recent flare up, I would like to offer an alternate narrative to the one about Trump is a Joe-Biden-esqe meat puppet being controlled by a zionist cabal, that seems to be the popular consensus here.
First off what does winning look like, in the eyes of team Trump?
Ideally, Iran makes a credible and verifiable commitment to dismantling their nuclear weapons program and stop supplying arms to HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russian Federation, Et Al. Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one. If the choice is between reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes and giving the IRGC access to nuclear missiles we choose to turn Iran into another Afghanistan.
Importantly we are not going to do the Clinton or Obama thing where we give them a whole bunch of cash and trade concessions in exchange for a pinky-promise not to act up again and then sit on our thumbs when they renege on those promises 6-monthes later. While I'm not privy to the specifics my guess is that the plan is to hold Kharg Island hostage to force Iranian compliance.
How is this in American interests? I think it is just as valid to ask as how is it not?
While there is something of an isolationist streak present in the online right the prevailing attitude amongst the wider GOP is that if the US is going to occupy the role of hegemon we must play the role.
First, I think it needs to be pointed out that, with the Biden-era environmental limits removed the US is once again a net petroleum exporter and the US economy is much better situated to weather possible energy-trade disruptions than say China is.
As the global hegemon, international trade flows freely (and for the most part safely) largely thanks to guarantees that are enforced by the US Navy. If the US is the world's cop, Iran is not some innocent brown kid who got shot for no reason, they're the habitual bad actor with dozens of prior complaints and arrests.
From my perspective democrats' attitude towards the Iranian regime seems to echo their attitudes towards illegal immigration, violent crime. If you ask them if they want violent schizophrenics on the train they'll answer "no", but at the same time they will vehemently oppose anyone who looks like they might try to stop violent schizophrenics from stabbing people on trains. They seem to view the occasional train stabbing or ballistic missile attack as simply the price of doing business.
Again the reason the Alt Right is on the outside is that they were not the target constituency, they never were.
I think that you are engaging for the common affluent liberal fallacy of assuming that the you opponents have been somehow manipulated into voting against their own interests to salve your own ego rather than consider the possibility that they have their own reasons and interests that are different from yours.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
3d ago
Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.
I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.
This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.
For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
3d ago
I do not believe that Gabbard is signing off on every individual hiring decision across the entirety of the US intelligence community, do you?
Tehran announcing that the straights have been closed is a very different state from no ships transiting the straights. Looking at Marine Traffic, Lloyds List, and various other logistics industry trade sites what appears to be happening is the the Euros are spooked and staying in port, the Gulf States are running dark (IE turning of their transponders), and the Chinese are ignoring the announcement but given that most of their tonnage is bound for Iranian ports anyway that is to be expected.
And again. believing that Trump/MAGA was "memed into existence" by edge-lords posting on 4-Chan requires one to be entirely ignorant of the preceding 8 - 10 years of GOP internal politics.
As I said, what Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as many former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of Id-Pol and then build a coalition around it. The Bernie-Bro to Trump-Stan pipeline flipped more votes than any on the Alt-Right could have ever dreamed of and that is a large part of why the Alt Right is on the outside. They are not the target constituency, they never were.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
3d ago
I’m also really confused what happened with SignalGate. Who wanted them fired? And why?
What is it that you find confusing?
Caldwell was/is creature of the intel establishment. He got fired by Hegseth for reasons but Hegseth never bothered to revoke his security clearance. Caldwell has since been rehired by an arm of the intel establishment that Hegseth has no authority over because the intel establishment looks out for it's own.
This is basically any given Tuesday in DC (or any other first world government for that matter).
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
3d ago
To me this sudden speculation about Netanyahu's death is a fairly transparent attempt by the usual suspects to distract from the far more credible reports that the younger Khamenei was either killed or seriously injured in the series of strikes that took out the elder Khamenei and that Iran is effectively without a "supreme leader" at this time.
In any case it is neither here nor there, if the IRGC were able to seriously disrupt or threaten the US or Israel's chains of command I imagine we'd be seeing something a bit more substantial than pseudonymous musings on X, and if Netanyahu or Khamenei (or Trump for that matter) really is dead I expect we'll find out one way or the other in a few weeks.
In the meantime Iran has gone from launching 500+ missiles and drones in the first 24 hours of the war to averaging around 125 launches a day for the week of March 2nd and 32 a day in the week of March 9th. I seen a lot of speculation (again from the usual suspects) how how this apparent decline is a product of Iran trying to draw the Jews and the Americans in so that they can win a decisive battle, but I think it's far more likely that they've shot their load.
As for the rest, the Alt-right has always had a vastly overinflated perception of their own importance. Believing that Trump/MAGA was "memed into existence" by edge-lords posting on 4-Chan requires one to be entirely ignorant of the preceding 8 - 10 years of GOP internal politics. It was only "unexpected" to those who were not paying attention.
John Nolte has a theory about why the left is suddenly so eager to throw Chavez under the bus.
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