anti_dan
15hr ago
Are you forgetting the re-imposed economic sanctions and multiple operations to destroy or sabotage the nuclear program? There have been multiple killings of scientists and generals over the years. They were obviously close to breakout at the end of the Biden admin with his relaxing of sanctions. If that had been 9 years instead of 4 of pumping money into Iran, they'd obviously have had them during Biden Admin.
anti_dan
17hr ago
Not only that, but there was no appetite from any of the counterparties to implement enforcement mechanisms if we suspected they had a secret nuclear base. Just look at how Framce, Germany, UK, China, etc responded to Iran engaging in piracy against their vessels in response to the bombing campaign: They cried and blamed the US and did nothing. If Iran kicked out inspectors they would have done the same thing. So the JCPOA was, practically, just lifting sanctions for fake promises.
anti_dan
17hr ago
The JCPOA put Iran in this same position, just with more money and less bombed out bases. Likely if it was in effect the last 10 years there'd already have been a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv.
anti_dan
1d ago
Real fights end more quickly, are more random, and often weapons of some sort are involved. This equalizes and randomizes, but the trends are the same.
Real fights reward explosive action more than combat sports, often the winning move is first to get the other person's head to hit something hard.
When I was beating bigger guys in wrestling, it was quick takedowns (which translate to real fights) and stamina (which doesn't as much).
anti_dan
1d ago
This is simply slander against the U-14/16 team they played. Those boys won. They would have won unless the refs cheated in favor of the females. The gap between Chealsea youth and the professional team is orders of magnitude less than between Chelsea men and the US female world cup team.
anti_dan
1d ago
Bench press is a training exercise, not a useful combat skill. It is not a bad training exercise, but it is a middling one. Most weight lifts are. Combat itself is where male advantage is at its height. If there was a woman 5% taller, 5% heavier, 5% better than me on bench and squat, I'd estimate she is probably a professional athlete, and secondly, has almost no chance against me in a wrestling or judo match. Boxing maybe higher if she is a boxer, because striking is not my best attribute.
And I am not near my peak skill wise. Things are just how they are.
anti_dan
1d ago
Grappling/Fighting is the place where all male advantages basically come together.
anti_dan
1d ago
So, a few illustrative matchups:
170 pound fit regular guy vs trained 170 pound trained grappler. Grappler wins north of 90% of the time. Skill is super potent when things are roughly balanced.
170 pound pretty good grappler vs 240 pound untrained but not pure fat regular guy. That's a big ask, probably near the tipping point I think. On the feet the bigger guy can just fall on the grappler. Bigger neck, wrists, legs all make pins harder and escapes can be exhausting.
140 pound fit very trained woman vs 150 pound untrained but healthy guy. The woman wins a pretty large chunk of the time. Competitive but not dominant - grips on arms are hard to get out of, in the chaos of an uncontrolled fight raw explosions of strength can be a problem, but if she's willing to fight dirty and is smart on her feet she should be able to do fine.
200 pound top tier male powerlifter vs 185 pound guy who did a good amount of wrestling in college 5-10 years ago. The lifter is crazy strong and has amazing grip, posture, resistance, etc. But the wrestler has spent years shooting levels, sprawling, controlling wrists, and understanding base. The lifter doesn't know what a double leg feels like coming at him, has no hip defense, and will be exhausted in 45 seconds of real scrambling. The wrestler wins this handily.
As a formerly skilled wrestler, I disagree with your evaluations.
The 170 LB Male Grappler Beats the 240 regular guy. I was 140 and would routinely beat significantly trained 215 guys in high school. The weight is important, but only when we are talking about winning titles.
140 Woman very trained does not beat 150 man unless the training AND fitness gap is immense. I'd give her an advantage only if she is basically a professional, and he is older or fatter than me.
Last scenario is absolutely correct. I would routinely "out strength" people who beat me in every weight lift in HS during wrestling matches.
anti_dan
1d ago
Surely these are just average joes and average janes? Do you mean to tell me if the woman trains for a couple years, and is healthy / responsive to training, she wouldn't be stronger than the majority of men that don't train, or are just fooling around in the gym / not really progressively overloading? (to what degree am I overestimating performance of average jane after several years of training? I'm guessing there was a large genetic component to why powerlifting women are so strong? What is the average ceiling for strength for a woman that trains powerlifting AS A HOBBY for a few years?)
Average or above average does a lot of work here. The problem for women who train hard is not average guys, who some they could probably beat and some they probably cant based just on genetics. Its just that once a guy gets off his ass and gets into any kind of shape, the woman is toast.
By way of example, I wrestled approximately ages 6-18, and I was pretty good. State qualifier in a fairly competitive state good, placed in states a few years in middle school, never in HS. When I was 11/12ish I had a girl as an opponent. It lasted one round. I won. This was before puberty.
She then went on to attend a good, not great, wrestling high school and made varsity as a freshman. She had a losing record. The next 3 years she was relegated to JV by one elite talent (Iowa good) and 2 other okay talents at her weight class. Then she almost immediately went on to win the female Olympic trials. So we are talking about basically the best 18 year old girl in the country who had been previously relegated to the JV squad at her high school by guys who mostly were unremarkable, and barely into puberty (we are basically only talking about freshmen in the weight classes relevant here).
This difference peaks in the 16-25 range, but also legacy effects from the differences in general training methods and banked strength go on quite long. I've worked office jobs for 15 years at this point, my workouts consist of pushups and walking. This still means something like 99% of women would lose to me in any combat sport. We are basically only talking about professionals having a chance. And when I was in the 18-25 age group, something approaching 0%.
That is really the problem with the movie hero-chick is that the emphasis is always on hand to hand combat. Its literally the place where the disadvantage is greatest. All the male advantages converge in that space. Further, the enemies in these depictions are never average Joes as you postulate, they are always hardened criminals. To be succinct. Approximately no one in the world is interested in an average fat guy fighting a super fit lady. Its always like 6'6'' Ivan who looks like he's been on steroids for 5 years.
If you wanted to make a realistic female combatant you'd make Female Hawkeye (aka Katniss Everdeen in book 1), you'd make her a sniper or other sort of gunfighter that never gets into melee range. In those fights, skill dominates, and there is little evidence for male skill exceeding well trained females (in fact, for archery it seems to lean female). Or you could have some sort of pure long distance racer girl, or whatever. But the people making things are at war with reality. And so we get what we get.
anti_dan
3d ago
What Iran is doing is what they are doing. My ire is for the countries helping them by blaming America
anti_dan
4d ago
It's Trump who can't thinks strategically. He's the one who started a war which predictably led to Iran closing the straight and then asked the Europeans to bail him out.
Its predictable that Iran would engage in piracy against 3rd parties in response to military actions against it? Sounds like they are pretty bad guys and should be taken out pretty soon. Imagine if Israel mined the Straight of Gibralter every time Hamas launched a terror attack. Would the French be like, "come on Hamas cut it out?" Come on man. That beggars belief.
anti_dan
4d ago
The original public meaning has two main exceptions that make the ACLU's position nonsense: Indians and Diplomats. In 1866 those two groups couldn't just go around raping and pillaging and avoid being hauled into American courts. To quote that insurance commercial, "Thats not how this works. Thats not how any of this works."
If we arent going to reconsider WKA. And we probably aren't. The principled question to ask about any immigrant group is, "are they more like a permanent resident or more like and Indian/diplomat?" Tourists seem more like a diplomat. Illegals seem more like an Indian.
anti_dan
4d ago
It isn’t nitpicking to figure out what the words “subject to the jurisdiction” means.
The reality is that neither side has a good answer to this. A plain meaning of the phrase would mean anyone who US law applies to. However, that can't be correct because we know there are two groups that it never applied to until statutes were written: AmerIndians, and Diplomats and their kin.
BUT, AmerIndians and Diplomats and their kin have been consistently prosecuted for crimes, brought into courts on civil actions, etc going back to the founding. If a diplomat commits a serious crime on US soil, they are almost always prosecuted, and the visiting nation basically always waives immunity. Same was true for AmerIndians committing crimes, but states wouldn't even bother to talk to the Tribe in question. If you were a drunk Indian that killed an American you were just tried and hanged quite quickly.
So the so called "plain reading" regarding whether American laws apply to you is just a straight out red herring. Its wrong, very wrong.
So PROBABLY something along the loyalty questions that have been often remarked on in some cases in the 1800s is what it actually means. The real problem with those is that its mostly subjective question of someone's mind, and probably should have gone the other way in Wong Kim Arc if it really is about loyalty. They were still Chinese citizens, not American citizens at the time. What side of the war would an illegal immigrant or tourist pick in a war between America and Mexico/China/Etc. The real answer for most of them is the side they think is going to win. National loyalty is not a quick thing to develop, it takes generations of being in the same place and cultivating ties to the community. If we applied a loyalty test many 5th generation people would not pass. Heck, nowadays many descendants of founding fathers prefer enemy countries to prevail against the US.
anti_dan
4d ago
Putin also invaded his neighbors under the Obama regime (which Biden is best seen as the 3rd term of). The defining thing about the Obama people long term is their consistent lack of seriousness in foreign policy. Grandiose speeches paired with feckless actual policy. JCPOA is the crowning achievement of this "strategy" if you can call it one.
anti_dan
4d ago
Biden was a Russia hawk in rhetoric only. It was like Reverse-Teddy-Roosevelt stuff. Its pretty obvious in hindsight why Putin waited for him to be President to invade.
anti_dan
6d ago
Im always surprised at how many of these I miss in real time. Hat tip to @LazyLongposter I particularly liked that gem.
anti_dan
8d ago
I did a time limited search to see what Kagan thought about the JCPOA before Trump got into office, and he was seemingly silent on the issue. Prior to the JCPOA he called the Iran nuclear program the biggest question to American security Obama would face. Given that silence we can't know what he thought about the JCPOA in a Trump-free world. However, his lack of commentary while fellow Neocons were very loud about how it was a shit sandwich with no enforcement mechanisms that gave Iran everything up front (oddly correct by the Neocons here), indicates he was already departing from the neocon camp into a more full-Dem partisan camp at that time.
Regardless of Kagan's views at the time, I do always find appeals to the JCPOA facile and stupid. Its not a treaty, and other countries who were party to it didn't care about any part of the agreement besides getting more Iranian petrol and LNG. They were never going to think it was sufficiently violated to think it wasn't salvageable, because they didn't care about any of the alleged burdens on Iran. They only were interested in the US's obligations.
Given all that, there is no path to a "broad coalition" Iran could have been doing all the terrorist funding it has been since 2015, just with extra money because of lifted sanctions, and then put up a big clock in Tehran in Jan 2024 that said, "Countdown to Nuclear ICBM completion" with a 365 day countdown and none of the other countries would have cared. America would be left with this same coalition of Israel + a couple of ME countries pissed about Iran's terrorism.
That doesn't mean Trump didn't fuck this up. He's unarguably failed rhetorically selling the war to the public. He's seemingly underestimated the IRGC's leadership depth. And he's also seemingly committed to no ground troops, which means he can't secure the straight long term. But, about the last point, it is also kind of a stupid criticism of Trump. There's nothing that says Iran needs to attack French and Chinese vessels because they are at war with America. In fact, that is just piracy. The fact that the French and Chinese blame America is a kind of derangement in its own right. In more normal times France would be the one threatening to nuke Tehran right now if they stopped or hit a single additional French flagged vessel.
anti_dan
8d ago
Given that anytime a non-Commie tankie goes to the country they consistently report crushing poverty, government corruption, and a bunch of street scams, the obvious answer is the real domestic GDP is quite low and the numbers are cooked by the regime.
anti_dan
9d ago
They still have plenty of trade partners and this particular subrule is generally not enforced!
n 2024, the top exports of Cuba were Rolled Tobacco ($418M), Zinc Ore ($107M), Nickel Mattes ($88.6M), Hard Liquor ($75.2M), and Precious Metal Ore ($55M). The top destinations were China ($270M), Spain ($109M), Germany ($68.2M), Macau ($57.1M), and Switzerland ($49.9M).
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub
anti_dan
10d ago
their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites
This is not true in any way. They not only have higher objective crime rates via stats like incarceration %, number of homicides per capita, etc, but they also are far less policed and report crime to authorities less often.
anti_dan
10d ago
While not being able to trade with the US is certainly detrimental to Cuba, it is hardly explanatory as to its utter dysfunction. Access to 1 market, even if it is a huge close market, is simply not capable of producing such negative results. Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc. Its a small island. Even if it was producing goods and services on a per capita basis rivaling a US state, those markets would be more than adequate to absorb all that output and more.
The only thing that the US opening its markets up to Cuba would really do, or would have done, is piss off a bunch of Floridians, who might storm Havanna in boats. Which would be good for Cuba long term of course, because obviously there are enough Cuban-decent former marines to take out the Castro regime if given a green light, but well there it is.
The whole point of the JCPOA was to lift sanctions on Iran so it could be a rival to Israel and Europeans could buy more oil from them. The nuclear program restrictions were a thin veneer erected on top of that framework with no enforcement options (nor did any party have any interest in enforcement as we have seen subsequently).
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