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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34767 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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I recently got into an argument regarding Israel vs Iran with a staunch "America First Isolationism Now" type. It cemented my views on the issue, not from an "Israel is righteous and Iran is not" angle but a practical weighing of the facts. The other party's opinion was "I don't want another war, and that region is bloodthirsty anyway. Let them sort it out." My thesis is simply: I cannot understand anyone who has Western or even strictly American interests in mind could think that the strikes on Iran are none of our business.

Mind you, I don't mean "United States Government" interests. I mean the interests of every single living American.

To recap the history: The current Iranian regime rose from a revolution overthrowing a US-backed monarchy, which we had previously supported economically and supplied with military technology (The F-4 and F-14 being the big examples you can still see today). Said regime hates the US with a burning passion, both for backing the monarchy and for getting in the way of a regional Islamic revolution in the entire region. This is why they back the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hamas and Hezbollah are strictly against Israel, but the Houthis were explicitly anti-American and attempted to strike us, luckily with no loss of life (RIP drones). I can't say the same for the militias in Iraq, which successfully killed several US service members in 2023. Nowadays that's mostly directed at Israel, but I cannot imagine these groups and their funders suddenly had a change in heart towards Americans themselves.

Even putting that all aside, even when you think the whole region is a backwater shithole that can sort itself out, a hands-off position on Iran makes no sense when they're developing nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a complete game changer, making your nation functionally immune to any threat to its sovereignty. It was bad enough when North Korea developed them, but I can at least understand the hesitancy there due to its Chinese backing and already-existing existential threat to South Korea (thousands of artillery pieces would reduce Seoul to rubble regardless of NK's nuclear program). More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.

This is not true of Iran. Iran has ties with Russia and China, but they've never made so bold a defense pact as China did with North Korea. They are geographically separated from their backers as well. This makes them assailable. However, they are not geographically separated from the west. Iran already has MRBMs that could be converted to take a nuclear payload right now. Those threaten our bases and our allies. They have a functional space program, and if you have put a satellite in orbit you can build an ICBM. Those threaten the continental US. Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time. They will be incapable of being invaded lest you risk nuclear hellfire for the region, at absolute best. The only time you can strike them is now, before their nuclear program yields results.

I was genuinely shocked when I saw the posts from Rubio and the like denying our involvement in the Israeli strikes and implying that they were unwarranted aggression. Personally, it makes me understand why some people think Israel is simply America's attack dog, doing the dirty work we don't want to be involved in directly. Perhaps it is will be a fortuitous outcome for us simply because Israel would be in even more danger, and felt they had to attack no matter what. I wouldn't mind Iran buckling without a single American life lost.

I mentioned this in another post long ago, but it seems to me that echoes of the bygone neolib/neocon 90s and early 2000s world order have been crystallized in a really stupid way. An aversion to quagmires and wars of questionable outcome seems to make a lot of people (including Rubio - a bad indicator of the administration's position) think that any American intervention is some kind of ill fated, possibly bloodthirsty action. In the opinion of the person that spawned this post, it would be a war to continue some kind of dominion in the Middle East, which would hurt individual Americans to benefit the rich and powerful. While I don't think the US can magically fix countries in the area (see: Iraq), there is a middle zone between "Try to prop up an unwanted regime after removing the previous one" and "do nothing". Applying Iraq's sample size of one reeks of an embarrassing application of prior results to me.

At the end of the day, I can say that Israel's righteousness in this matter does not have a bit of sway as to whether or not I think these strikes are justified (or whether or not American involvement is a good thing). I do not want another nuclear power in the world, especially one so blatantly aggressive toward the West. I will admit that the odds of them cementing their own destruction via a nuclear strike against another nuclear power is low, but I worry about the insurgents they fund or political instability within leading to a device going "missing". That these are even possibilities makes my skin crawl. I find it ignorant and borderline cowardly that there are so many purportedly in favor of American interests who can plug their ears and say "let it sort itself out".

As an aside, to illustrate where I'm coming from: In political terms I am completely disinterested in the outcomes of the world apart from America. Not that I consider them lesser, or that any disasters anywhere else are unimportant; but I still must practically value my home, my life, and those of my loved ones first. As such, I strongly empathize with the "America First" sentiment. What I don't empathize with is the completely unrealistic expectation that we can simply close our borders, give people the middle finger, and not wake up to a vastly worse world for us in twenty years. The world is connected, and a collapse in one place will have follow on effects in others. See: Syria, Haiti, Somalia. You'd have to be crazy to think that every administration in every coming year would be able to or even want to hold the borders that tight and move all manufacturing to be domestic (the only way to be truly isolationist in my eyes). That's just a pipe dream. Thus America taking its hands of the reins would not be truly isolationist, and the soft power we'd be subjected to by countries filling in the void we leave would affect us at home. We already have adversaries fanning the flames of social unrest in the country (and useful idiots that play into their hands), and that's bad enough. A United States is impossible to invade. A broken one is anything but. So global affairs are our business, and if America can project its power to mitigate much worse threats downstream then I am on board with that.

This doesn't mean I blindly want a war, or to bomb every single potential threat all the time everywhere. But nuclear weapons make this entirely a different question.

Counterpoint: The US already has nuclear adversaries. If the threat of nuclear retaliation works to deter Putin (who owns the world's largest nuke stockpile), it should also suffice to deter Iran. They might be religious nutjobs, but not total religious nutjobs, like Hamas. They will not consider the glassing of all their population centers as a price worth paying to nuke New York.

Nukes work great to prevent you from being invaded or bombed, but they are not the win button for any conflict. Putin has a ton of nukes, and yet this only meant that NATO would not join the fight directly (which, to be sure, is a big deal). He did not try to nuke cities until Ukraine surrenders.

Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since 1989. In 2015, the JCPA was negotiated between Iran and the Obama administration as well as China, Russia and Europe. It limited to the amount of nuclear material Iran was allowed to produce in exchange for sanction relief. While Israel (itself a noted expert on nuclear proliferation, I might add) claimed non-compliance, the IAEA claimed compliance in 2018, when Trump decided to quit the JCPA (possibly because it was an Obama deal) and impose sanctions on Iran. Since then, the gas centrifuges have been running.

Bombing the facilities and murdering their scientists can slow their program, but is unlikely to stop it. Sure, you kick the can down the road for another year, but you also normalize bombing sovereign countries, which is likely not a good lesson to teach a soon to be nuclear power.

If you do not want Iran to have nukes, then you need an invasion and regime change. I would like to point out that about the only one to benefit from recent US-led invasions in the Muslim world was the military industrial complex. The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh. I for one would prefer not to find out what kind of religious crazies a US-led nation building project in Iran would inevitably give rise to.

I do not contest that Iran is very anti-Israel. Basically any group which prides itself on murdering Jews is supported by them. As someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist (though no right to the West Banks), I do not like this one bit. But at the end of the day, this is Israel's problem, not the problem of the US. Israel certainly has the ability to nuke Tehran, which should hopefully stop Iran from nuking Tel Aviv.

I am also not a fan of the current Israeli government, which basically encourages illegal settlements in the West Bank because they do not feel any pressure not to maximally piss off the Arabs, as they can be sure that the US will have their back if any large backslash happens. Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.

For what it is worth, compared to Sunni countries, Iran has not shown a lot of inclination to commit terrorist acts outside the Middle East. Bin Laden was famously a Saudi national with Saudi funding. Al-Qaeda and Daesh were Sunni extremist projects. This would bode well for the larger world in face of a nuclear Iran.

Them getting into a cold war with Iran might not be the worst thing in the world, there.

I don't deny this, but it's nonetheless an insane risk that risks global consequences. If you presented me a button of "these countries may nuke each other but you can guarantee it will never affect the world outside the middle east", I'd probably press it. But such an eventuality is no more a guarantee than some zealot in Tehran sees the Israeli missiles on the way and goes "fuck it, I'll take Europe/America out with me".

The conquest of the Taliban was undone in a heartbeat as soon as the US withdrew, and the US invasion of Iraq prepared the ground for daesh.

I mention this in another post but I think the prolonged nation-building stuff doesn't work if you don't a. rout the actual supporters (which would include a lot of collateral damage and questionable arrests where Afghanistan was concerned) and b. Don't work with the surviving establishment to make something new. In Iraq, this would have meant letting at least some Ba'ath party members be involved in the reorganization of the party, rather than completely ousting them and making them and all their supporters de facto enemies (hence the insurgency) while propping up a bunch of previously uninvolved Sunnis (hence ISIS). In Afghanistan, this likely never would have worked, because the only existing mass establishment they had was the Taliban. There were no mid level bureaucrats who were going "I'm just in the Taliban to do city planning", the Taliban was it. You can't replace them with tribal, sometimes boy raping farmers, and declare victory.

Point being, as I said in another post, you can just gut a country's military and leave, a la Gulf War 1. There's a reason we had an even easier time rolling over their conventional army in Gulf War 2, which is that they were never able to recover to the level they were at pre-Gulf War 1. I would be fine with the same thing happening to Iran.

I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.” Add in that there are statements in the Hadith that claim the end of days is marked by a great slaughter of Jews, and it’s not hard to imagine that they’d be willing to use it.

I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.”

I question whether one can in fact rise to control of a nation-state without becoming sufficiently cynical/realist that "don't try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die" still works. We had a whole lot of evidence that the Japanese were insanely fanatical, but in the end they were, in fact, actually sane humans. Jihadism has demonstrated that it is willing to eat notable costs, but they still have to recruit their suicide bombers very carefully from a quite-limited pool.

It is not clear to me that Jihadism is actually more insane than Communism, and MAD worked on Communism.

overthrowing a US-backed monarchy

The monarchy was overthrown because the US under Carter refused to support it. (or at least Nixon thought so and blamed Carter for it) They were told if they cracked down on the revolutionaries US would not back that decision.

a revolution overthrowing a US-backed monarchy,

That is certainly one way to put it.

The gist of the matter is that in 1941, Iran was a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament (not a very well working one, though). Then in 1951 their prime minister voted to nationalize British oil interests, so the US and the Brits backed a military coup in 1953, after which the shah regime became your typical tinpot dictatorship. Then in 1979, the ayatollah overthrew the shah with a lot of popular support, and Iran has been a theocracy ever since.

In other news, it is a complete mystery why Iran hates the US, when their goal is to bring democracy and economic freedom to the world.

ayatollah overthrew the shah

Though the Iranian regime (and neocons) prefer this narrative, communists (and fellow travelers) and friends overthrew the Shah, then islamists stabbed them in the back (cf. the Bolsheviks). The Shah had thousands of communists in his prisons, not islamists. Khomeini was only invited back to Iran, after the Shah lost power, by the new civilian-military government. It took them a few years (until 1982) to definitively wrestle control, executing most of the military leadership and various leftists. Worse yet, the US helped Khomeini enter. Two examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mojahedin_Organization_of_Iran#1979_Iranian_Revolution_and_subsequent_power_struggles and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudeh_Party_of_Iran#Islamic_Republic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_guerrilla_groups_of_Iran

Tangentially, Mossadegh also backstabbed the communists:

Next the royalist officers moved to overthrow Mossadeq. On August 16, three days after the shah left for the Caspian to take a “rest cure,” Colonel Nasiri of the Imperial Guards arrived at the premier’s doorstep with a royal decree replacing Mossadeq with Zahedi as premier. The attempt, however, was a complete fiasco, for the pro-Mossadeq chief of the army, tipped off by the Tudeh military network, surrounded Nasiri and his Imperial Guards as they approached the premier’s residence. The following day the shah fled to Bagdad, the and the Tudeh crowds poured into the streets, destroying royalist statues. In some provincial towns, such as Rasht and Enzeli, the Tudeh took over the municipal buildings. The next morning, Mossadeq, after a fateful interview with the American ambassador, who promised aid if law and order was reestablished, instructed the army to clear the streets of all demonstrators. Ironically, Mossadeq was trying to use the military, his past enemy, to crush the crowd, his main bulwark. Not surprisingly, the military used this opportunity to strike against Mossadeq. On August 19, while the Tudeh was taken aback by Mossadeq’s blow against them, Zahedi, commanding thirty-five Sherman tanks, surrounded the premier’s residence, and after a nine-hour battle captured Mossadeq. Acoustical effects for the event were provided both by Sha'yban “the Brainless,” who led a noisy demonstration from the red-light district to the bazaar, and by the gendarmerie, who transported some eight hundred farm hands from the royal stables in Veramin to central Tehran. - Iran Between Two Revolutions - Ervand Abrahamian

We have a strong interest in Iran.

We don't want another regime change fiasco with another migrant crisis to Europe. The neocon wars have been a disaster for Europe, they have been a disaster for the christians in the middle east and they have destroyed the region. We have a stake in this war, Iran is defending Europe and we should be greatful for that.

The idea that we should keep bombing the middle east because they hate us because we bomb them is silly logic. The US has good relations with Vietnam because the US hasn't bombed them for decades. If the policy was to have an eternal conflict with Vietnam it wouldn't have benefited either party. Pull out of there and focus on trying to mend the relations after decades of horrific wars and crimes committed against the people there.

China is the biggest trading partner in the middle east. They have achieved a significant economic presence without wasting trillions bombing weddings, running torture camps and backing jihadists. If anything the US is doing an excellent job pushing countries toward China as they seek a patron that isn't bombing them.

The idea that we should keep bombing the middle east because they hate us because we bomb them is silly logic.

I would agree. Who besides you is using this logic?

Iran is defending Europe

from what? "neocon wars have been a disaster" does not provide explanation for that, these wars could be terrible idea and it does not make Iran good.

Mass third world immigration. When the US invaded Iraq and opened the flood gates to Europe with migrants Iran helped the Iraqis defend themselves. Iran played a key roll in defeating ISIS. These two wars have been immensely helpful for Europe.

A guess: Sunnism?

Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.

The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.

Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.

Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!

There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.

Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.

Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.

China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!

A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.

More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.

They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.

Not an argument, but I have a hard time accepting that the "bomb iran" people are working in good faith from solid natsec principles-- because the majority of rabidly pro-israel partisans I've met are republican and therefore at least defacto ukraine-skeptic. Like, I can intellectually understand that there are honest to god neocons out there voting for Holden Bloodfeast whenever possible, and in principle I sympathize quite a lot with them. But they seem to occupy very, very little of the media environment I'm exposed to. Pairing that with my supreme lack of faith in the current administration, I have this kneejerk response that any ammunition we're throwing into the middle east is probably being wasted compared to the alternative option of putting it into Ukrainian stockpiles.

the majority of rabidly pro-israel partisans I've met are republican and therefore at least defacto ukraine-skeptic

To be fair, if you are trying to prevent nuclear proliferation than you should be skeptical of Ukraine. The longer the war drags on, the higher the odds of them procuring a nuclear weapon go. (How high or low those odds are I'm not sure, but I wouldn't rule the possibility out.)

In either case, the invasion period is exhibit A for getting nukes. We talked them into giving up nukes in the 1990s. We promised protection. They got invaded. And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes. I mean, if I’m on the outs with a superpower, my best hope of avoiding “liberation” is nuclear weapons. So no matter what happens between Israel and Iran, they aren’t going to stop trying.

As I've discussed before, the Ukrainian hold on the actual nukes seems to have been pretty tenuous at best (and the idea that the United States promised them protection in any meaningful sense is false) – but yes, I agree that the Big Lesson of Current Era is "have nukes."

And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes.

I sort of doubt this, honestly, there's little appetite for even the conventional damage North Korea could do.

Said regime hates the US with a burning passion, both for backing the monarchy and for getting in the way of a regional Islamic revolution in the entire region.

I feel like this is so emblematic of the blinders people have. Really, you think Iran hates the US for the Islamic revolution and not the US-Israeli "alliance" and its belligerence towards all Iran's regional neighbors- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and so forth. Saying it's about the Islamic revolution just makes me wonder what planet you are living on. Israel has said it will only accept the "Libya model" of nuclear disarmament. The "Libya model" means: you give up your nuclear program, then we topple your regime. The notion Iran just has some irrational hatred towards the US is so ridiculous.

Personally, it makes me understand why some people think Israel is simply America's attack dog, doing the dirty work we don't want to be involved in directly.

Again- living in the land of pure fantasy. Israel got America to do the dirty work in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and Syria. How many troops did Israel deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan? Zero, despite the loss of thousands of American lives. And now it is plainly obvious that Israel initiated war with Iran with the intent and plan to force the United States to enter the war. They have already requested US assistance to enter the war and admitted they can't achieve their war objectives without the United States.

I agree with the thrust of your post in that I am not isolationist, I understand America as an Empire with imperial interests and obligations. But doing so leads to the obvious conclusion that Zionism is and has been immensely harmful to the imperial interests of the United States, and that toppling the regime in Iran is foremost a play for the interests of International Zionism and not the United States or Europe.

An aversion to quagmires and wars of questionable outcome seems to make a lot of people (...) think that any American intervention is some kind of ill fated, possibly bloodthirsty action.

"An aversion to quagmires" is probably my core objection, so I was curious how you're going to address it, and I can't say you offer much of a response. To begin with, the argument is not so much "any American intervention is some kind of ill fated, possibly bloodthirsty action", and more "don't listen to literally the same people who were in charge of the previous quagmires" and "please, I am begging you, give me the barest semblance of an indication that you learned anything at all from recent history". Specifically: what do you think made the previous interventions fail, why do you think everybody arguing for them missed the factors leading to their failure, why would this intervention fare any better, and why do you think you're not missing any factors the same way interventionists missed them recently. Bonus points if you answer: what consequences will you accept if it turns out you're wrong.

Notice also that I said "interventions" in plural. Iraq was not the only example of one, and you know it. Interventionists had free rein over the region for most of my adult life, they regime-changed like half a dozen countries, and they made a mess out of everything they touched. The fact that we've spent the last decade witch-hunting literal nobodies for crimethink like "men and women are different", but these people still get to be taken seriously, is a testament to how sick our societies are.

As an aside, to illustrate where I'm coming from: In political terms I am completely disinterested in the outcomes of the world apart from America.

What are the practical consequences of this? Would you give the throne to king Zahir Shah, instead of forcing him to renounce his claim to it, if most of his country accepted his reign? Would you cut Israel loose, if it brought the rest of the Middle East into the fold?

Said regime hates the US with a burning passion

Also an aside, but I find it hard to believe. Please don't flood me with official statements of said regime, because I don't consider them particularly meaningful. I may be typical minding, but from what I can tell politics inherently demands such levels of rat-fucking, backstabbing, and shifting allegiances, that anyone who holds reins over any country, of any significant size, being able to hold to a grudge in such a principled manner would be almost admirable.

Nuclear weapons are a complete game changer, making your nation functionally immune to any threat to its sovereignty.

Okay, so if that's true then why do you then say in the very next paragraph

Iran already has MRBMs that could be converted to take a nuclear payload right now. Those threaten our bases and our allies. They have a functional space program, and if you have put a satellite in orbit you can build an ICBM. Those threaten the continental US. Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.

and then later

A United States is impossible to invade. A broken one is anything but.

?

It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!

Look, I actually would like to remove the Iranian regime, and I don't particularly want Iran to get nuclear weapons.

But there are (at least) three things that need to be considered. (Just going to ignore for the moment the legal problems with preemptively striking another nation, but suffice to say that as I understand it it's legally problematic, to the extent that international law means anything.)

FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.

And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change. (And even then...I wouldn't exactly consider it "reliable.") Which will either require local Iranian collaborators (in which case Israel is likely already better situated than the United States to procure them) or "someone" (the United States) to invade and pacify the country. (Or some third, arguably worse option, like creating a massive humanitarian crisis to cause the country to collapse entirely). So asking the United States to "make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon" is arguably a much more serious ask than our last Middle Eastern incursion, depending on how serious you are about it

SECONDLY, the United States declining to enter the fight may actually in some ways be good for Israel because it could force Iran to withhold a portion of its offensive weapons as a deterrent package. If the United States intervenes at a massive level to accomplish regime change, there's really no point in Iran not firing every last missile that it has. So the US standing out is forcing Iran to make choices about whether or not to empty out its war reserve. Since Israel appears to be successfully hunting Iranian ballistic missile on the ground, this hesitation likely makes the Iranian ballistic missile stockpile less effective (assuming a fixed capacity to destroy ballistic missiles on the ground, the Israelis will destroy a larger number of ballistic missiles on the ground over time if fewer numbers are ordered to launch any given salvo).

FINALLY, the strategic interest of the United States in the conflict lies, as you suggest, in removing Iranian nuclear capability. Trump hopes to do that via negotiation. Israel's actions may force Iran back to the negotiating table, in which case US involvement would be counterproductive (since it may drive Iran away from the negotiating table). Currently the good cop/bad cop (or, if you prefer, Great Satan/Little Satan) routine seems to be worth a shot.

If the good cop/bad cop routine fails, then – while it is in the interest of Israel to push for US involvement as early an often as possible in order to decrease the cost of the conflict on Israel – it is in the interest of the United States to make Israel bear as much of the burden as possible. (We've poured billions of dollars into their ballistic missile defense, it's not as if we are obliged to give them a carrier strike group, too!) If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero. While this by itself likely cannot terminate Iran's nuclear program – as they have built up nuclear capability once, we should presume they can do it a second time – it can likely scrap a lot of difficult and expense work and (presumably) set them back for a while. Kicking the can down the road, but sometimes that's all you can do – and it might be all that's necessary. The Iranian regime may not last forever.

Given the above, it seems to me that it would be unwise for the United States to do anything at this point besides let things play out. Diplomacy may still work. If Israel can actually do "everything except the MOP up" then, yeah, sending them a dozen MOPs [I think technically Israel could deliver them via C-130, which would be pretty funny] or whatever is probably a decent deal for the US. Shooting down a few Iranian ballistic missiles to test our capabilities is also probably smart. But what exactly is the US interest in intervening right now and potentially foreclosing a path to bringing Iran to the table?

Two caveats. Firstly, my thesis was not "the US should strike NOW", but that Israel succeeding here is undoubtedly very very good for us, and if they needed help to succeed, I'd want to do so. I say that as someone with skin in the game.

It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!

Secondly, allow me to rephrase: Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders. At any point during a real conventional invasion you can consider (or declare) your existence threatened and use them to great effect, either wiping out entire armies or the invaders' home front. They do not make you immune to internal rot, discord, economic decline, or anything else, as the USSR will gladly tell you. That this is your opening argument is disheartening, because I find it quite intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of that distinction.

As such, I don't worry about someone invading the United States. If decades of discord and hostile messaging (bolstered by adversaries who are quite happy to watch us tear ourselves apart without firing a single shot) leads to the United States to cease to exist as a political entity, then we would be quite susceptible to invasion, be it by a hostile force or something more covert. A "North American" continent with dozens of individual nation states that are likely at each others' throats would present a foreign actor many potential inroads into allying with, occupying, subverting, or otherwise controlling part of the landmass. As I live on that landmass, I'd like the huge boon that "two massive oceans and only two continental neighbors" to stay that way. We already have Chinese and other agents coming through our weak border to the south. Imagine that ten or a hundred fold. That is why we can be both a nuclear power and vulnerable.

Nuclear powers can also be defeated abroad, as in within other people's borders, without really having the right (in international eyes) to use the nuclear option. We have failed to achieve many military objectives, as has Russia, and neither have deployed nuclear weapons. But it also means no one can ever go to the source. As for Iran, yes, they have weapons that can reach us, but they are not yet nuclear capable. Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence. And from there stems the problem. A nuclear Iran can proxy war to their hearts' content. A nuclear Iran can threaten to retaliate to conventional Israeli strikes with nuclear weapons (whereas now only Israel can), leading both to consider a nuclear first strike necessary to preserve their existence/secure their victory, depending on perspective. A nuclear Iran can lock up within its borders when its armaments are exhausted and refill its stockpiles and have a credible threat against anyone trying to stop them. They go from being a regional power to a fact of life unless some sort of unconventional method deters them or causes their regime to collapse. Once again, see America. I am reasonably hopeful that we won't collapse in the near future, and I am also reasonably sure that a nuclear Iran would also last quite a while. Even if they didn't, those nukes would have to go somewhere once they collapse, and that's a huge security risk. All you need is one powerful higher up or base deciding they wanted to get massively rich, or being insanely anti-Israeli/American/whatever to sell or use them.

These were all real arguments up to the end of the Cold War, and they ring true now. Every single nation that develops its own nuclear weapons increases the risk of some sort of horrible outcome, be it an entrenched regime, accident, or sale to/use by crazies within or without the government. I don't want it to happen.

FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.

I agree with this. I admittedly did not make this clear enough in my post, but I must say I am aware of the looming threat of China to American interests and I don't want to be bogged down in this. I really hope that Israel succeeds or Iran comes back to the negotiating table, as you said. However, there are two issues here. Firstly, Iran has been "at the negotiating table" several times, including with previous administrations, leading to billions of funds going into their pockets in return for them only pursuing civil nuclear reactors... which they then proceeded to ignore completely. Secondly, the inverse of your statement is true as well: Iran does not have infinite capacity to do things either. They have already used a huge amount of missiles in the current exchange, and their IADS seems to be in shambles. They may already be close to their limit as far as projecting power is concerned, and dealing with them now is a lot more appealing than waiting for an armistice where they are able to refill their reserves. If they actually nuclearize, or perhaps state their intent to use those weapons against the US, and we suddenly have to divert resources back to them to stop an imminent threat, it will be a lot costlier, and likely bloodier.

And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change.

I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat. That's why the "they're making WMDs" justification for Gulf War 2 is a persistent joke.

Second (another commenter posted in response to this but I'm going to put my reply here, as it's relevant and I've received a number of replies) I think the biggest issue with Gulf War 2 (other than doing it) was that we picked the worst middle ground imaginable. We banned every single Ba'ath party member from ever being in government, which is not even a thing we did with the Nazis or Japanese. This essentially left a fledgling government in the middle of a war zone filled with the unqualified, malcontents, and sometimes literal terrorists in power. That Iraq even exists after ISIS is kind of a miracle to me, not that they're somehow doing great. I think we should have either:

  1. Completely obliterated their military again, ousted their leaders that time, and left.
  2. Actually worked with the remaining government to allow for some kind of legitimate regime change.

Both of these things are something I would accept, at least on the home front. "Don't fuck with the US or they'll show up, kill all your leaders, and break all your stuff" is at least something we can credibly do multiple countries. We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.

SECONDLY

I somewhat responded to these points above, but I agree partially. I'll explain below.

If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero.

As I said above, I want this to happen. As with Ukraine, I like the idea of adversaries blunting themselves against our allies at zero cost to American lives and (relatively) low cost with materiel. As it is, if we're going to have to strike, I want to strike while the iron is hot and their munitions and defenses are depleted. If we're not going to take our hands off the steering wheel of the entire region and withdraw entirely (which I think is a bad idea outside the scope of this already long-winded discussion), then I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.

The Iranian regime may not last forever.

I hope it doesn't. The average Iranian is not a lover of their regime, which is why we see regular protests despite the authoritarian nature of their government. While I've mentioned I prioritize American interests over others, I don't want a single life to be lost. But I have to be realistic and consider the fact that their nation will be able to do damage as long as they're in power, even more if they nuclearize.

Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders.

They pretty obviously don't.

It's definitely true that nuclear weapons are very powerful and that having them ups the ante for an invader. But we've had a lot of experience recently concerning the limitations of being a nuclear-armed power and that's not reflected here. I agree with you about the issues with soft power but both in your original post and here you're using language that suggests that having nuclear weapons gives you some kind of immunity while Russia – the world's nuclear power – has been subjected to a conventional land invasion and have been struck within their borders innumerable times by Ukraine. Israel's nuclear weapons may have caused Iran to think twice, but it hasn't stopped them from repeatedly launching conventional ballistic missiles at Israel many, many times.

Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence.

Deterrence was invented to deal with the problem of other people's nuclear weapons. (This is an exaggeration, but it's very common to see the word "deterrence" preceded by the word "nuclear.")

I don't disagree with everything you say: yes, the US is vulnerable to internal unrest, as all countries may be, yes having nuclear weapons does allow you to use them to effectively defend yourself, thereby making it more likely that attackers will not attempt to militarily conquer you in your entirety but they're not magic.

I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat.

Presumably if the Iranians can enrich uranium once, they can do it again. Israel killing every single nuclear scientist and obliterating every nuclear facility might set them back a generation, and that might be long enough for the problem to become moot. But generally speaking, if Iran can do it once, they can do it a second time.

I could be wrong about this, but my recollection was that Iraq was never nearly as far along the "make nuclear weapon" tech tree as Iran was, and their reactor (the one destroyed by Israel) was constructed and serviced by France. I don't think Iraq had nearly the in-house expertise Iran does (Israel's campaign against Iranian scientists notwithstanding).

Secondly, Iran has relatively good relations with North Korea and might simply be able to procure functional nuclear weapons from them (I have no idea what North Korea considers sane or not).

We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.

But that's what would be required if our goal is to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear weapon using military force alone. Quite possibly boots on the ground could be avoided, but it would require, presumably, an indefinite persistent air interdiction of any nuclear capabilities.

Or how else do you propose to once-and-for-all prevent them from rebuilding their nuclear capabilities? The other paths are 1. overwhelming humanitarian disaster (such as nuclear weapons) of such magnitude as to turn Iran into a political non-entity, 2. some sort of deal, or 3. installing or allowing to be installed a new regime.

I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.

I think we're both on the same page here, but it won't be easiest for us to do it now, it will be easiest in probably one or two weeks or so.

You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position, but it seems to me that you're happy to let Israel sort it out and your main concern is that they will be unable to "finish the job." What exactly do you think the US can do that Israel cannot?

It's true that the US has MOPs that may be able to penetrate some of the Iranian underground facilities. If they can't, we'd need to use nukes (which Israel already has). If Israel has airspace control over Iran, they can (I think) keep the bunkers closed indefinitely by bombing their entrances, so it's unclear that the US has a huge advantage over Israel in this regard. The main abilities the US brings to the table are

  • MOPs (which may or may not work, but can't guarantee that Iran won't just rebuild what has been destroyed)
  • A very large army (but you don't want ground occupation)
  • Hundreds of interceptors (but we don't want to use them, because China)
  • More air power of the sort Israel essentially already has (which seems relatively pointless right now if the Israeli air campaign is as effective as is currently believed, doesn't it?)

So what exactly do you think the United States should do?

Russia – the world's nuclear power – has been subjected to a conventional land invasion and have been struck within their borders innumerable times by Ukraine.

I mention in my reply that strikes within a border are different than a conventional land invasion. Secondly, said Ukrainian land invasion barely penetrated the Russian borders before they were expelled. It was also a retaliation in an active conflict - likely to pull Russian forces off the front line - which colors it differently than, say, an unprovoked mass invasion of Russia. Put differently: If Ukraine was magically and decisively winning this war, and pushed the Russians back to the border, I seriously doubt they'd get much further than there, out of a very founded fear that Russia would use nuclear weapons against them. Russia has said they would use nuclear weapons if their sovereignty was threatened. While this was a veiled threat along the lines of "Ukraine and the occupied portions of it are part of Russia, so don't you dare take them back", I don't doubt it would ring very true if Russia proper was legitimately under threat of losing territory.

You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position, but it seems to me that you're happy to let Israel sort it out and your main concern is that they will be unable to "finish the job." What exactly do you think the US can do that Israel cannot?

A very large army (but you don't want ground occupation)

You can invade a country without a prolonged occupation. Once again, see the first Gulf War. We rolled over then-one-of-the-largest armies in the world in a month and then immediately pulled out. I mentioned I wouldn't be explicitly against killing their leaders and leaving, but thoroughly gutting the military and their nuclear stores/bunkers (very easy to do if you've conquered them and can walk right up!) and leaving the leadership humiliated would even be fine by me. It would leave a very credible threat in the Iranian government's mind that we could do it again, because we already did it when they had years to build up their defenses. I don't want to be involved in nation building because (this is a separate thesis of mine) modern militaries, at least the United States', seem to be incapable of totally subduing an enemy via mass bombardment (i.e. killing a shitload of civilians), or nation-building. I don't think the former is necessarily "what it would take", as I am against civilians dying, so blowing up all their major military and nuclear assets and making them toothless for a good long time would be as good a solution as any.

On this note, a large army would likely not be the primary thing we'd need to fight China if they up and decided a US invasion of Iran was the perfect time to strike. In the short term, it would be primarily a naval and air defense, with the biggest land target I can think of being Taiwan (who has their own army - and ideally we'd want to keep the Chinese marines from ever making a landing, making them secondary). I'm not saying an army couldn't or wouldn't become necessary in the long term, only that a land component would not necessarily be a huge limiting factor. A CSG? Maybe, but we do famously have many more than only one CSG. And as you mention below, Israeli air support may prove mostly sufficient in such a circumstance.

More air power of the sort Israel essentially already has (which seems relatively pointless right now if the Israeli air campaign is as effective as is currently believed, doesn't it?)

Obviously this is a developing situation. Since I made the original post, Iran has apparently come crawling back to the bargaining table since the Israeli air campaign so completely dominated them. I genuinely hope this puts a bow on the whole situation, and the US never needs to lift a finger to change this. As I said, I have skin in the game when it comes to American conflicts, and one less is fine by me.

You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position

The attitude was "let the two parties sort it out regardless of the outcome". The second part is what I take issue with. I have no need for an American flag to be on the wikipedia page for this conflict, I just explicitly and powerfully do not want a nuclear Iran - or any new nuclear country that has even a chance in hell of using them.

very easy to do if you've conquered them and can walk right up

Taking a stroll on the moon is quite easy, if you've successfully travelled there by rocket. You just skipped the hard part.

Successfully invading Iran would be an insane clusterfuck, and would be the biggest Chinese strategic victory this side of the 1940s (followed shortly by a bigger one, conquering Taiwan).

I actually would have said it would be impossible to invade Iran period a week ago. but they've folded so hard I'll downgrade to "unbelievably expensive and profoundly wasteful".

Russia has said they would use nuclear weapons if their sovereignty was threatened. While this was a veiled threat along the lines of "Ukraine and the occupied portions of it are part of Russia, so don't you dare take them back", I don't doubt it would ring very true if Russia proper was legitimately under threat of losing territory.

Yes, I agree with you there.

We rolled over then-one-of-the-largest armies in the world in a month and then immediately pulled out.

The United States and its allies did enter Iraq, but it never got within 100 miles of Baghdad. If Iraq had had a credible WMD program, it would not have been sufficient to neutralize it.

On this note, a large army would likely not be the primary thing we'd need to fight China if they up and decided a US invasion of Iran was the perfect time to strike. In the short term, it would be primarily a naval and air defense, with the biggest land target I can think of being Taiwan (who has their own army - and ideally we'd want to keep the Chinese marines from ever making a landing, making them secondary).

Yes, correct. But the US doctrine is to fight with air support, meaning that US munitions stockpiles would be degraded in an invasion of Iran (as would US missile interceptors given Iran's large stockpile of ballistic missiles). Obviously a sufficiently thorough destruction of the Iranian military by Israel makes that moot, but that hasn't happened yet.

I genuinely hope this puts a bow on the whole situation, and the US never needs to lift a finger to change this.

SAME.

I just explicitly and powerfully do not want a nuclear Iran - or any new nuclear country that has even a chance in hell of using them.

Sovereign states have the right to develop nuclear weapons, if they so choose, and invading them for doing so would be a violation of international law. Many of the next countries to develop nuclear weapons will likely be US allies (Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, perhaps Taiwan and Poland; contrast with of course Iran and perhaps Belarus). That's part of why stopping a Chinese invasion is so crucial to US defensive strategy, as a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan dramatically increases the odds of nuclear proliferation.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to limit nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, I think that the nuclear asymmetry arguably makes the world more unstable and more prone to violence.

Because nuclear weapons are, though not a magical item, a potent deterrent, the best method to prevent other countries from getting them might be to explicitly carve up the world into nuclear power blocs (US, Russia, China, India) and give the nuclear sovereigns explicit hegemony and dominion over the other nation-states. The nuclear sovereigns could agree to use their nuclear weapons against any country that attempted to develop or field any independent nuclear capability. They might even be able to develop a shared nuclear monitoring and weapons sharing framework that could gradually grow in time into the true planetary sovereign, the single nuclear monopower.

This would of course be a complete overturn of the post-WW2 global order, but under that current system unilaterally invading countries that decide to develop nuclear weapons is illegal. Doing so would freeze the number of nuclear powers at their current levels (and possibly reduce them), at the price of the destruction of the sovereignty of most nations on Earth – but you seem quite comfortable to ignore national sovereignty if weapons of mass destruction are in play.

Otherwise, if the United States wants to ensure a nuclear-proliferation-free Earth (I am not sure this is actually a good idea, but running with your goal here for a moment), it is presumably on the hook to (illegally) invade and de-nuclearize any country, which means that it is in the national interest of countries like China and Russia to proliferate nuclear weapons programs to hostile states, forcing the United States to bear the costs of intervention. (Of course the United States can play the same game, but doing so risks...proliferating the weapons!)

A quick response, as I'm mostly on board with your response (and I'm burning my night!):

The United States and its allies did enter Iraq, but it never got within 100 miles of Baghdad. If Iraq had had a credible WMD program, it would not have been sufficient to neutralize it.

This was because Iraq capitulated. The regular army had surrendered by the tens of thousands and only the Republican Guard remained. I don't mean they would walk right up or go unopposed - but had they chosen to do so, they could have. It was a common criticism of the war at the time that we did not go far enough (not even Saddam, just allowing the Republican Guard to escape/continue).

But the US doctrine is to fight with air support

In this case, as we've agreed, the Israelis are doing quite alright in that regard (RIP F-14s). Not that I think we'd need no air support - despite anti-Israel concerns, neither the US or Israel is at the other's beck and call, and only a fool would assume there is no situation where US forces would need support - but the cost would be greatly diminished due to Israel's exceptionally successful air campaign.

On the other hand, I think that the nuclear asymmetry arguably makes the world more unstable and more prone to violence.

I actually somewhat agree with your overall assessment. Rational actors will likely never use them unless pushed to the brink. And they contribute to a lasting peace. But my worry is that an increasing number of countries with nuclear arsenals greatly increases the odds that an irrational actor gets into power, or that poor safeguards are implemented. To separate my feelings from my (theoretical) policy suggestions: I am against any country nuclearizing. I am not in favor of world policing literally any country nuclearizing. But Iran, or as worse hypotheticals, Syria, or Sudan - those are problems. With the African continent in mind, I am counting my lucky stars that South Africa denuclearized before going through its current continually corrupt and often hostile decline. That would be another situation where the world (i.e. the US because no one else has power projection) would need to step in and make sure nothing went missing. That is my concern.

I hope it doesn't. The average Iranian is not a lover of their regime, which is why we see regular protests despite the authoritarian nature of their government.

The protests are probably just Western-sponsored nonsense, perhaps with some sponsored by the Iranian intelligence services to sucker any dissidents out in the open.

This is a very good post. I would add another couple of points:

  1. Actually invading Iran would be very difficult, much harder than Iraq, and would risk turning into America’s Ukraine War.

  2. From the Israel perspective, a secular Iranian nationalist government isn’t necessarily going to to be a lot friendlier. There are many Iranian dissidents who think that the Islamic Republic government is cowardly and has been going much too easy on Israel over the last two decades. And that is somewhat true, the Ayatollahs are unpopular and any foreign adventure is risky because of their low support at home. There are very good non-religious, non-ethnic reasons for Iran and Israel to be at each other’s throats. Each stands to be the major regional power in the Middle East and the town isn’t big enough for the two of them. In the long-run, a secular Iranian government with high levels of popular support that is competent and actually has its shit together is probably a lot worse for Israel.

There might tension between USA and Iran, but depending on the situation countries can make up quickly. Vietnam normalized relations quite quickly, right after a brutal war that left most of their country in ruins and millions dead. But in this case for better or for worse, the US is fanning the flames of antagonism against Iran. The fact is that the US is constantly messing around with Iran's business, far far more than the Iran is able to mess with US business.

Iran has no blood feud with the US. Their people and culture have no multi generational conflict with the US. If the US just let Iran do whatever it wants, which to be fair includes many quite terrible things, then I really think that they would be willing to forget past injustices and not bother trying to mess with a country halfway around the world.

Iran has no blood feud with the US.

Iran certainly has a blood feud with the US. The people of Iran as a whole may or may not (depends on just how bad the Shah was, and how much they blame the US for that), but the current leadership (as a class) does. They encourage chants of "Death to America". They refer to the US as the Great Satan. When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.

It is true that if Iran were to just do whatever it wants, they likely would mess with the Little Satan (Israel) first. I don't know if the Ayatollahs are even crazier than the Kims, and would nuke Haifa and Tel Aviv as soon as they got the bombs. But it's definitely a possibility.

So do you think it was a mistake to make nice with Jolani? He's ex al-qaeda and had ties to ISIS. The majority of deadly attacks in the west, 9/11, charlie hebdo, bataclan, nice, etc. Were either ISIS or al-qaeda, either directly or inspired. Iran's / hezbollah / houthi attacks have been more military targets and less civilian. Yet the US had no problem making nice with him and removing the bounty from his head the second he happened to topple a country that was an impediment to the expansion of their empire, but no real threat to American lives.

The Iran thing really has nothing to do with keeping us safe, and everything to do with expanding our dear leaders' geopolitical power.

Jolani is at least pretending to be an ex-terrorist. Iran is steadfast in its hatred of the US.

So Stated preference > Revealed preference? For me it's the other way around.

Iran's rhetoric and actions match. There is no reason other than wishful thinking to believe they are willing to consider anything other than active enmity with the US.

If they wanted to do this, why muck about for the last 30-40 years without getting nukes? It really doesn't take that long. They've got plenty of engineering expertise and oil money to spend on it.

The US and Israel have been working actively (e.g. Stuxnet) to prevent it.

They encourage chants of "Death to America". They refer to the US as the Great Satan. When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.

Why? It makes about as much sense to me as believing any other political slogan.

Believing it 100% uncritically? No.

Taking them into account? Yes.

If politician campaigns on promise to introduce communism you should take into account their win is likely to result in them stealing things you own.

There is no doubt that Iran is currently hostile to the US, but the kinds of statements issued by countries currently engaged in hostilities tend to be pretty deranged generally, so I don't know if what they're saying should be enough to take them as expressions of genuine irreconcilable hatred.

They have been consistent in both expressing "Death to America" and calling the US the "Great Satan" since the formation of the current regime.

What I'm saying is: yeah, and? Propaganda against hostile states can get pretty deranged, that doesn't mean a given regime actually believes it.

The current Iranian regime has always been hostile to the US, they have always been open about it, and they have consistently made this clear in word and deed. There is no reason to believe otherwise, except perhaps the polyannaish idea that one can always smooth things over by diplomacy.

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Discounting them entirely makes no sense either.

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Because not only are those slogans backed by authoritative position statements from senior members of the Iranian state, they are backed by decades of observed actions, including state sponsorship of terrorism and proxy-militia attacks on American civilian, military, and diplomatic efforts in other countries.

'You should not believe any given political slogan' is not the same as 'you should not believe any political slogan.' Many political slogans are, in fact, generally accurate indicators of policy direction. Nybbler made the appropriate calibration from taking a statement to the directionional.

I agree that comparing the slogans to observed actions is a good way to gauge whether or not the statements carry weight. But do the observed actions of Iran indicate a burning irreconcilable hatred, or standard-issue hostility, the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history?

But do the observed actions of Iran indicate a burning irreconcilable hatred, or standard-issue hostility, the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history?

Setting aside that both degrees are the likes of which various states have entered into, and exited from, countless times throughout history-

-and that distinction is largely irrelevant when you working within a single leadership generation, which Iran still is for the founding revolutionary leadership class whose personal vendettas still apply even if their successors in a few generations change their mind and shift category-

-either would suffice for what Nybbler said.

This is the position Nybbler made that you quoted to dispute-

When someone tells you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it makes sense to believe them.

-and no part of this position on the nature of animosity, which makes it a distinction without a difference. Whether the Iranians elites have a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred' or not doesn't challenge the premise.

If someone with 'standard-issue hostility,' where 'standard' includes decades of terrorism in foreign countries against US institutions and directly supporting attacks on US forces when the US and Iran are not at war, is telling you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it (still) makes sense to believe them.

and that distinction is largely irrelevant when you working within a single leadership generation

I'm pretty sure we can find many historical examples beginning / ending hostilities within the same generation.

and no part of this position on the nature of animosity, which makes it a distinction without a difference. Whether the Iranians elites have a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred' or not doesn't challenge the premise.

I thought the question they were discussing was whether or not Iran has a blood feud with the US? Maybe I misunderstood something, but how would you describe the concept if not a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred'?

If someone with 'standard-issue hostility,' where 'standard' includes decades of terrorism in foreign countries against US institutions and directly supporting attacks on US forces when the US and Iran are not at war, is telling you in no uncertain terms that they are your enemy, it (still) makes sense to believe them.

I mean, yes, all those things are quite typical of states currently engaged in hostilities, and yes "hostilities" implies they are currently your enemies. "Blood feud", on the other hand, would imply that the hostilities cannot be ended by means of rational persuasion, and will continue to re-flare no matter how conciliatory one of the sides is.

I'm not even necessarily denying the idea that such a blood feud exists, I just don't know if the statements from the Iranian government, no matter how deranged, are a good argument for it's existence.

I'm pretty sure we can find many historical examples beginning / ending hostilities within the same generation.

I'm also pretty sure you can admit that Iran specifically is already in its second, leaning into third, generation of participants.

If you want to go by senior leaders, they already are in the second senior leader generation and are well staged for a hardliner to lead the third. If you want to go by major institutional leaders, the late Soleimani of the IRGC was around 20 during the revolution and 60 when he died as the head of the IRGC, which is to say that most of the revolutionary paramilitary types are being done by younger men of post-revolution generations. The Iranian Revolution is about 46 years old, which is to say a child born after the 'new' Iran has had time to grow under up, be properly educated, fight, have kids, and for those kids to have been properly educated and in their fighting / parenting years as well. The Iranian theocracy absolutely has a revolutionary veteran ingroup for people who were involved in the revolution from the start, but the age of the average iranian- 34- means that most of the actual feuding-execution has been conducted by considerably younger people for a generation or two already.

When we look at historical examples of participants ending a feud in any generation, the proponents for ending it are generally not both declaring themselves an enemy while continuing to conduct routine hostilities to their end-of-life years. Almost as importantly, their key pillars of support tend not to gained their privileges with joining in on the feud, and don't stand to lose substantial influence and wealth if they let the feud go away.

Iran is the sort of structure you'd expect to see continue on a conflict across leadership generations. Both the autocrat-level senior leader selection processes and the state-within-the-state role and incentives of the IRGC support continuing the conflict. The senior leaders select for, and remove on a basis of a lack of, commitment to the Cause. Even the nominally elected representatives are pre-screened at the candidate selection level, and the non-elected power centers are even more deliberately managed.

This selection structure is in turn enforced by an institution that would lose its perks and privileges if the hostilities were to end. The IRGC is both a revolutionary-enforcer private army, but also a state-within-a-state whose privileges are justified by defending the revolution and executing the feud by, yes, bringing death to Americans. (And others.) This is the 'worst' of three worlds in terms of 'ending hostilities within the same generation'- selection for revolutionary fervor, material incentive for continuing, but also the prospect of punishment if a non-revolutionary successor took over. Then the IRGC would get fewer perks, and possibly more prison sentences for those things like domestic detentions and torture of political dissidents opposed to the revolution.

if we want to characterize Iran's leadership structure, they'd be closer to historical analogs of Imperial Japan- where being insufficiently hardline could get someone assassinated or the government functionally self-couped- rather than, say, Gaddafi in Libya, who happily engaged in European terrorism before trying to reconcile later. Japan notably continued its feuding until its government was forcibly resolved, and Gaddafi's feud was not as over as he might have thought when the European successor-governments saw an opportunity to strike back at him with US support.

I thought the question they were discussing was whether or not Iran has a blood feud with the US?

They were, but your question was not that question.

You quoted the section about believing someone who declares themselves an enemy, as opposed to Nybbler's characterization of a blood feud. Your response questioned why to believe a self-declaration of enemyship by comparing it to any other political slogan, as opposed to any other kind of conflict. Your basis of argument specifically ignorred the sort of validating actions (that would give slogans credibility) that is the understood background context of the US-Iranian feud.

Maybe I misunderstood something, but how would you describe the concept if not a 'burning, irreconcilable hatred'?

I wouldn't.

Partly because even irreconciliable feuds can be reconciled, because 'irreconciliable' is a judgement of the involved people's character, not an objective fact of nature. People's characters change with time and context, such that things that were impossible for them at one point are imminently possible at another. Reconciliation is usually by the descendants (future generations) rather than the initiators (the current Iranian leadership generation), and the more degrees of separation the better. I do not recognize / subscribe to a fundamental distinction between an irreconcilable geopolitical and a feud that could eventually ends, for the same reason I do not hold the same for any other 'unending' human relationship. There are no unending human relationships, because there are no unending and unchanging humans to have them. There are no permanent geopolitical conflicts, because the people having the conflicts change out.

The other part is I don't think 'blood feud' is a coherent enough concept to be meaningfully definable. I would certainly recognize as a metaphor for multi-generational hostility. I would also recognize it as a metaphor for hostility-on-general principle. But because 'blood feud' is so nebulous, it is also non-falsifiable. If your concept of blood feud is [A] and Nybbler's is [B], and Phailoor's is [C], Nybbler is not wrong for not being aligned with [A], or even in asserting [B] when rejecting [C].

Given that Nybbler's argument uses blood feud in the way Phailoor was using it- namely as Phailoor's short-hand for a conflict that is (as he put it) mostly a response to the US and which would end if the US stopped acting- and that Nybbler's point was far more about 'believe what they say' than 'there is a blood feud specifically because they say there is'- I also wouldn't read into blood feud as any sort of specific concept by either of them.

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One of the more impactful books I read this decade was Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. The books argues that our media environment, primarily TV in the time that this book was written, encourages political infantilization, rhetorical deskilling, and an obsession with appearances rather than substance of policies and candidates. Parts of this argument are undoubtedly true: Postman gives the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 where people stood for 7 HOURS to listen to the two politicians duke it out over the nitty-gritty policies related to slavery as an institution at that time. I couldn't see very many people today, much less your average social-media addicted normie (probably the equivalent of a rural Illinois farmer in the 1850s), paying attention to anything for 7 hours, much less grasping complex policy arguments.

But at the same time, I wonder how rose-tinted Postman's perception of political culture in the antebellum period was. I'm doing my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom, and this time around it really struck me how much heavy-handed, or even blatantly-illegal shit that the pro-slavery faction of the nation in the 1850s got up to in the lead up to the Civil War. The Filibuster invasions of sovereign Central American countries were sanctioned by many politicians in the South, and the individuals responsible got away scot-free because of the bias of the jurors. The Fugitive Slave Act and related Dred Scott and other Supreme Court rulings were attempts to basically force the North to accept slavery throughout the whole country. Pro-slavery forces from Missouri tried to falsify elections in Kansas to force admission of that state as permitting slavery, despite a nearly 10:1 ratio of yeoman farmers:slaver holders in the territory. And this isn't even getting started on the morality of slavery itself. Of course the more extreme abolitionists also got up to some indefensible stuff (mainly thinking John Brown and his backers), but the majority of the insane policy prescriptions and rhetoric came from below the Mason-Dixon Line. All this is to say that basically, it seems to me that the undoubtedly superior attention spans and verbal reasoning skills in general didn't seem to do much to help policy-makers decide the slavery question. In the end force of arms had to do that.

I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States. Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln. In both cases, it doesn't seem that attention span, or verbal IQ helped either side convince their opponents or find a peaceful solution to the problem.

Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges? Or are these tools only really useful in justifying what one already believes in a slightly more pretty way, leaving the actual battles over fundamental differences to be fought on the battlefield.

Postscript: One difference that I do think is real between today and the 1860s is the willingness of young men to actually put their lives on the line for what they believed in. Say what you will for John Brown, or Stonewall Jackson, but they were willing to die to fight against (or for) slavery. There were quite a few university professors and students in the Union Army. I don't think you would see this kind of behavior today from either side of the political divide, but especially from the left.

I think that the attention span thing is real, and quite troubling. I find it very rare that anyone can even articulate what they believe and why they believe it, let alone provide evidence that backs up their positions. Most people, when pressed to explain where they get their information, it generally reduces to social media, YouTube, or podcasts. In short, for the vast majority, their view of reality is based on the AI running their social media feeds. In this sense we are very far behind the people of 1824 or even 1724 who generally got their news from newspapers that came out once a day and contained long-form articles about the news. This means that they at least understood the bare facts of the issues. And that puts them far above us in being able to understand the world, and take positions based on the facts and their own thoughts about those issues. We run on vibes.

The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.

The bigger difference between their era and ours is that we’re much more narcissistic and see political opinions as parts of our identity. In 1824, you wouldn’t have made an identity of your policy positions. A person’s lifestyle and hobbies were not affected by their politics. People might have interests, but being in favor of the fugitive slave law had nothing to do with how you saw yourself as a person. You didn’t pick up or drop interests because they were coded “other team”. Nobody stopped drinking tea because it was marketed to the Southern people. We dropped Bud Light because it was marketed to trans people.

I must dissent. Of all the years to pick to claim identity didn't shape politics, picking a period right in the midst of the rise of nationalism as a mass movement (1789 French Revolution, fundamentally changing the relation between the people and the state based on identity) and the publication of the communist manifest (1848, formalizing an economic-class based approach to politics in addition to already existing national/religious identities) is certainly a place to start claiming that people weren't identifying or acting according to their identified category interest.

Even in the American system, identity-driven interest politics is not exactly hard to find. The dominance of state-identity interests (what is good for my state, the team I identify with) forged fundamental characteristics of the US political system (Senate versus House), major landmark legislations (the various new-state compromises over slavery balance), regional interest economic policies (north-east favored protectionism vis-a-vis the south-favored freer trade), and was regular motivation for which side of the civil war various people aligned with (check the generals).

There was never a halcyon period where people didn't have their politics shaped by their affiliation, and each individual made their judgements out of sincerity unbothered by allegiance. The affiliations that mattered most change by time and context- religious identitarianism, dynastic alliance structures, employment contexts- but they certainly existed, whether it's remembered or not.

I think that the attention span thing is real, and quite troubling.

Just yesterday I wrote a short 250 word reply about camera raw development process and someone else complained that it was too wordy. And I'm the guy with the ADHD diagnosis there...

Abolitionists absolutely saw it as part of their identity, at least.

Part of, sure. But im pretty sure they weren’t choosing fashions or foods or other products because they were associated with abolition. Modern politics isn’t politics as they would have understood it. It’s more of a lifestyle brand in our culture. And in a lot of ways I think I would compare our way of thinking about our political party affiliation much like someone pre-enlightenment might have thought about religious denominations. Today nobody really gives a fuck what denomination of Christianity you follow. And outside of highly religious regions of the country, nobody’s even that upset by the idea that you’re not Christian at all. Most people believe or don’t but it’s not the thing that drives their thinking. Go back to the reformation, and it mattered quite a bit both to you and everyone around you what type of Christianity you practiced. Be a Catholic in John Calvin’s part of France isn’t good for your lifespan. Be Protestant in a Catholic region and it’s likewise not a good thing. And most people were not only willing to die rather than renounce their version of Christianity, but likewise willing to see others punished for not being the right kind of Christian. Minus the killing (at least thus far) this is how most people approach politics. Our system is the only good and true, and the reason you aren’t a good red/blue is that you are evil or deluded. And each part of the political spectrum has its preferred lifestyle. MAGA types like to style themselves after working class interests. Blue tribes tend to like more arty things. But why should this go along with politics?

Part of, sure. But im pretty sure they weren’t choosing fashions or foods or other products because they were associated with abolition.

I distinctly remembered reading about a movement to boycott products created using slavery, and it indeed seems to have existed, but was abandonded after a few years due to not working out.

But im pretty sure they weren’t choosing fashions or foods or other products because they were associated with abolition.

They absolutely were.

Modern politics isn’t politics as they would have understood it. It’s more of a lifestyle brand in our culture. And in a lot of ways I think I would compare our way of thinking about our political party affiliation much like someone pre-enlightenment might have thought about religious denominations.

Religion was central to politics in medieval Europe, not a distinct thing that was seperate and fenced off. The distinction between the nationalist killing a communist and a catholic killing a protestant is on a conceptual level, not that different. In both cases it is an argument over how the world as we understand it is arranged and who is handing out bread.

Ultimately I think you're starting from a false premise here, or have an odd definition of politics. At the end of the day humans are going to be humans and love showing how much they are part of the tribe through how they dress, act, eat, etc. I mean, just look at the history of nationalism and nationalist movements.

Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln.

William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution while calling it "an agreement with hell." In many ways I think the radical pro-slavery South Carolinian Fire-Eaters gave the other side a free win by splitting from the USA first, saving the radical abolitionists from the unpopular position of "destroy the Constitution and abolish slavery by any means."

I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States.

While I understand where you're coming from (and wouldn't necessarily disagree in some respects) I actually think their position is closer to the North's in a specific aspect that is under-discussed.

A lot of the anger in the North towards the South wasn't due to the abstracted question of slavery, it was because slaves would escape from the South to the North, settle someplace like Massachusetts that would welcome escaped slaves, and build a new life for themselves...until federal officials showed up, tore them away from their family or friends, and returned them to the South, as was required by the Constitution. What caused the South to secede wasn't that the Constitution didn't favor their position, it was that they were getting locked out of conventional power by the more numerous free states (that's why South Carolina bailed when they did, after it became clear the federal government was going to be hostile to them due to a presidential election, even though the pro-slavey side had been racking up Wins like the Dred Scott decision just a few years earlier. (In this respect, I think your blue-states-as-South analogy is arguably very apt: the center of gravity in the electoral college is shifting redder and redder every census, and the Supreme Court's decisions haven't been cutting towards the blue states either.)

Interestingly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates saw the introduction by Douglas of the "Freeport Doctrine" which essentially said that even when slavery could not be legally prohibited, if the local government exercised its authority in such a way as to be inimical to slavery it would constitute a de facto ban.

It seems pretty clear to me that the blue states (or at least some of them) have been running their own version of the Freeport Doctrine as regards illegal immigrants and get upset about ICE for much the same reasons as Northerners were upset about slave catchers. And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free. Returning to your casting, it seems to me that the administration is quite content to dangle Fort Sumter in front of the other side, not necessarily in terms of secession but just in the reality that violent demonstration against the governmental authorities will radicalize reds and blues, but it seems plausible to have a net effect that favors the administration's position. Perhaps just as firing on Fort Sumter gave the abolitionists on a platter what they otherwise were arguably decades away from being able to seize by conventional political means, so too the protests against ICE in California (no matter how popular they are in California) will enable the Trump administration's previously radical push to aggressively deport illegal immigrants writ large.

Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges?

Off the top of my head, the Revolutionary War might be the best example. Unlike other examples (such as World War Two) the Founding Fathers were having to make up a lot as they went along because they had to create the institutions they needed to be a nation as they went (yes I know the state Congresses were already a thing, so there was actually less of a jump there than one might think, but still!) and from what I can tell they did a lot of it on sheer "I have read history for 1000 hours and we're remaking the Roman Republic from scratch but better this time" energy. (Back to the Civil War: the South actually aspired to emulate the success of the American Revolution and saw their secession as an ideological successor but failed in part because George Washington could afford to retreat from the British in a way that a slaveholding agrarian state fighting for its independence against a neighboring country could not.)

And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free.

There's no reason it couldn't. It really depends on what the anti-immigration people are upset about. Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California. If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.

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I mean you still have no border control at the state border. If I live in California it’s not like there’s a border checkpoint at Texas. So whatever the most liberal policy is would end up being tge reality for everyone. One million immigrants in California don’t have to state there.

The distance between California and Texas seems to be at least 500km, and more like perhaps 1500km between the big cities.

An illegal in California can likely not just take a plane from LA to Houston for a weekend of murder, mayhem and pet-eating. (If he can, then the federal government could fix that.) Nor can he likely afford it. Perhaps he can take the bus (which would also be preventable through legislation), or drive there by car. He can certainly hike through Nevada and New Mexico.

The costs of going from CA to Texas are high in terms of time, money and deportation risk. Assuming that Texas is fully cooperating with ICE, the cost of staying any substantial amount of time in Texas are high in terms of deportation risk, likewise.

If I were an illegal, having perhaps paid most of what I own and risked my life to get into the US, and CA was safe and Texas was not, then there would be nothing in Texas which would be worth the risk of deportation. As much as people like to dunk on California, it is likely still a hell of a lot better than whatever country the illegal came from.

If you model illegals as rational actors, then having states which do not enforce immigration law is a great boon to everyone other state, because the net migration will be towards these safe states.

If you model illegals as particles undergoing Brownian motion, then sure, a few will diffuse into Texas. But new illegals will also get in from abroad, so you need to keep up your deportation effort indefinitely either way.

Things would be different if California had the power to let new illegals in, or if immigrants had a generation length of a year, with their population rising exponentially. Or if there was nothing worth stealing in the illegal-friendly zone, but plenty worth stealing in the MAGA-zone 200m over.

I guess an argument can also be made that if the illegals are not deported now, some bleeding heart liberal (like me) will naturalize them in a decade, at which point they can come to Texas and nobody can do anything about it.

Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California.

Right, but this leads to a couple of things logically

  1. the states that don't want the illegals will want to cut off any potential indirect federal subsidies to the illegals, because it makes no sense for them to help pay for aliens when they aren't even receiving any e.g. tax benefits. This means fights over things like "public school funding" and "welfare funding."

  2. internal border checkpoints.

Maybe this is compatible with a United States, but I think in many ways it vibes as being less "united" than the European Union.

If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.

One of the things that's been proven dramatically twice over the past few weeks is that if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets. It's not really unreasonable for red states in a collateral security agreement with blue states to want to prevent this outcome.

if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets

They'll never tell you why.

Who's they and what's why in this context? I don't get it.

It's a reference to a supposed Russian proverb "the Jew will always tell you what happened to him, but he'll never tell you why."

Iran and Russia got hit because they engaged in acts of war against other countries. It doesn't occur to "they" that you can avoid having to worry about such things if you don't pick fights with foreign countries.

It's basically the mindset of the prison gang guy who's big and tough and strong and always thinking about how he will defend himself from attack, who sees of himself as a hard-headed realist, and is 10x more likely to die a violent death than the average schlubby insurance agent who never thinks about self-defense at all. MAGA is an entire political movement based around this mentality, which wants to drag the entire country down with it.

Is your position here is that if we get attacked by a foreign adversary it is because we deserve it? [Edit to add – if Russia could have avoided having to worry about such things if it didn't pick fights with foreign countries, does that mean Ukraine doesn't have to worry about it, in your view?]

I don't think that can be anything but a straw man of your actual position, but – it really doesn't matter whether Iran or Russia were in the right or not, we need to pay close attention to the conflicts going on around the world or risk learning their lessons the hard way.

(JD Vance if you're reading this get Hesgeth to fire a five star every month until we have soft cover around all of our strategic bombers.)

Ah I see, you've never actually lived in a failed state and have therefore no organic understanding of the necessity of a monopoly on force for what you consider a normal life to even exist.

That's easy to remedy, Hispaniola is really nice at this time of year. You can have a quick trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and convince yourself which society you'd prefer to live in based on their approach to border enforcement.

Be sure to ask any insurance providers what they think of either place, though you might have trouble finding any in Haiti at the moment.

I will say I don't even mind anarchists myself, so long as they can take a hard look at a lawless society and genuinely desire it for themselves. Me I'm more of a Leviathan guy, private property, courts and all that jazz you know.

Nice takedown of that strawman.

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During the trade war with Canada the Canadians threatened to turn off its electricity supply to America. Trump and MAGA used that as a reason why America couldn't rely on foreign countries for electricity:

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/3zhsGGkCA11aj2O0t57NaQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTQ5MQ--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_independent_635/80f6a10cc60a71ffc764529da7c7eb2a

They really cannot grasp the correlation between their behavior and outcomes and think that's a good argument.

I think it’s mostly the former, with the giant flaw if you have a federal government, a sufficient number of illegals living in communities many hundreds of miles away will end up forcing you to accept their own preferences via the ballot box.

Right, this is the other problem. Imagine if Rhode Island unilaterally declared it was giving residency (but not citizenship!) to everyone in India and instantly gained a supermajority in the electoral college.

This is obviously crazy and it doesn't seem like a good idea to say "well no this is fine as long as you fly millions of Indians to Rhode Island."

Latest updates, now that it's spreading around official media outlets: a suspect is wanted, Vance Boelter. He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/democratic-lawmakers-minnesota-shot

A man masquerading as a police officer is shooting politicians in their homes. The why is debatable; the theories I see floating around have to do with these two Democrat's recent voting records, and breaking from Dem consensus to support the Republicans. I don't know if this is true, I didn't check their records -- I share only because it's what I heard.

The why is also, I think, insignificant. There are so many reasons to be violent in modern society, if you're not intrinsically against violence itself -- punishing defectors, rallying your side with a show of force, intimidating people and politicians on the margins. I don't care what specific social ill or rage drove this would-be assassin.

More interesting, to me, is that we're seeing assassinations and their attempts more and more. It seems that way to me, at least -- I'm going off vibes and a gut reckoning with the numbers, not a reasoned analysis. Maybe I'm entirely wrong! But the vibe I get is the willingness to use violence on one's enemies is becoming significantly more normalized by the day, and eventually, I suspect, we're going to hit a turning point where no one pretends they don't want the other side dead and we get to it.

I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.

It makes me think. We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.

We don't build. We don't conquer. We prosper, sort of, the numbers on the charts go up and the useless shit is really cheap -- but the precious things are rarer than ever.

I dunno. Nobody died this time, I guess that's nice. And the future, rough beast that it is, continues to slouch toward Bethlehem.

edit: scratch that two died, I guess that's less nice. RIP.

I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.

Well the Zizians also found it hard to argue against murderous force on principle, and instead ran a nice empirical experiment for us. It turns out it’s a bad idea.

All they proved was that they failed.

A serious risk of using murderous force.

Yes, the cost is potentially great. That's the primary limiting factor, for which we should all be grateful. And we should dread any context that alters that balance.

I don't know how you could manage to turn political murder into something fake and gay but the Zizians managed to do so. It's not the principles that are important, it's actually being able to do shit. If I could radicalize the people inside of an Applebees at 7pm they'd be able to do much more damage and cause a nation-wide lockdown.

I would argue that "it is fine to shoot a few state senators" is far out of the overton window for both MAGA and the woke left.

Political violence can surely further a cause (See the Nazis or Mao, for example), but in the US, the murderers of elected officials will generally strengthen the side of the victim, and end up being condemned rather than celebrated by their own side.

This means that the perpetrators of political violence against elected officials are unlikely to be rational, committed followers of one of the big political camps who are willing to risk their life and freedom to further their cause. Instead, they are more likely to be parts of much smaller fringe movements, crazy, driven by bloodlust, or wanting to achieve eternal infamy through their deeds.

(Of course, this also leaves the door open for people being celebrated for other political violence. For example, imgur loves that Luigi guy. And the German RAF had quite a few supporters on the slightly more mainstream student left.)

I have seen 10 times more comments from the left mad that the Trump assassin missed than I have seem from leftists mad he tried in the first place. I think the only reason that guy has not be lionized is that he failed, a few inches to the right and the left would be trying to build statues of him.

Ditto Luigi Mangione.

Not everyone on the left was celebrating the guy, but virtually nobody was shushing the ones who were, and nobody took up the "please don't murder CEOs" cause.

He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

Which makes me think that politicians should say as little as possible in the immediate aftermath of an event like this or any other tragedy or natural disaster, because it only leads to egg on face (as well as shooting off your mouth based on inadequate information).

Walz was quick off the mark with "this is a politically motivated assassination", presumably on the basis that if Democrat politicians were attacked, it must be those dastardly Republicans to blame. Well, turns out that (it's looking like) the guy is one of your own, Tim. So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

Particularly if (let's do some wild speculating here) the guy was motivated by the David Hogg approach of "let's go after the moderate Democrats, after all they're to blame for co-operating with Republicans and enabling Trump to be elected"?

Walz was quick off the mark with "this is a politically motivated assassination", presumably on the basis that if Democrat politicians were attacked, it must be those dastardly Republicans to blame. Well, turns out that (it's looking like) the guy is one of your own, Tim. So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

The connections to Walz are incredibly tenuous, that he was reappointed six years ago to a large bipartisan workforce advisory board (one of 130 total state boards, advisory councils, task forces, etc) with this including volunteer small business owner representatives from around the state where most of the nominations came from basically just rubber stamping local council choices.

It's a ridiculously weak connection, but that's not really the point now is it? The bigger point is the implications people try to make like you put here

So now what is the political motivation, and how is your party to be held accountable?

The bigger logic employed here is "bad guy tenuously connected to your side did something wrong? That's proof you're evil!" and this logic means a person using this logic simply can't accept that anyone bad ever exists on their end of the political spectrum or they'd have to contend with the same implications.

And it reminds me of this point from SSC about the Ashley Todd case https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/

I think insofar as this affected the election – and everyone seems to have agreed that it might have – it hit President Obama with a burst of bad karma. Obama something something psychopath with a knife. Regardless of the exact content of those something somethings, is that the kind of guy you want to vote for?

Then when it was discovered to be a hoax, it was McCain something something race-baiting hoaxer. Now he’s got the bad karma!

This sort of conflation between a cause and its supporters really only makes sense in the emotivist model of arguing. I mean, this shouldn’t even get dignified with the name ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem fallacy is “McCain had sex with a goat, therefore whatever he says about taxes is invalid.” At least it’s still the same guy. This is something the philosophy textbooks can’t bring themselves to believe really exists, even as a fallacy.

But if there’s a General Factor Of McCain, then anything bad remotely connected to the guy – goat sex, lying campaigners, whatever – reflects on everything else about him.

And let's be honest, the large majority of the time this logic gets used it's as an isolated demand for rigor.

The other side is accountable for all their bad actions, whereas my side just has a few bad apples. I'm going to assume you're Republican aligned based off previous comments and context so let's ask that question.

Should we be holding Republicans responsible for the recent stories of people trying to kill protestors yesterday?

I think no and I've been consistent with my beliefs. I said it about Charlottesville, Gamergate, BLM, the "stochastic terrorism" accusations against LibsofTiktok, Palestine activists, Israeli activists, January 6th protestors, protestors in France during the pension strikes, etc etc that blaming groups for the actions of a few individuals is just poor reasoning.

So will you be consistent with your argument and agree Republicans should be held accountable for cases like these car attacks or the attempted assassination of Pelosi, the attempted kidnapping of Whitmer, the murder of a cop during Jan 6th, etc?

Now I'm not going to assume bad faith of you, but I will say that I find most people, right and left wingers alike tend to agree with my position that they aren't responsible for a few crazies once they're asked about their side.

What I wanted to point out was that the immediate and reflexive jump to "he must be one a' them bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGAs!" has not been borne out so far by what we know, and that guy appears to be a Democrat or at least involved with the Democratic party on some level.

So there are no immediate convenient just-so stories as to "who did this why" in the aftermath of any event like this, and 'least said soonest mended' is the best advice.

What I wanted to point out was that the immediate and reflexive jump to "he must be one a' them bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGAs!"

I'm pretty sure I'm the one you're referring to here. I also am a "bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGA". I think this guy came from my side of the aisle because the initial evidence seems to have broken that way. The assassin's connections to the Democratic party appear to be tenuous at best, and reports are citing support for abortion as the through-line of his target list and a history of Conservative Christian involvement in his social media trail. That's genuinely how the evidence looks to me. I have not been attempting to make any comment on Protestants vs Catholics; I am noting that the way the press is talking about him is generally how they talk about people like me.

It would not be surprising in the least if it turned out that the press were lying, but I have no current evidence that they're lying other than that it's the press, and if they're lying, it's at least somewhat about facts they don't control and should be publicly verifiable, so I think that's less likely.

Having observed several iterations of this particular game over the years, I think anyone who argues for ignoring the question of motive is kidding themselves; if this guy is in fact a Red Triber, that fact will, to put it delicately, be relevant to the discourse for some time. If he is not a Red Triber, then I am compelled to point out that the question of his motivations will be actively suppressed. That is the pattern I observe from the last several go-rounds.

I am deeply concerned about escalating extremism. I believe it is better in principle to consistently engage on the motives of extremists such as this and previous assassins, rather than allow our press to play their usual games.

reports are citing support for abortion as the through-line of his target list and a history of Conservative Christian involvement in his social media trail

Yeah, but so far the reports seem sketchy - not the actual list but one typed up and given to the police? I don't know how much credence to put in anything, though his sudden turn (if I believe the alleged LinkedIn page on social media claimed to be his) from a history of generally working in the food industry/retail industry to saying he was CEO of Red Lion and working in the Congo sounds very odd - maybe he had some kind of mental breakdown?

According to Boelter’s LinkedIn page, he is listed as the CEO of Red Lion Group, which is based in Congo, and he’s listed as a part of the leadership team at Praetorian Guard Security, which provides armed home security in the Twin Cities area.

It appears in the past, he’d worked in food production for several companies, including Del Monte and Nestle.

According to his bio on Praetorian Guard Security Boelter worked security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East “including the West Bank, southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.”

So maybe he was shooting or planning to shoot pro-choice people, or maybe he had some other reason, or who knows what exactly was going on. I'm waiting to hear more. He seems to have had a mixed background, to say the least.

Should we be holding Republicans responsible for the recent stories of people trying to kill protestors yesterday?

Held responsible? OR Get credit for?

This is the really intractable portion, because killing protestors is probably net pretty good when done by private individuals. Protesting, even the "peaceful" kind is still highly antisocial, at best being a massive waste of time and resources. But usually also significantly interrupting business and people's lives. And more realistically, nowadays, most are used as cover fire for violent crisis actors. Its probably bad if police just shoot them, but guys sniping them out of windows would get us back closer to a more healthy equilibrium where protesting is reserved for important government scandals like covering up sex rings and the like, not for when a teacher's union wants a 10% raise or ICE agents are check notes executing lawful detention orders.

This is the really intractable portion, because killing protestors is probably net pretty good when done by private individuals. Protesting, even the "peaceful" kind is still highly antisocial, at best being a massive waste of time and resources. But usually also significantly interrupting business and people's lives

Killing people also disrupts a lot of lives too, including taking court and police time away from other crimes. It disrupts the employers of both, the family members and friends of both, etc. It increases the fear of violence level of the rest of society. It devalues nearby property by increasing the crime rate.

Murder doesn't just hurt the murder victim.

It increases the fear of violence level of the rest of society.

How so? If I’m not planning on participating in a protest, why would my “fear of violence” be increased by the knowledge that protestors may suffer negative consequences for protesting? Their circumstances do not appear to mirror my circumstances in any important way, so why should I draw any conclusions about what’s likely to happen to me based on what happens to them?

It devalues nearby property by increasing the crime rate.

including taking court and police time away from other crimes.

Not if the police agree to do only a cursory investigation, informed by the assumption “Eh, whatever happens to these people happens, no need to look too deeply into it.” In that scenario, no arrest would be made and no court resources would need to be expended.

Putting aside any morals, I don't see how you're feasibly going to make a law that allows for people to kill others easily that also doesn't inevitably end up with a bunch of people dying because "I thought they counted as a valid target" becomes an obvious excuse with very little ability to counter, and not to mention it pretty clearly violates the entire principles behind the first amendment if we start killing people over them just existing together in a public space with signs and speech. Even with self-defense/stand your ground laws which are generally easier to work off of, we still see things with murderous people shooting doordash drivers and pulling guns on girl scouts trying to exploit it.

It comes off as "I'm bloodthirsty and I want to justify it, no one will be bothered if I just shoot that guy I find annoying right?"

No, no, no, you see, it works very well if the only people that the police is gonna give a pass to are Hoffmeisters and everyone who isn't a Hoffmeister gets hit with the full extent of the law if they try to lynch the shooter.

This is the really intractable portion, because killing protestors is probably net pretty good when done by private individuals.

no, it is not

at best being a massive waste of time and resources. But usually also significantly interrupting business and people's lives.

I think that is not a good reason to murder people

Feel free to elaborate

I think that burden on arguing that murder is actually fine is on people claiming that vastly higher murder rate would be an improvement.

And that you would not like world where "significantly interrupting my life" would result in murder. I assure you that nonzero number of people think you are significantly interrupting their life.

The connections to Walz are incredibly tenuous, that he was reappointed six years ago to a large bipartisan workforce advisory board (one of 130 total state boards, advisory councils, task forces, etc) with this including volunteer small business owner representatives from around the state where most of the nominations came from basically just rubber stamping local council choices.

That is super weak, but FWIW, I'm also seeing claims that his wife was an intern for Walz at one point.

Yeah like 15 years ago for a brief stint. They're all very weak connections, and I think an obvious way to see this if you tried to draw a connection elsewhere.

Like would "Local store once hired roommate" be a convincing connection to attach Vance to the owner of the local store? Probably not.

Or if Walmart had employed him, would we be worried about the district manager? Probably not.

And yet we could just as easily draw all those connections. Hundreds or thousands of people all suspect, from former coworkers to employees for his security firm to other people on that workforce board or even just the people at the church he attended.

This too seems like an isolated demand for rigor, incredibly weak connections that include a shit ton of people who aren't being implicated despite many having even closer ties.

"this is a politically motivated assassination"

Charitably, this statement is true if they were killed because of their roles as politicians, which seems likely any time a public political figure is killed except by random violence or accident. That said, the implication that "the other side" did it isn't necessarily true, and hyping it as such in this case can presumably put a lot of egg in the face if it turns out to be [your side] infighting, which also isn't uncommon.

Yeah, shooting politicians probably is politically motivated. But he could have been shooting politicians because he thinks they're lizard people controlling us all with mind rays from their lunar base. We don't know precisely what or why the guy was trying to achieve as yet, so saying nothing except some anodyne platitudes until we find the hell out what was going on is the best way to go.

People in this thread are claiming that the shooter is a Blue, given that he appears to have been appointed to office by Tim Waltz and possibly by other Democratic politicians, with one of the victims being a democrat who recently voted with the Republicans on an important issue, resulting in much criticism from her own party. Also, he apparently had a stack of No Kings flyers in his vehicle. This seems quite premature to me.

I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.

Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.

This seems highly inconsistent with the facts on the ground. What are the odds that he happened to target two democrats that very recently voted on a massive issue with the Republicans?

That is, if he was targeting Democrats at random the odds are very small he’d pick these two. So the evidence we have at first glance (as opposed to your speculative evidence) suggests he is left wing coded.

I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers

If the politicians were all Democrats, then yeah they'll all be pro-choice. As your comment indicates, Christians and pro-life not wanted in the Democratic Party.

Depravity, depravity, the Democrats like depravity,

For they are fiends in human shape, monsters of depravity.

You may meet them in a by-street, you may see them in the square —

But when a crime’s discovered, then a Democrat's not there!

(Because it was really a pro-life, homophobe, transphobe, racist, conservative theocrat, bigot, Republican in disguise only pretending to be a Democrat)

  • -19

For they are fiends in human shape, monsters of depravity.

That's the norm across the West. In most of Europe abortion is non-controversial even in conservative and far-right parties.

pro-life not wanted in the Democratic Party.

Yep. The reaction is akin to how the GOP would react to "pro-Sharia-law Republicans."

This is way too boo-outgroup.

Okay, maybe the T.S. Eliot parody was over the line.

But show me where I'm wrong that it is more likely than not that Democratic politicians are pro-choice. The bodies are barely cold by this stage so I don't want to go digging out "what did Representative A and Senator B get as scores from Planned Parenthood?" but assuming that "oh this guy must be pro-lifer because he had a list of pro-choice politicians" doesn't track when it comes to Democrats. If he had a list of Democrats, he had a list of pro-choicers, more likely than not. Correlation is not causation, isn't that the saying?

No one is disputing that Democratic politicians are more likely than not to be pro-choice. That wasn't the boo outgroup part.

Please (I mean this sincerely) don't start playing this game again just because you're back under a new alt.

I don't want to fight over this. But if someone can come along and presume that the shooting happened because of some Christian extremist, I'm going to answer that in the same spirit as it was posted. "Gosh, he must have been a radical anti-abortionist, he had a list and everything!"

Says who? When we get proper information, go right ahead. Right now we have bits and scraps and no clear pictures, and what little information we do have points towards the guy being a Democrat, but already some comments here are trying to spin it that "yeah well it was really all the fault of the Republicans".

Are you under the impression that FC is a Democrat supporter?

I don't know what their views are (I don't track closely "aha, X said Y so that must mean Z" on here). Whether they're Red, Blue, Green or Orange, professing to have insight into the mind of the shooter because the magic crystal ball is showing the shape of a black dog is proposing an explanation too soon.

I feel like what's going on in this subthread can be described as "trading in culture war options". Clearly, people hope to get a greater win for their side by calling boo outgroup in advance, before it has actually been established that the bad guy was in their outgroup (the mechanism being something like "see, this proves that you get a more accurate world model by assuming that [my outgroup] is bad"), at the risk of egg on their face and a status drop for their ingroup if the call turns out to be wrong.

To make the trade count, whatever the shooter's politics turn out to be, we should parade those who confidently claimed the opposite through town with dunce hats and signs saying "[my tribe] sucks".

Until very recently, the Democratic Party in Minnesota had Pro-life Democrats.

Minnesota’s Iron Range was both very pro-life and very pro-union. They elected pro-life Democrat Jim Oberstar to Congress many times, until Obamacare turned the pro-lifers against him.

There were pro-life Democrats in the party, until they got deliberately frozen out. There's still a sub-group of them inside the party, but they weren't the ones being invited to, for instance, Hotties for Harris bashes.

Right now, they can't make enough of Governor Walz being pro-reproductive rights and so forth.

Right now, they can't make enough of Governor Walz being pro-reproductive rights and so forth.

Makes sense. It's their best issue.

Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate saying he's a Trump supporter.

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934036017746780454

EDIT: Excuse me. Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate allegedly saying he's a Trump supporter. I thought he was saying it during the cringe blubbering part but now that I listen on better speakers it's not that. The source for his roommate saying he is a Trump supporter is the reporter in this video https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934061437691072727

Hanania dropping the sarcasm in the twitter thread:

I know right! Lmao, just like they told us to take the vax, fellow pureblood.

He really is a jackass. People are pointing out that the dudes LinkedIn has him employed 50m from the location of this alleged roommate and that the alleged shooter was married with kids. It really calls into question whether this purported roommate is actually a roommate.

The only thing Haniana has in response to the evidence is sarcasm. He is just the worst; even when he agrees with me.

According to this Boelter was renting part-time, presumably so that he could stay near his workplace when necessary. (edit: did you mean 50 miles? I read that automatically as 50 meters.)

Also: "The roommate tells FOX 9 he has known Boelter for more than 40 years, since the fourth grade and didn't express a lot of strong political views. He did, however, have strong views on abortion. Authorities also found receipts for items used in Saturday morning's shootings in one of his vehicles at the Minneapolis home."

no idea what denomination this guy is, but in the Catholic world, prolife, pro-immigration, pro-social justice like healthcare for the poor, anti-Trump is not particularly ideosyncratic. Rather it's extremely common, and a relatively consistent worldview. This probably describes the pope himself, and many priest and bishops in the US.

However, I don't this agree that this maps to 'Red-coded'. I think it's the default left-wing half of Catholicism in America, consistenly votes democrate, and is pretty solidly blue tribe, just not woke.

Seems like a Charismatic Protestant of some sort, which would, at least in American context, further point towards him probably not being a liberal/leftist.

There are (weird)left wing charismatic protestants. It really wouldn't shock me if one of them wound up in a political assassination because, well, you can expect any group of weirdos to be overrepresented in political violence.

I think it's the default left-wing half of Catholicism in America, consistently votes democrat, and is pretty solidly blue tribe, just not woke.

In the days when the Democrats really were the party of the working man, you could vote Democrat and be red-coded. That faded away as they chased after the college-educated vote, pivoted to "what do college kids like? oh yeah sex'n'drugs'n'rock&roll", went increasingly all-in on progressivism, or at least allowed the progressive wing to push the social liberalisation programme, and dumped the rare part of "safe, legal, and rare" in the dumpster.

So now you're either mostly a cultural Catholic who votes blue no matter who because that's how you were raised, you are more serious about your faith but think the Democrats are better on other issues, or this is the deal-breaker issue for you and you have to hold your nose and vote for the Republicans.

But I think FCfromSSC doesn't mean Catholics when they talk about Christians there, they mean Protestants and most especially the Evangelicals.

"what do college kids like? oh yeah sex'n'drugs'n'rock&roll"

No-college kids like that too.

Yes and no.

Biden / Pelosi style catholics are definitely solidly blue tribe and do vote democrat. There's even vestiges of old school machine politics for these kind of folks in states like Rhode Island and Massachusettes.

The problem is they aren't actually catholic. Just as "culturally Jewish" is a thing for totally non-observing "Jews" in the bicoastal cities, I believe "culturally catholic" exists as well for many democrat strongholds. To me, it's almost stolen valor. People like Biden etc get to say "faith is at the core of who I am" blah blah blah and infuse their speeches - and votes - with high minded moralism. But they aren't actually living or even trying to believe the doctrine of their faith. The Church is pretty damn clear on abortion and divorce, among other issues.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith. A lot of the politically motivated (and serious) American Catholics also get really into issues of religious liberties. One need look no further than the recent SCOTUS decision on tax-exemption status for faith based charities.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican

Don't think the Pope would agree.

Why?

The majority of what he posted on Twitter before he became Pope (which wasn't much) was criticism of Trumpist policies or ideas.

He was also a, literally, registered Republican.

Claiming that the pope agreed with democrats more on immigration is probably true(although a lot of the evidence used for that is out of context- his recent speech about ‘breaking down borders’ was explicitly calling for Palestinian rights and not about the U.S., for example). But the claim that he was or is particularly anti trump is not.

There are a small number of theologically serious Catholics who vote democrat- over stuff like the border, 'Trump is pro-choice too', 'democrats hew closer to Catholic social teaching'(apart from unions this is not really true, because Catholic social teaching is not really defined enough to say that clearly- it's a set of principles, not a policy platform, and neither party is much into it), or just unironically believing democrat's propaganda. This group is old and shrinking(partly from dying of old age), but the claim that it doesn't exist is just false.

That being said 90+% of non-dissenting, precept-following Catholics do probably vote republican, with the other single-digit percent being a higher percentage of heavily propagandized non-English speakers, or residents of places like Chicago where maintaining a democrat registration to vote strategically for less-bad democrats is more important than protest voting for republicans, than of actual liberals.

This is all correct and an important improvement on what I originally commented.

Taking the issue up one or two levels of analysis, I believe there's a fundamental and close-to-irreconcilable tension between being Catholic and being American. I was listening to an SSPX sermon on the drive home from my Dad's last night and the priest points out that America is a protestant country founded on and steeped in protestant principles. Catholic integralism has approximately 0% shot of taking root in the American Federalist system. (That being said, however, Catholic political leaders, especially in the judiciary, have, for decades, punch above their electoral weight.)

The overwhelming majority of the time, voting in America, for theologically serious (TM) catholics, is a choice for the lesser of two evils. My guiding light, for some time, has been a candidate's perspective on religious liberty. Never their voiced position, mind you - religious liberty is one of those issues everyone always says they are for, but their voting behaviors often betray them later on.

Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith.

Only if you selectively define "bedrock elements" to include only what's politically convenient. Is JD Vance actually Catholic? He repeated rumors about Haitian immigrants he knew to be untrue for the specific purpose of demonizing them for political gain. He has, to my knowledge, never once apologized for this or walked back his statements, instead doubling down on them and insisting on calling them "illegals" not because they arrived here illegally, but because he disagreed with the political mechanism by which they were allowed to come. Again, he didn't do this because he was mistaken but because either he personally doesn't like them due to his own racism or because he cynically believes that other people are racist enough that he can exploit them for his own political ends. While the church's position on immigration doesn't contain any bright lines, you'd have to squint really hard to claim that productive, law-abiding people are causing such a burden to the United States that we are justified in deporting them to a country steeped in as much violence, poverty, and political instability as Haiti.

Or if you'd prefer bright lines, let's just point to capital punishment, an issue on which the church has taken an unequivocal stance for 50 years. This isn't merely something where Republicans want to maintain the status quo; they actually advocate expanding the death penalty. At least when Democrats want to expand abortion access it isn't based on the idea that more abortions is a good thing.

I say this as a Catholic who went to a small, Catholic, liberal arts college largely populated by serious Catholics. Some of my friends were liberals, some conservatives, and I don't believe for a second that abortion or anything else is the defining thing that's keeping them from voting Democrat. I'm still in contact with a lot of these people, and the ones that didn't switch to Democrat in the wake of Trump are all aboard the Trump Train, defending every policy of his without question. They spent college defending the Iraq War as totally justified, and I can't tell you how many times I heard the traditional conservative caricature about how poor people just didn't work hard enough and taxes should be lower to avoid penalizing the most talented people in society. I don't think that these people "aren't true Catholics", I just wish conservative Catholics would stop blowing smoke up my ass because of the abortion issue, or gay marriage, or whatever. The Democratic Party could reverse course on these issues tomorrow and I'd still have to hear the same bullshit about immigrants, poor people, urban blacks, and anyone else they think is ruining America.

The correlation between social and economic conservatism isn't all that surprising in light of facts like these:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GVSIRXhWYAAxzzp?format=png&name=small

A very large supermajority of six-precepts following Catholics who don't dissent from the doctrine of the Church voting republican is not the same thing as most Catholic republicans being six-precept following believers in every jot of Church doctrine.

The actual name for the prior group when identified in social surveys is 'conservative Catholics', and pollsters literally identify them in part by their beliefs about things like papal infallibility and transubstantiation. @100ProofTollBooth may not be literally correct, but his statement is almost assuredly close enough for government work.

There are requirements to come under the program which they entered via. I don’t think anyone seriously debates that on the merits they’d qualify for these programs. Instead, the whole point is to delay for almost a decade having the case tried on the merits so that by that point in time the pro immigrant can say “they’ve been here a decade — how cruel to cast them out.”

That is, it is all a procedural game whilst they are substantively illegal. Fuck then for playing that game and the NGOs who support it.

Biden is in an irregular marriage.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/01/27/some-questions-about-the-bidens-1977-catholic-wedding/

I’m not talking about Biden or Pelosi or other democrat leaders. There are many many serious Catholics who are anti Trump and also anti abortion. You can I can discuss whether they are mistaken to keep voting democrat but these people exist in large number.

I am saying that if this guy is hypothetically anti Trump pro immigrant healthcare and anti abortion:

  1. This describes a ton of serious involved Catholics. You are right that they are much less common in trad circles

  2. A reliably large proportion vote democrat. Sure once you start filtering for theological rigidity, they vote more and more a minority vote, but still exist.

  3. Voting pattern aside these folks are much more Blue Tribe than Red Tribe.

  4. This set of views probably describes the most left wing bishops in the US, including ones who are shakey on sex stuff and ones who are solid.

Again, ther is no evidence this guy is Catholic so I’m just playing pattern matching.

I agree that the last 20 years saw a move of the last of these Catholics to the GOP. Pro choice Democratic politicians were censured by the church itself which is a big step. In liberal European countries like Germany there are Catholic groups who have semi-openly broken with the Vatican on abortion but in the US the clergy tend to be more socially conservative.

But an example of the above would be like ACB who is a liberal except for abortion.

If they didn't have to worry about re-election there'd be a lot more "ACBs" in the House and Senate.

ACB as a 'liberal' is a bit of a stretch. She's probably better described as a moderate conservative on non-social issues.

I too have seen reports his list involved those targets. But, tellingly, the sources saying this didn't share the entire list. They just said it included those targets. It's yet unknown if he was targeting only Democrats, targeting specific people, or targeting many -- ultimately, the cops caught him too early, so he didn't get the chance to go through his entire list. We'll have to wait for the manifesto to release, if it ever does.

I'll admit I'm curious as to his motives. He's so... out of the expected range of random killers.

If the report is the same one I saw, it seems so odd to me.

Why does he have roommates when he also has a family with five children and a wife he's still married to? Why did he text his roommates that he "did something stupid" instead of his wife? Unless they're estranged.

Everything about this is bizarre. He somehow gained weight after losing the body armor and getting a cowboy hat. His wife worked for Tim Walz (Jenny Boelter). They also owned properties together.

Why was this well-off man with a family renting with a Papa John's pizza guy? Why would he text him?

My current thinking is the roommate is making it all up. As for the rest of it, dunno. Every emerging detail makes the story weirder.

Why was this well-off man with a family renting with a Papa John's pizza guy?

Sublease for a temporary business assignment? I know a few people with a house several hours from where they work who get an apartment - sleep in town on work nights, go home on weekends.

Maybe. Still seems weird he'd text the guy.

Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.

Maybe it's my inner partisam speaking, but if the attack is strongly red coded I'd expect the dems would be rubbing it in everyone's faces every chance they get.

I mean I think the silence is rather telling here. If he were a GOP/MAGA type, they likely wouldn’t be silent on motive. There’s a lot of people on the left who want MAGA to go stochastic terrorist on them. They fantasized about “MAGA instigators” infiltrating the No Kings protests, much as they fantasize about Trump declaring martial law and using the military against them. Is the political equivalent of a bored housewife with a Rape Fetish. She’s so bored an feels so unwanted that rape is an improvement.

they likely wouldn’t be silent on motive

Who is "they" supposed to be? The police who have possession of the manifesto? What makes it likely that a police precinct is carrying water for the dems by hiding the political affiliations of an assassin? Is the idea that Tim Walz, governor, is behind the scenes threatening to cut their budget if they dont play ball?

Homogenizing the motives of every possible leftist actor from journos to bored spinsters to protestors to the local PD does give the impression that somebody is fantasizing though, ill give you that.

Lots of hardcore dems could plausibly get their hands on the manifesto, and potentially leak it. The prosecution, detectives, city, police. They're all places that democrat operatives have influence and know people.

That one trans shooter of the Christian school never got their manifesto released for unclear reasons that seem plausibly political (trans person hated Christianity) and police played along

Audrey Hale’s “manifesto” has been released. It was never more than a rambling diary. The reason its release was delayed — which was hinted at by law enforcement at the time and has since been made explicit — is that it repeatedly refers to Hale’s personal relationship (and unrequited obsession) with a local public figure.

Why not? They've done it before. They explicitly went out of their way to hide the Nashville Shooter's manifesto, who was a self-claimed FtM tranny that shot up a Christian school, if you've forgotten.

Do you mean it wasn't released immediately, or ever?

(May 2025) https://newschannel9.com/news/local/fbi-releases-over-100-pages-of-writings-by-covenant-school-shooter-audrey-hale-journal-diary-release-mass-shooting-school-shooting-nashville-suicidal-mass-shooting-schools-gun-control-firearms-mental-health-tbi-document-pdf-google-trends

It means they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the release, including coming up with a novel invocation of copyright law and (when part of the manifesto was leaked anyway) threatening the newspaper editor with contempt charges.

Who is “they”? Best I can tell it was mostly the parents and school trying legal tricks (presumably to protect their reputation or something)? And the stated purpose feels at least facially plausible even if made in bad faith (that releasing shooter thoughts only makes them more famous and validates their approach as their writings are guaranteed notoriety) even if you disagree (as I do) and think there’s more to lose by a perception of secrecy. I mean, despite thinking this, it’s also true that media attention spawns copycats. I’ve never seen the copyright angle used but it also seems legally plausible.

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It could also be that his motives are non-ideological, or only tangentially mapped onto anything resembling a “Red vs. Blue” split. He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.

He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.

Like with Charles Guiteau shooting James Garfield?

Rarely do these things turn out to neatly fit anyone's narrative. I think this or something like it is very likely indeed.

Or he's one of those political oddballs who cannot be neatly categorized as "red-blue." A pro-life Democrat who hates Trump but who also has idiosyncratic reasons for hating particular Democrats? Not impossible.

That's certainly possible, but it's not the way I'd bet, given the current information.

He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.

The connections to Walz are so weak that it's basically misleading to just say without stating the context. As Fox 9 reports https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-lawmaker-shootings-suspect-id-ap

Boelter was appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2016, then reappointed by Gov. Tim Walz in 2019 as a private sector representative to the governor's workforce development council, with the term expiring in 2023. The Governor’s Office appoints thousands of people from all parties to these boards and commissions – the workforce development council has about 60 people on it. They are unpaid, external boards that the Minnesota Legislature creates. They are not appointments to a position in the governor’s cabinet.

I don't know Minnesota politics too well but it says right here in the original law (relevant at 2016 during the time of the appointment)

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/2014/cite/116L.665

In selecting the representatives of the council, the governor shall ensure that 50 percent of the members come from nominations provided by local workforce councils. Local education representatives shall come from nominations provided by local education to employment partnerships. The 31 members shall represent the following sectors

So high chance even Dayton had little connection besides basically rubber-stamping the recommendation from a local council, and then Walz just renewed it. Even then, you can't really expect and aren't vetting for random businessmen on a random workforce development council you're appointing them for to start shooting people.

I don't know to what extent Walz cared about his appointment or knew who he was, so I didn't theorize on it. It's possible he's just a rubber stamped crazy that slipped through the cracks or got radicalized in office.

I have a different take- there are so many reasons not to be violent in modern society because modern society has set it up so that being violent tends to end up with you being less likely to get what you want over the long run.

It is not hard to imagine a society where the elites are more violent than the lower orders- there have been quite a lot of them throughout history. But we live in the reverse. It's fairly plausible to me that for the very bottom rungs of society- the homeless, male(adult women in these communities are much better off) residents of the worst black ghettos, etc- violence is net positive on an individual level. But for everyone else? Violence decreases as you rise on the social totem pole for a reason and that reason is that people towards the top are better at avoiding maladaptive behavior. In polite society, the top four-fifths or so, willingness to resort to private violence is strongly correlated with being towards the bottom, starting with literal dogs.

I mean I don’t know that such a situation will continue forever, and I think our social trust is rapidly eroding. In part because we are fractured as a society into groups that have less desire to cooperate, and even less to trust that the others won’t defect first. A low social trust society cannot remain nonviolent for long.

I don't share that take. I've noticed a steady rise over the years in left-wing violence, and seen how it's correlated with a steady rise in the left getting their way on various matters of national significance. I look to history, where violence is both the cause of and solution to many problems. Violence is costly, enormously costly, if you don't perfectly get away with it -- but the rewards are high.

We have more freedom than ever.

Like hell we are. We are constantly surveilled and the frontier has been filled for well over a century. Regulations of all kinds are only ever increasing, never decreasing. I can't think of any way in which we are more free than the modal man of 1875. More wealth and safety and security, sure. More freedom? I don't see it.

I think one can argue that the modal man of 1875 was some farmer who spent his life at the mercy of his father and his local community, or some city factory worker who was at the mercy of his local political machine's boss. Also, they had actual conscription back then, the government could force you to join the army against your will (technically that's still true but in practice it's extremely extremely unlikely to actually happen). More freedom back then? I doubt it.

Assuming you're referring to an Anglosphere country, there was no draft in 1875(although there was one in France and Germany). The anglosphere adopted conscription en masse for the world wars and, while the US used it for the civil war, that was seen as an exception. Instead, anglosphere armies recruited the poorest in society by promising better conditions during long terms of service- and the barracks probably actually did have better living conditions than home for the poor until at least the fifties, if not even later.

Conceptualizations of freedom and what it entails varies significantly person to person, so I won't dispute your take. Absent freedom, my point's the same.

In no way is an overstatement, although in many ways I agree. To take the obvious one, sexual freedoms have clearly increased, not entirely to society’s benefit.

sexual freedoms

Slavery to lust and degeneracy is not freedom.

You want to attack freedom, fine, there’s plenty of illiberal thinkers and arguments you can draw on, including, especially, here. But have the honesty to call your enemy freedom, not slavery.

I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".

From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.

You're just parroting the progressive line that more choices equal more freedom. When those choices lead to societal decay, it’s not freedom, it’s chaos. Your 'objective' view is just moral relativism dressed up as enlightenment.

You're just parroting the progressive line that more choices equal more freedom.

Or literally 1984: “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.

No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".

Sexual freedom is not a real thing in the individualistic sense, because sex isn't really an individualistic activity. We should judge sexual freedom by whether society's norms more easily feed into what makes people happy in the long run, not by the theoretical freedom of activity.

It's unclear by that standard that western societies are sexually freer today or in 1875 or 1950 or whenever.

When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer? It seems they had fewer options as they were slaves to their addiction. They possibly have an additional choice, homeless addict living in a tent (this was an option before too), but far more choices are now unavailable to them, as we see how challenging it is to move on from homeless and drug abuse.

Did it make the larger society around them freer or do they too now have fewer places to be free of homesless addicts living in tents.

Individuals have alway had the 'freedom' to be lustful degenerates if they were willing to face the opprobrium that went with it.

When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer?

Yes. Some of them just used this extra freedom to make decisions that made them less free. But the decriminalization itself made them freer. They just didn't necessarily make good choices with that freedom. Part of what freedom is, is that it sometimes allows people to make decisions that make them less free in the long run. That does not mean that it is not freedom, though.

Since when has license being equivalent to freedom become "objective"?

Exactly. The conflation of license with liberty is the hallmark of a society that’s lost its moral compass. Freedom isn’t the absence of restraint; it’s the presence of virtue.

I think the word you’re looking for is not freedom but “agency”!

Mao Zedong was extremely agentic, but I wouldn't call him free. These are fairly distinct concepts.

You'd have more of a point if you said "self-actualization" but I'd argue that's far closer to the historical meaning of freedom than unrestrained whim.

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No, the presence of virtue is virtuousness. Freedom is something different.

"This is not liberty, this is license" has always been a tyrant's excuse.

That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?

Is it true? Whatever the answer it, it certainly doesn't seem "objective".

That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?

The tyrant is a tyrant because he's taking away your liberty, in this case by claiming it is not liberty at all, but "license" (which is liberty that he doesn't like).

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'Anything goes' has always been the rallying cry of those who want to tear down civilization. Tyrants and anarchists both love to twist language to suit their ends. Call it license or call it degeneracy, either way, it’s not freedom worth defending.

When one uses the word "freedom" in its most common, everyday meaning of "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", that's not twisting language, that's just using the most common, everyday meaning of the word. I would argue that it's actually more of a twisting of language to use the word "freedom" to mean something more philosophical, like you are doing. But in any case, this is just a semantic argument.

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Well, it is, actually. Some people just misunderstand "freedom" as an unalloyed good. Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say, which is why a lot of people like libertarianism in theory but find it's completely nonviable in practice, and anarchists are just profoundly unserious people.

Put another way, your argument would also be made by Muslims who claim that making women wear burkas actually gives them more freedom, since they are protected from the lustful gazes of men. (I have actually known Western progressive female converts to Islam who argued this, happy in their burkas, and ignoring the key word making.)

Getting back to @KMC's point, he's right in the sense that a man in 1875 could ride out into the frontier and build, explore, or taking another path, rob, rape and pillage, with much more impunity than today. That was certainly more "freedom" and some men fancy themselves born into the wrong age, but yes, freedom comes with tradeoffs. And wealth, safety, and security is very much a kind of freedom! Sure, a man starving in the wilds is more "free" than me in the sense he has no legal authorities "surveilling" him.

Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say

The "they" who say this are generally authoritarians, who sometimes write unintentional parodies of Bills of Rights in the form of paired statements of the form "You have the right to do X, you have the responsibility not to do X unless we say it's OK".

Yet freedoms come with responsibility.

No, they do not. One only says "freedom comes with reponsibility" when one wants to vitiate the freedom claimed. It's saying you have freedom, "but". (And nothing before the "but" matters)

Freedom comes with responsibility.

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freedom with responsibility?

It’s a nice sentiment, but it ignores the fact that most people can’t handle the responsibility. That’s why we have laws, traditions, and taboos. Without them, 'freedom' just becomes a euphemism for hedonism.

It's a sliding scale, as all things are.

If I have to choose between people having too much freedom to do things I disapprove of, or people being forbidden to do things you disapprove of, I choose freedom.

Whatever you call that option, having it compared to not having it is freedom.

By that logic, the freedom to self-destruct is still freedom. Sure, but it’s not something to celebrate. It’s a symptom of a society that’s lost its way. Options don’t make you free if they’re just different flavors of ruin.

Sure, but it’s not something to celebrate.

Whether or not a freedom should be celebrated is different from whether or not it is a freedom in the first place. The latter is the point that you are trying to deny.

There's freedom from and freedom to. If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.

The 'freedom' to indulge in degeneracy doesn’t just affect the individual, it poisons the well for everyone else. It’s like saying you’re free to pollute the air because it’s your right, never mind that it makes the atmosphere unbreathable for others.

I think it always makes more sense to describe freedom in specific contexts rather than try to define some kind of net, global, non-associated “freedom”. Freedom to breathe clean air without payment or restriction is a different freedom to, say, pollute the skies. These freedoms are often in conflict and it’s not clear that you can describe a ‘net freedom’ as if it were something numerical.

To choose a more grounded example, burning trash is a classic local conflict with no clear ‘more free’ option. One neighbor says it’s freedom to choose how to dispose of their own property on their own property. Another neighbor says it’s freedom to have clean air. Another says freedom is being able to throw loud parties whenever, but yet another says excessive noise infringes on their own freedom to do certain activities that might require quiet.

The solution is practical compromise, not arguing over which appeal to freedom is stronger.

If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.

I do not think that the ungendered version of the argument works. In high density areas (where your "sexual degeneracy" is more frequent), it does not matter if 99% of your generation do not qualify as a partner, the remaining 1% is still a decent-sized pool. If Jehova's witnesses can manage to find another JW to marry, then traditionalists should likewise be fine.

Now, I could be wrong and you could be lamenting how hard it is for 20 year old tradwives-to-be to find a virgin man who is making enough money to provide for a family, and how all the men have been "ruined" through either unmarried sex or porn.

Given traditionalist double standards, I think it is more likely that you are lamenting that there is a dearth of virgin women wanting to marry and start a family, and how all the 20 yo's want to go to college, will likely go through multiple boyfriends, perhaps suck a few cocks at parties, experiment with lesbianism or try anal sex, at which point you would consider them ruined.

As someone who himself gets laid less than I would likely have before the sexual revolution, let me say I have about zero sympathies.

All these arguments against the sexual liberation (mostly of women) could as well be made about the liberation of slaves in the US, which removed a lot of liberties previously enjoyed by the plantation owners. White families who had for generations enjoyed stable jobs as overseers were suddenly without employment. Today, a white guy can not hope to find blacks to work on his plantation for housing and basic food even if he promises not to whip or rape them. Instead, he is expected to pay them. The indignity!

I am always skeptical of claiming that we should not give one group the freedom to chose what to do with their lives because it will have downstream indirect effects which will harm other groups. (The exception is when the effects are obvious and heavily infringing that other group's freedoms. For example, legalizing anti-tank weapons would lead to a lot of people being blown up, or legalizing violent rape would unduly infringe on the liberties of the victims.)

We did not stop freeing the slaves because we were unsure on how this would affect the social order in the South or the price of tobacco. We went ahead and dealt with the indirect consequences as they appeared (badly, often).

Skepticism is healthy, but willful blindness to consequences is not. Every choice has ripple effects, and pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking. Society isn’t a collection of isolated individuals; it’s a web of interdependencies. Your slave analogy’s fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that unchecked lust screws us all in the end.

In what ways has modern society been screwed by unchecked lust?

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There's freedom from and freedom to.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I think that George Orwell was quite sympathetic to the idea of negative freedom actually, in spite of his socialist leanings.

In today’s world, degeneracy is liberation. It’s the same old doublespeak, just with a new coat of paint. Orwell would be proud, or horrified. Probably both.

I agree, but doesn't this logic follow through to literally every "freedom"? When someone exercises free speech to advocate for X, they deprive those opposed to it from living in a ~X society, etc.

That is how I view the notion of "freedoms" (i.e. incoherent because you can just switch framings to switch what is/is not a freedom) - but it seems that some right-wingers like you and @AvocadoPanic think freedoms make sense in general (and sexual degeneracy in particular just doesn't count)

Could you give an example of an act of moral degeneracy that would still count as freedom? (Otherwise, I think we should just use the word degeneracy, since that is less ambiguous than "freedom")

The freedom to speak your mind, even if it’s offensive. Just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. Freedom without discernment is just noise. Degeneracy’s a better word when people treat liberty like a free-for-all buffet.

I think honestly we talk about politics as identity and warfare, in ways that paint the other as an enemy, talk about the stakes as if they’re of earthshaking importance. And on top of that, everything is political, or if not by nature political, it will be used as a vehicle for political messaging.

This creates a supersaturated solution of political angst. Theres all this pent up emotion about things people are told are super important, that their enemies are working to destroy. Honestly, expect this to get much much worse because people are encouraged to see their problems in political light with those guys over there are making your life worse.

Near term, I think we need to actually disengage. Consume less news, stop following political opinion-makers and listening to political commentary. Go get a real hobby or three. Find a non political group of people — and in a space that explicitly doesn’t allow political commentary or discussion. If we go back to that, I think we’ll muddle through with a minimum of actual deaths. If everyone leans in and gets more engaged and more attached to causes, you can expect more shooting.

I genuinely think the source for this strife is that people are self sorting too much. People naturally tend to moderate when exposed to other perspectives. It’s just the exposure is too skewed towards social media and online/TV personalities and too little towards everyday fellow humans. Also why travel as a source for eliminating prejudice has reversed - too little actual genuine interpersonal contact. People will never learn how to talk about politics without rage unless they attempt it (and occasionally fail). It’s not much different than other social skills in that way.

I mean yes, I totally agree. But I notice that really the first bump of hyper-partisan politics seems to have started with the rise of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle. Before that, being a political junkie was hard work. You got an hour a day (local half hour and National half hour) of television news, a newspaper in the morning, and that was about it. Political talk radio was in its infancy, as was internet news. So if you wanted to closely follow politics, you’d have to buy in-depth news magazines and that had a time and money cost to it. Which made becoming too radical on either side of the equation a lot of work. You just couldn’t marinate in the stuff going on in Congress or what this or that political figure said.

I find, for myself, the more news I consume, the more political opinions mattered to me. Up to a point, awareness is good, and to the degree that an issue is actually important, you should be aware of it. But when news consumes you, you end up being pushed into radical thinking and anger and all the rest of it. It’s not a healthy way to live life. And I think slowing down and just doing much less thinking about politics is good for not just individuals but society in general. Most of the stuff people get mad about wouldn’t have made the news at all in 1982. What would you have heard about No Kings had it happened in 1982? You’d see a three minute story, maybe some random person saying something about “Trump isn’t a King”. You’d see another story about the military parades, maybe a couple of short “it’s good for the soldiers” statements by the brass, a brief clip of Trump clapping along to music or something. That would be it, on to other things. Maybe Iran and Israel get two minutes, as does Ukraine, and the shootings and manhunt in Minnesota. Weather and Sports. Not enough to feed on or radicalize on.

Awareness might inflame the tensions, to the extent you can't fight an enemy if you don't know he's there, but I don't believe the problems are people being "told" anything. The problems are genuine and irreconcilable differences in terminal values and mutually alien axioms. Once, those differences didn't exist or weren't known, so we muddled along, but there's shared knowledge now. We do, in fact, know what our fellows think, what they want, and what they vote for.

The Fruit of Knowledge has been eaten. We cannot now lose our awareness of good and evil.

I don’t think my point is to be “unaware”. My point is to turn down your level of exposure to the toxoplasma of outrage — and just as import, if you want some degree of normalcy— make it a social norm in your non-political spaces that we do not talk about politics here in places where the purpose of the group or activity is not political.

I don’t think our differences are completely irreconcilable. If you talk about big picture end goals, most people want the same things. Prosperity, health, safety, relative freedom, and an educated populace. If you gave that list of goals to anyone from communists to libertarians, from old school democrats to NRx bros, I think they’d all agree on those things as end goals. We actually have two problems: too much political news, and too many people who have made politics their personality. Neither of those have anything to do with solving the problems that exist in policy. In fact they prevent solutions as everyone is convinced the other guys are evil. And that thus compromise is evil. And here we are.

Of course if you reduce life to its broadest and least specific terms, we all want Good Things and don't want Bad Things. The problem is that there's no such thing as prosperity, or health, or safety, or relative freedom, or an educated populace. These aren't objective measures, they're vibes and negotiations, and the negotiations have been breaking down for decades.

Is it healthy or unhealthy to support trans rights?

Is it safe or unsafe to tolerate drugged-out homeless on the streets and public transit?

Can our nation be prosperous without disarming its citizens? Can it be safe?

You can't balance civilization on platitudes.

The question that befalls those that are cursed with this knowledge is then, what to do about it?

Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?

Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?

Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.

On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.

This was apparently blue-on-blue though. Can't avoid that by sorting, unless the sort becomes fractal.

Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.

Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.

I'll just link to the comment I made on @Dirty_DemSoc 's "WHY BOTHER" post. Since its relevant to the protests AND the assassinations.

Quote:

And yet we know that democratic elections don't completely avert violence, or else Mexico's most recent election wouldn't have been so damn bloody. Turns out that violence is also a way to influence outcomes in a democracy, when you don't expect the votes to go your way 'organically.' So there's a bit of a feedback loop.

Right now we're in a phase where a minority faction is fomenting chaos for want of being able to achieve their goals via electoral process.

In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.

Of course the basic motives will be more complex than that, but the goal of having mass protests is ALSO to demonstrate "we are numerous, we are organized, and we could turn violent if things don't change in our favor!"

But we had a spate of lefty-coded assassination/killing attempts going back at least to Trump's earshot, and THAT trend is a bit scarier because the people of his tribe either ignore it (tacitly approving, I'd say), line up in support like with Luigi, or actually denounce it and try to lower the temperature and root out the radicals among them who are willing to get froggy.

Anything other than the last option will mean MORE attempts going forward. I'm waiting with a TON of consternation for the first FPV drone-based assassination that succeeds.

PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.

I mean that’s how power works. If you read ancient history really up until the late 19th century, violence was very much a part of the politics of the era. I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less. If that changes, or the elites leading the major factions believe that they will be disempowered for a long period of time, I think you’ll see a return to older and less civilized versions of politics in which shooting a political enemy is a viable way to force your way to a seat at the table.

Power games between the elite are how power is distributed in any society. If they can’t get there by peace, we’ll have wars.

I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less

That’s… a pretty big change actually. And fairly fundamental. It’s why at least to SOME extent Dems were justified in being a little freaked out by the noises Trump was making about elections. Because trust that your opponent will be forced to give you another chance to win is foundational to democracy as currently practiced.

And on the other side, why “The Emerging Demographic Majority” caused such a storm when it was published.

How far left are we drawing the line to get to this "minority faction"? If mainstream Dems, then I would argue that it is quite clearly not a minority and essentially equivalent with Republicans as the dominant political force. Presidential elections are won by a few percentage points at the widest margin, for example.

The democrats lost the popular vote for president and pretty clearly don't have the general support of the populace.

Trump had a bigger popular margin than in 2016, but my point is that it was still quite narrow, and this is basically true of all post-Clinton elections. For Dems or Reps to claim the other side to be a minority faction rather than one of two more or less evenly matched contenders seems wrong, and this was true four years ago too.

I think the red states are growing faster than blue the blue states, which given how close elections have been and how often the results follow the EC over the popular vote, that could be huge.

In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.

It's worth noting that nobody believes this though- I think my hunting club could wipe the floor with the entirety of antifa in an afternoon in an actual take-the-gloves-off civil unrest scenario, and the median American probably agrees with me. And that's leaving aside that my hunting club is not the entirety of red assets in a serious civil unrest scenario.

The modal outcome of some blue tribe mass-unrest enabled auspicious incident is 'the national guard just kills them all because it doesn't actually want to take orders from blue state governments trying to run interference'. I think both blue and red Americans are aware of this.

But your hunting club has norms, not to mention careers and families that they would potentially sacrifice if they had to go hot.

I think the demonstrated WILLINGNESS to start killing is the factor we're seeing here.

Not clear that your hunting club would actually start killing unless REALLY pushed.

Sure, I don’t think my hunting club would be a factor in sustained civil unrest. But, like, 3%er groups and the like totally would.

PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.

I agree, but let us also remember to pin some blame on Trump for doing the ICE raids as flamboyantly as possible.

Obama deported 410,000 people in 2012 and managed to avoid cameras far better.

I am convinced Trump wants liberals to overreact because it's the best campaign ad and the mobs are happy to take the bait.

Turning people away at the border might count as a deportataion in the stats, but it's not going to undo the 10 million illegals that Mayorkas let in.

Obama didn't do much for removing people in the interior of the country, and that's what I want to see. We're not going to get to the 50 million depirtataions we need, but I applaud the honest effort.

Not all deportations are the same. Turning someone back around the border counts as a deportation but is of a different kind.

Only Nixon could go to China and only Obama could do kids in cages without the left losing their shit.

Yes, black bag the illegals in the dead of night and try to suppress news coverage of the "dissappearances."

Quiet, stealthy operation.

Do you believe the left would sit quietly by for such tactics?

There's a huge gulf between that and what Trump is doing currently. Trump is making these raids as much a spectacle as possible.

Did we forget the Studio Ghibli rendition of the crying handcuffed deportee tweeted by the White House? What about videos captioned "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight"?

He even has fucking Dr Phil accompanying raids now.

Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Trump is signaling his political loyalties to those who elected him. The more publicized and controversial means that these are more costly signals. This means that his supporters will believe that his efforts are sincere.

And I'm suggesting that it wouldn't really matter.

The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.

If Trump didn't give them am impetus, I think they'd find one.

It's not particularly surprising for Trump to run on a mass deportation platform... then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.

The riots in 2020 were generated by preexisting real(if not exactly grounded in reality) grievances the black community- yes all of it- had with contemporary American governance. That's not the case for the 2025 protests.

The reason he's making a big deal of it is because he can't possibly hit the numbers we need. Best to seem to be effective if you can't actually accomplish everything you've promised.

The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.

This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself. There were anti-police protests in 2014 under Obama as well. You can't attribute these things to a single police murder.

then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.

This is not making a big deal out of enforcement. It is ostentatious cruelty (one might even say the cruelty is the point :v).

You've also got things like ICE going after valid visa holders, calling immigrants "invaders", and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.

The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was not a "deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself".

The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was the widespread belief among Progressives that police kill large numbers of innocent Black men.

This belief was explicitly false, but became widespread among Progressives specifically because a large percentage of Journalists spent many years collaborating together to bias their reporting in a way calculated to create this impression, or in the parlance, "raise awareness". Widespread criticism of this practice was uniformly ignored.

And of course, the direct result of the riots was many thousands of additional Black people murdered by overwhelmingly Black criminals, as law enforcement broke down and the criminals ran rampant. This was the easily-predictable result of the riots, and it was in fact predicted in advance, by myself and many others. I observe that Blues, having been most vociferous in their support of the Black Lives Matter campaign when it was sparking riots based on a fictitious epidemic of Black murder, now studiously deploy the squid ink when the topic of the factual consequences of that campaign is raised. "Black Lives Matter" was a slogan to them, not anything resembling a principle.

calling immigrants "invaders"

The term seems appropriate.

and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.

Despite what this poster and the average LA resident might think, Red Tribers are only de facto second-class citizens in Blue enclaves, not de jure. According to the actual laws in the actual law books, they are still entitled to the protections afforded by the law, and to having the laws enforced on those who break them.

So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?

Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"

So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?

The competing interests and preferences of nativists, anti-nativists, employers, consumers, etc... combined with a deadlocked political system that effectively leaves immigration policy up to the caprices of executive discretion.

Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"

What is that supposed to mean? Illegal immigrants can't vote, so the "importing voters" theory doesn't hold up so well, and their mere existence alienates the xenophobe vote, so it's hard to call it a winning electoral strategy. Even if you think they're wrong, you should probably take immigration advocates at their word when they offer humanitarian and economic justifications for supporting immigration.

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Yes. Some people believe the US is infinitely wealthy and we can afford to take in all of the downtrodden of the world fleeing poverty and oppression and the only reason you could be against this is because you're racist.

It does not compute that this could bankrupt the entitlements systems they are so fond of that are mostly paid out of high earner taxes. Or they believe money is magic and the classists are causing fake scarcity or whatever.

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I agree he has the odds stacked against him but I still think it adds nothing but combustibility to (e.g.) invite Dr Phil along on raids.

And I think he benefits from trolling the liberals so hard they start engaging in political violence.

I don't think there's a way for Trump to do ICE raids that is not responded to as if it were a maximally offensive, existential threat by his political opposites.

You think there's no way?

https://www.themotte.org/post/2154/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/335942?context=8#context

Correct. I think even the most objectively mild form of mass deportations would involve crying children, separated families, and coordinated meanness via law enforcement. I think, further, it would be responded to as a humanitarian crisis and proof of Trump's fascist intent. I believe this because this is how everything Trump does is treated by his opposition. With that in mind, he shouldn't worry about the negative reactions at all. He should -- and did -- use it to rally his supporters and pump them up.

Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.

One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.

Another is that Washington’s ED: Minnesota's /ED state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.

Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.

Another is that Washington’s state Senate is very close.

No, not particularly. You linked to Minnesota, but said Washington. WA Dems have 30/49 in the Senate.

Ah, thanks. This event happened in Minnesota, and the victims were Minnesota State Senators. Not sure how I goofed that up after linking to the Minnesota senate.

b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though.

I mean, “Vance Luther Boelter” is absolutely not a common name. No component of the name is remotely common; I can’t comment on the probability of this guy being wrongly accused/apprehended, but the odds of him getting mixed up with another individual with the same name are vanishingly low.

I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.

Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.

Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.

I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.

All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.

The success of this fellow and the Luigi fellow re-enforced my long standing belief that the primary reason we don't live in a world rife with terrorism and crime is because terrorists and criminals are almost exclusively stupid. Even the ones doing "complex financial crimes" (as categorized by prosecuting attorneys) are typically dummies stealing social security numbers from the people at the nursing home they work at, or bilking medicaid "on behalf of" the people living at the nursing home they work at.

If more smart people become motivated to do crime, we are screwed. Not only with the trains, planes, and other targets be successfully destroyed, we wont even catch them.

I think that getting away with assassination doesn't just require smarts (and it requires plenty of that in our heavily surveilled world where there are cameras all over the place), it also requires a lot of coolness of nerve so that you don't make simple, stupid mistakes in the middle of the act, in the throes of overwhelming fear, adrenaline and other kinds of emotions. I think that there are very very few people in the world who not only have the smarts to get away with an assassination of a high-value target, but also have the sort of emotional coolness where they can actually apply their intelligence to the situation while they are doing it, instead of having 90% of their smarts wiped away in the moment by raw adrenaline while trying to pull off the act, and/or just stumbling into the sort of friction that always happens when trying to implement a plan in real life as opposed to in theory or daydreams ("no plan survives contact with the enemy"). Dostoevsky wrote a great description of how this works in Crime and Punishment.

It boggles the mind that Luigi didn't have a pre-arranged Airbnb in NJ he could have fled to, booked with a fake name, and holed up for a month or two, surviving exclusively off of DoorDash.

That would have done nothing for him. The key flaw in his plan was his inability to anonymously exit the heavily videotaped area that is Manhattan.

The key flaw in his plan was his inability to anonymously exit the heavily videotaped area that is Manhattan.

Eh, if he'd ditched the compromising stuff (like the gun) at some point he probably could have brazened it out.

Maybe at trial that helps you get to reasonable doubt, but given the video evidence there was no way he wasn't getting arrested and the case with just the video is strong enough to indict (indeed few are not). Its not a slam dunk case you would want to prosecute without the gun on his person, but you can still ethically put it on.

Eh, if he'd ditched the compromising stuff (like the gun) at some point he probably could have brazened it out.

How?

Not sure how much that would have helped. Eventually, CCTV footage would either find him leaving Central Park and heading out of the city, in which case his choice of destination wouldn’t really matter—indeed, a psueodonymously-booked Airbnb would look extra sus. Or it wouldn’t, in which case he could go basically anywhere, even home, so long as he had a reasonable explanation for his absence. Maybe a weekend Airbnb booking would help establish an alibi, but then it’s better for it to be in his own name.

If I were him, I would have immediately destroyed the gun and tossed it into a large body of water—you could even do this while still in Central Park! I would also have brought a change of clothes and found a hiding spot in the park in which to lay low overnight, perhaps 24 hours or even longer, to throw off CCTV-based detection.

Uh, in Minecraft, of course.

I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here.

I agree. I wouldn't say we have a political violence problem yet. But I do believe we're seeing a rise in political violence, both in actual perpetration and in rhetorical support from the masses. This is what I'd imagine the period before the American Troubles would look like. I'm not wary of the situation right now.. just worried about the direction it's trending.

I also suspect it's going to become easier to get away with this as it continues. In normal contexts, you pretty much have to be a wacky fucko to risk your entire life on a mad crusade to kill a famous person - especially since it's unlikely, even if you kill them, to have a meaningful change on the system as a whole. So killers and would-be John Wicks have primarily drawn themselves from a host of impulsive, low capital, and frequently mentally unwell people.

But if it's normalized? As in, if it starts being done by normal but pissed off people? That changes it. I'm not inclined to murder, but I'm reasonably sure it's actually very easy to do it, provided you're careful and adequately random in your targeting. And I'm not an especially bright or competent man. Get someone motivated, trained, someone ready..

Well. Like I said, it's the trending line that worries me, not the current status quo.

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

I call it "politics in a multi-party democracy" or "rule of law"

The polarization in actual multiparty systems is significantly less because there is no obvious ”the other side” when the constituent parties of the sides change depending on the question and which parties are in the government at the time.

Yes, but even the multiparty democracies in the west are currently devolving into a dysfunctional establishment vs non-establishment two sides conflict.

the modal reality "politics in a multi-party democracy" and "rule of law" are meant to evoke is one where hard limits on the scope and scale of political conflict exist and are respected, and where law is capable of settling conflicts. That is not the world we are living in.

That's not how I remember most of my life in such a state. And I lived through the blessed 90s which I'm told were the apotheosis of such sentiment.

And yet in retrospect, all I can see of that period is a more covert form of what you describe. The mask used to be better, but all of it was just attempts to help friends and hurt enemies in whichever way the law allows or at least tolerates.

What I'll concede is that people had more faith in the power of debate then, but that's only because the underhanded tactics have proven themselves to work better to everyone now.

You saw 'proven' as if anything has settled, as opposed to there being regular ebbs and flows of various forms of underhanded tactics and political violence mixed in amongst other strategies. Any given tactic, underhanded or not, has diminishing returns.

It's not exactly hard to find evidence even in US history of when political violence was part of the public confrontations of the day. Your memory and/or awareness may be shaped by institutional efforts to downplay the existence- there is a reason that the American self-history of the civil rights movement hyper-focuses on peaceful protestor leaders like MLK while diminishing / downplaying / ommitting violent actors- but pick a 25 year period, and it's not exactly hard to find acts of terrorism mixed with general unrest or political controversy movements.

A lot of these are ignored / people are unaware of for a variety of reasons, including self-interest of partisans to downplay/disassociate themselves with ideological cousins or ancestors, but among the reasons is that movements that tried to capitalize on them often hit their limits and failed.

+1 to that post. I remember it, and most of what you write. The sides are getting better at hurting the outgroup and minimizing trouble.

We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.

Just wait to see what AI does here, when at best jobs really start getting replaced with UBI.

This is generally my argument against AI art. I’m not moved by the “look at the abundance! Look at what is now possible and accessible at scale!” Genre of argument, like the ones made a few threads down. Because exactly I don’t think they are net positive for any sense of flourishing. It’s a hedonic treadmill. Art thrives under constraint, and the human spirit works similarly.

I'm not worried about AI art, myself. Those with a transcendent message to share will still be around. Everyone else gets to make fun pictures, or characters, etc.

Ok but this is a wholly generalizable dismissal of the ops observation about material malaise within a society of abundance. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily that it’s wrong. But I think those who recognize the ops observation should consider AI abundance making it worse.

Sure there will still be transcendent art. Just like now there’s plenty of meaningful and spiritually fulfilling lives and communities within the culture. I myself have the latter in spades.

But it can be both true that the potential for any individual or subgroup remains and can be found, while the broader culture deteriorates and the ratio worsens

The Reign of Quantity cannot be solved by the destruction of its means. If that were the case, Luddism and its successors would have succeeded.

We must ride the tiger. There is no other way.

Transcendance will have to find other ways to make itself known to us than the superficial messages we are used to.

I am the op. I don't think the problems with our spirituality are from AI art.

I know. I am saying then the connection you are making to abundance and the cultural malaise makes less sense. AI (not art specifically or even meaningfully. That was not meant to be causal, just exemplar) will increase the meaning deficit as it removes purpose for a lot of people.

I see, there's a misunderstanding in my pairing of abundance with malaise -- I was not meaning to suggest the abundance caused it, but rather, I was contrasting the fact we have abundance with the fact we still have greater malaise, because our malaise is for non-material concerns such that abundance cannot help.

I personally adore abundance. It's great. I would not chalk our malaise up to it. I can readily imagine a prosperous society that has abundance and spiritual richness.

Note: top-level post about breaking event. Basically just a summary of what happened, but with the poster's own thoughts about it. Not a huge effortpost, no brilliantly original ideas. Just some musings on current events and enough to hang a discussion on.

It's not hard, folks. We don't ask for more than this.

@ControlsFreak: Please take note. Someone managed to report on a current event without spending hours researching the sources or getting a warning/ban for a low effort comment.

Affirming the consequent is quite out of fashion.

Beware Trivial Inconveniences

I am happy to trivially inconvenience people who would otherwise lower the quality of conversation. That's the point.

Aw, thanks. Yeah, I gotta say, it always struck me that people really dramatize the requirements for a top post. If I can do it, anyone can.


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