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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Even if the population of Iran has little-to-no bearing on whether military intervention is wise, it still has major implications on a million other relevant variables that accompany military intervention, like the death toll, the economic impact, the refugees, the counter attack,

These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military. The actual strategic planners and number-crunchers can figure out how many faceless Iranians need to die -- but no number will justify letting Iran go nuclear.

I feel like I'm talking to someone who confidently declares that he doesn't care about prices when selecting a restaurant, and then I point out that prices will impact the cost of going to the restaurant and prices are strong indicators of food quality and decorum and may indicate how you should dress when going to the restaurant, etc., but the guy just keep saying, "I don't care, I have a lot of money, so no matter how expensive a restaurant is, I can afford it."

Yes, this is accurate. None of the things you think matter I think matter. I can go to the restaurant dressed however I please, and I don't care if the meal is especially tasty or not. I just want to get some food.

Or, rather, not get the food. In this case, I don't want to extract anything from Iran.

These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military.

Doing another Ceteris Paribus, I would much rather my elected officials understood the scope/scale of the military conflict they are pre-commiting the military people to executing on.

For a more tangible point, every missile fired at Iran, and every defensive interceptor used to protect American assets against Iran, cannot be used for a war against China. The bigger Iran is, the more of those you will need. T

here is a serious opportunity cost to committing to a war, especially when you are in a cold war with a country that is expanding its military faster than you.

Maybe you think it's more important to smash Iran than be maximally prepared against China, in which case fair enough.

But to confidently say "I don't care if the people in charge of deciding to start a war don't understand basic facts about the scope and scale of the war they're committing us to" I think you should have much higher standards for your elected officials.

All fair concerns for you to have, just not ones I share. I genuinely don't think it matters at all if Ted Cruz knows the population of Iran, because its population isn't one of the relevant metrics for our decisions.

I guess what I'm trying to understand about your view is why knowing the scale doesn't matter.

Bigger country = need more bombs = less bombs to deter China. Why isn't that important to understand?

I guess you can respond by saying "well we should simply make more bombs", which is correct, but the political party who is more willing to make bombs is currently in power and they're not exactly going hard on increasing defense production (happy to be proven wrong here, I would like USA to be stronger vs China than it is).

If Ted Cruz overplays America's hand due to ignorance, we all suffer

How do you imagine us suffering? What harm are you imagining China inflicting on us if we use too many bunker busters in Iran? China will never harm the US mainland, because mainland threats against nuclear powers don't happen. Perhaps, if we ran out of resources for awhile, we wouldn't be able to protect Taiwan. But, really, Taiwan belongs to China as it is -- same as Cuba is ours. We shouldn't really be protecting them anyway, we should be building our own domestic chip manufactories.

Collapse of the current global trade/finance system that massively benefits America would cause harm.

Our lives are subsidized in many many ways by this system.

Perhaps you think the current system has made Americans lazy and complacent consumers of trinkets (not wrong), but the violent end to the system will still cause a lot of harm to the people around to experience it.

Also yeah, losing the chip fabs (and the rare earth metals, and the pharmaceutical precursors, and the machine tools, and innumerable other inputs) would be devastating to scientific and economic progress. All those things could be onshored eventually, but that process would be unfathomably painful (and longgggg).

Also losing the ability to sell stuff to a massive fraction of the world's population

I don't think China's going to collapse global trade if we bomb Iran too much. They're rather reliant on it, too, you see.

Hypothesized chain of causality:

America expends large numbers of munitions on Iran > this lowers China's risk of making a play for Taiwan over the next ~5 (10?) years > China makes a move for Taiwan > both juggernauts slug it out > during the conflict, global trade collapses > depending on who wins the conflict (or if it even ends, it might just turn into a stalemate with occasional explosions), global trade potentially never recovers, and the world bifurcates a lot > we all are worse off as a result

In your worldview, am I to understand that the reason China doesn't start World War 3 is because it fears America will bomb Taiwan into oblivion, and thus, if at any point we seem like we can't glass the entire place, they will invade?

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