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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.

Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.

The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.

It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.

I hesitate to be the cold calculating math guy but.... no wait, I can't help myself, I am that guy: 80 people isn't actually that many. I mean, obviously every death is a tragedy for themselves and the people who knew them. But when you zoom out to the perspective of a country of 300 million people, it's tiny.

80 deaths * 80 QALYS lost * 365 * 24 * 60 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes). That is, on average preventing a catastrophe of this magnitude is worth 11 minutes of life averaged over everybody in the country. If your proposed solutions of "don't let kids be kids anymore", "take time doing flood preparedness drills" and "spend lots of money damming every river everywhere" costs more than 11 minutes per person in terms of actual time and lessened enjoyment and life lived, then it won't be worth it. (though if you can get costs lower than that it is worth it).

Google says annual flood deaths in the U.S. are ~125, so ballpark this number is approximately right, you'd have to prevent this many deaths at that cost ratio consistently every year (and you'd actually have to reduce it by that much, across the entire country, not just Summer Camps).

I think we should let kids be kids, and we should sometimes consider the inherent risks acceptable. People die, it's a thing that happens. And it's bad that it happens, but if we don't have magic finger snapping powers that make it not happen for free, then we have to consider the costs and tradeoffs. And the thing nobody wants to admit is that, mathematically, there MUST be a point where the costs are no longer worth it. You can make arguments about where that point is, but the argument has to start with the assumption that there is such a point.

People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.

People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead

I'll trade safety seminars 1:1 for shortened lifespan any day of the week.

Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.

Note my trade is not at par for QALYs, it's at par for unadjusted LYs.

Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.

Your math seems to assume they would only have lived one more year each. (If I understood it right, and if I didn't, it might be because most of the symbols seem to be missing...) Many were kids with their whole life ahead of them. It's 11 minutes per year they would have lived on average, plus other considerations of the sort self_made_human pointed out.

His math is right:

"80 deaths 80 QALYS lost 365 2460 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes)"

80 deaths * 80 QALYS (generous, statistically prob. more like 60-70) lost * 365 * 24 * 60 / 330,000,000 => 10.19 (rounds up to 11 minutes)

Whether the population of the US is the right denominator is potentially debatable, but is not a priori crazy.

If you want to do things on a flood plain, surely you should be prepared for a flood. Better yet, manage the water so it won't flood. Flooding isn't akin to 'oh no this playground is too exciting, little Timmy might bruise himself, better make it as dull as possible' safetyism, it's a serious issue that destroys a great deal of property along with killing people.

I also submit that Los Angeles shouldn't have been burning down this year either. The US is supposed to be rich and this part of LA doubly so. Rich people aren't supposed to have their houses burn down. Clear away the flammable shrubs and have some water in tanks so it doesn't just run dry and people are running around tossing oat milk onto fires, as in one memorable case. LA couldn't be bothered to properly prepare for fires in a fire-prone area, couldn't be bothered to clear out vegetation, couldn't be bothered to pass the marshmallow test and paid the price.

I don't see why it's not cost-efficient to take these measures for a rich country. What else was the money going to be spent on, boomer welfare, fake jobs in medicine?

Clear away the flammable shrubs

Ironically, my understanding from reading on the internet is that this is actually the problem. They DO clear away flammable stuff, at least the small stuff that's feasible to clear, which means regular small fires don't happen and so larger flammable stuff accumulates and accumulates so when a fire does break out it's super crazy bad. While if they allowed small fires to happen and eat whatever has accumulated then it would be more manageable.

AFAIK it applies in forests, not urban areas

Yeah I'm pretty sure he's talking about the shrubs around people's houses -- prophylactic burning is probably not a great control mechanism there...

As Eliezer Yudowsky once said, “That which can be destroyed by fire, should be.”

Rich countries tend to suffer from Cost Disease and overregulation which stops a lot of things that ought to be easy to do from happening.

I agree that after you get this many wildfires, there should be incentives to throw money at the problem until it stops. But if people are willing to throw money without limit, someone will be willing to soak all those funds up and deliver as little as possible.

While I certainly endorse the principle, shouldn't the figures be much higher because the relevant population are people who even have to seriously consider the risk of drowning due to a flood? The risk of being attacked by a shark per capita is pretty low, but most people don't live next to an ocean.

I think rich countries shouldn't be building houses and infrastructure in flood plains without damming or proper measures to control the water. It's not impossible. The Netherlands has most of its economic activity below sea level, they eroded the North Sea.

There are big floods all the time in Britain and Australia that wreck people's houses. There ought to be a more aggressive stance taken towards the weather, bring it under control one way or another.

@RandomRanger @faceh

The real turning point will be when insurance companies stop covering those areas. Flood insurance in the Texas gulf coast already has to be subsidized by the state government because it’s just not profitable anymore.

Its kinda funny (not in the 'haha' way) that government and citizens alike ignore this market signal of "IF YOU BUILD HERE, YOUR HOUSE WILL LIKELY BE DESTROYED, (AND YOU MAY DIE) ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE?

That said, I also note that we just build things way more densely than ever before, in terms of how much expensive infrastructure we pack into each acre in some places.

I sincerely assume that there is no chance that Insurance Cos. and their underwriters can stay solvent if a serious earthquake hits the Los Angeles area, or a Cat 5. Hurricane rips through Miami.

If the insurance was charged at the actual market rate, I would also guess that many places would only be inhabited by the uberrich who can self-insure, or by the poorer folks who go without insurance, build cheap, and don't quite understand the risk they're assuming.

I live in Coastal Florida so I've seen a mix of both happening.

has to be subsidized by the state government because it’s just not profitable anymore.

AKA: charging what it costs would be unacceptable. I'm sure there's some price where it makes sense to offer flood insurance in a floodplain, but the government decided that people should pay less than that.

At least it isn't a price control forcing the insurance companies take an (expected) loss on every policy.

Yeah, a straight subsidy is better then whatever price controls CA keeps flirting with. There's a real risk that of breaking the property insurance market with those sorts of moves.

No, we should, but it shouldn't include camps for children. Places like New Orleans should have buildings, they should be basically shanty-port towns for workers. Mostly single men. And they should get risk wages like high wire guys do, and probably should have a union that negotiates life insurance.

But children certainly shouldn't be living in floodplains.

Most places in the US do tightly regulate floodplain development. Most places like these summer camps, some of which are 100 years old, are grandfathered in so it's left to local government, communities, and operators to determine what they need to do to ensure adequate safety.

End of day you really can't account for every variable, or conditions that are far outside the 'expected' normal range.

Weather in particular is a chaotic system. Some days the conditions just happen to coincide to make things more severe than expected.

Remember just about a month ago a Swiss village got swept away by an avalanche. What are we to do about this risk? Engineer every mountain to be stable?

Or Volcanic eruptions. We don't HAVE an engineering solution to those!

The arguably better solution in many cases is to build the houses and infrastructure as cheaply as can reasonably be done so they can be more easily rebuilt, and spend the extra money on early warning and evacuation efforts.

I want my buildings on giant-fuck-off concrete/steel stilts engineered so hard that the wrath of god can't touch em.

IRC § R306 (Flood-Resistant Construction):

Buildings and structures in non-coastal flood-hazard areas [i. e., with waves < 1.5 ft] shall have the lowest floors elevated to or above the base [100-year] flood elevation plus 1 foot.

Buildings and structures erected within coastal flood-hazard areas [with waves ∈ [1.5 ft, 3 ft]] and coastal high-hazard areas [with waves > 3 ft] shall be elevated so that the bottom of the lowest horizontal structural members supporting the lowest floor, with the exception of piling, pile caps, columns, grade beams, and bracing, is elevated to or above the base flood elevation plus 1 foot.

Buildings and structures erected within coastal flood-hazard areas and coastal high-hazard areas shall be supported on pilings or columns.

And if you're prepared to pay for that, you can!

That's about the reality if you're buying waterfront property on the coastline of Florida.

Naturally, only really wealthy people can buy such property.

Mastering chaotic systems is the whole point of the game. That's what civilization is for, managing irrigation and controlling rivers is one of the oldest duties of government. We should also be working harder on controlling the weather. Weather is very complex but new AI methods are useful here, plus more sensors would be useful.

Building infrastructure to be replaceable and developing early warning systems is good but controlling the system entirely is better. Past a certain level of development, when human activity alters the whole climate system, we have to get more serious about controlling the environment rather than simply inhabiting it.

Imagine a man living in a huge mansion. His presence reshapes it slowly but surely as he builds up endless empty beer cans, bags full of garbage are overflowing. Rats and pests are building up. There are mysterious stains on the walls. And the mansion isn't so great in the first place, there are floorboards that mustn't be stood on, broken windows that let in the cold air.

He can either minimize his presence (not buy all these beer cans, eat 100% of his food so there's minimal waste, not tread where it's dangerous) or he can grow up and clear out all the garbage, renovate to fix up this place. Even though renovations are expensive, exhausting and you never know what kind of unexpected costs will emerge, it's still the right decision.

Weather is very complex but new AI methods are useful here, plus more sensors would be useful.

That's the, I dunno, "scary" part.

Quelling weather in one place might make it harsher somewhere else. How do you dissipate the energy of this system without it bursting out all at once somewhere?

That said, I would be all for engineering the paths of major hurricanes so they don't intersect with land at all. Simple enough approach.

Note, I'm huge on eventually rendering weather a nonissue. Become a Kardashev II Civ ASAP.

Or build O'Neill colonies where the weather can be precisely controlled at all times.

The CW angle is that Trump and Doge downsized the National Weather Service. This made sense ideologically -- meteorologists are basically climate researchers, and thus likely to be more worried about climate change than immigrants, plus college-educated pronoun-bearers. And I am sure that some of the NWS people were installed there by previous administrations for political reasons (which I happen to be sympathize with). But separating the wheat from the chaff would require a scalpel, not the chainsaw of doge.

Anyhow, in this case, the Guardian reports that NWS cuts did not contribute to the tragedy:

Despite funding cuts and widespread staffing shortages implemented by the Trump administration, NWS forecasters in both the local San Angelo office and at the NWS national specialty center responsible for excessive rainfall provided a series of watches and warnings in the days and hours leading up to Friday’s flooding disaster.

The forecast office in San Angelo has two current vacancies – typical for the pre-Trump era and fewer than the current average staff shortage across the NWS – and has not been experiencing any lapses in weather balloon data collection that have plagued some other offices.

[...] In a final escalation, the NWS office in San Angelo issued a flash flood emergency about an hour before the water started rapidly rising beyond flood stage at the closest US Geological Survey river monitoring gauge.

The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials. Did the firings affect that estimate? Who can say. If there is blame to assign though, it should go to the elected officials of Kerr County who decided not to install rising water warning systems despite a similar tragedy occurring previously (and their neighboring counties having installed these systems) and who delayed any kind of emergency response that night until hours after the floods started despite having received those flood warnings from the NWS.

What I expect is for the GOP to blame nameless government functionaries despite being the reigning regime, the Dems to blame Trump who will attract ire (deserved and undeserved) like a lightning rod, and the idiotic good ole boy Republicans that actually dropped the ball and got people killed to escape scrutiny.

The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials.

Is there any evidence that someone falsified the model output, decided to round 1.6mm/minute to 1mm/min or something like that?

If the complaint is simply that the model turned out not to match reality, that does not seem to be a remotely fair complaint. The job of the NWS to provide an estimate and an error bar. What is an appropriate response given a certain best estimate of a disaster probability is a political decision.

This feels like a bereft spouse yelling at a doctor "But you said there was an 85% chance he would survive the operation, so we thought it was safe. Why did you lie to us!"

I agree with the rest of your comment.

The bigger problem was that everyone was asleep. My phone does go off with a weather alert when anything worse than a thunderstorm pops up, but it probably wouldn't wake me up. If you live near a danger zone then you ought to install a dedicated warning app that's really loud.

I think that this is related to an inflation of alerts. For the forecasters, the incentives are to always warn, no matter if it is "there may be ice on the road, drive carefully" or "a hurricane will flood 90% of the area covered by this cell tower in minutes".

Basically, I would be fine with being woken up by an alert which has a 10% chance to save my life. For a typical user, this will perhaps happen once in their lifetime, probably less. However, I do not care about weather alerts which may kill a handful of people in an area of a few 100k. Send me a text if you must, but if I die due to ice on the road because I did not bother to check my phone in the morning, that will be on me.

But as the incentives are structured in a way to always exaggerate alerts, you run in the "boy who cried wolf" problem -- nobody wants a phone which wakes them up whenever a weather event which might theoretically kill someone happens in their general area.

Of course, the outcome this would excuse is if you had a bunch of people who drowned after randomly deciding to camp at the river bank. What happened here was instead that the organizers of a summer camp for kids dropped the ball. A level of care which might be tolerable when you are out drinking and fishing with your buddies is not necessarily tolerable when running an organized event. Of course, for all I know, the safety concern level of the organizers was above average. "Site specific disaster kills your charges" is an exceedingly rare outcome, and was probably not even on the radar of most camp organizers a week ago.

Basically, I would be fine with being woken up by an alert which has a 10% chance to save my life.

I would be fine with 0.1% Definitely with 1%.

But I got so far thousands of warnings and none was even close to that.

Alarm fatigue is a real thing. I know lots of people that have mentioned disabling alerts like this because they're tired of Amber Alerts (missing kids, often custody disputes) or Blue Alerts (for police getting fired at) from hundreds of miles away, or to be honest, even lots of NWS alerts, which IMO seem to have started appearing more often for less severe weather. I feel like I get weather alerts that are well meaning, but not surprising: "severe heat warning" for most of the South in summer isn't wrong, but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that (uncertain if I've gotten one exactly like that, but not too far from it).

There is a tier of unblockable alerts, but we've only tested that once. I think we need to better-align the alerts with the people that need to see them.

There was a documentary on the tornado in Joplin, MO where someone was visiting the area from California. They were dining at a local restaurant when the sirens started sounding. They were alarmed, but locals around them didn't react and reassured them that "this happens all the time" and wasn't something to be concerned about.

And then the tornado came right through town.

So a lot of locals in weather-prone areas are desensitized to the warnings, even when the klaxons really do go off.

Then again, the opposite can also happen. My father grew up in Kansas, and is the most weather-aware person I know: when I was a teenager/young adult he would always have the forecast memorized. There were lots of "wait, you're going where today? There's severe weather coming in, possible hail." When he learned he could access weather information at any time on his computer, I'm pretty sure it was like a revelation for him.

As someone who was in Tuscaloosa when we were hit earlier that year I chalk the local nonchalance up to a few things. Aside from the over-prevalence of false alarms it's hard to really comprehend what "this happens" means unless it happens to you. I shrugged it off as a joke even as I was dodging an EF-4 in my car delivering pizzas until I was rummaging around bombed out parts of town with my friend whose survival had suddenly been in doubt looking for his friends because communications were pretty much totally gone. I learned something about myself that week: It's easy enough for me to be personally brave or at least unconcerned with my safety enough to do something stupid like volunteer to take a delivery knowing full and well that there was a tornado on the ground. Holding it together in the face of people who'd lost something to everything and who'd only been guilty of being less fortunate than I was in the space of a few minutes was not so easy. The sense of suffering and apocalypse was overwhelming and not something I hope to witness again.

People were understandably more obedient toward the weather people for some years after (and to the meteorologists' credit they got it right on 4/27/11) but over time I guess you're going to be a worry-wart or not. Maybe my take isn't the healthiest, but it's this: If it's an EF-3 or less you're unlikely to get hit in the first place and probably will survive even if your house gets trashed. If it's an EF-4/5 after having seen brick apartment buildings and schools flattened I feel like there's not much point in worrying because unless you've got a bunker to climb into whether or not you survive is more a question of fate than weather awareness.

Yeah, tornadoes are bad that way. Even where tornados are common, most of the time tornados hit somewhere else. With floods, it's a bit more predictable, they hit the same exact spots.

I live near a large memory care facility, we get a lot of Silver Alerts from it. I'm ok with a text level of notification, but the actual alarm should be reserved for evacuation orders.

Yep, alarm fatigue is all too easy to fall into. It's always well meaning - someone makes the case that X should be really important, and nobody wants to be the one to tell them "actually that isn't important enough". But when everything is important, nothing is, and so people start to ignore everything as a way to cope with the onslaught. It applies to the phone alerts of course, but I see it all the time in network monitoring systems too. Sometimes you even see people start to invent higher tiers of "high priority" in an attempt to solve the problem, but unless they solve the actual problem (no one is willing to say no/they aren't listened to if they do), such efforts go about as you would expect.

In some cases it was not result of well meaning people.

It was result of some idiots angry that fallible system failed to predict storm/earthquake and suing operators of alert system. Obvious response is to flood system with false positives to avoid false negatives.

Not sure how to solve it.

I remember one of my old workplaces kind of avoided this due to the heroic efforts of a few very curmudgeonly and perhaps slightly autistic engineers that liked their environments and notifications in very particular ways. They would absolutely be the ones to say "no I don't care if this major product is down in production, I don't need to know about it because I work on this other unrelated minor product. You can't have an engineering team wide alert for your system going down.

Not the heroes we deserve, but the ones we need.

A flash of light and a loud bang followed by my phone announcing a thunderstorm warning happens at least several times a summer. Yeah, and no shit...

There were probably just memorable and your brain converts being able to remember multiple storms as meaning they must have happened often. Most parts of CA really don't get major thunderstorms all that often. Once every 1-3 years sounds about right for where I'm at for ex.

but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that

It's a Blue Tribe Is Right About Global Warming alarm; the fact it's a klaxon in the first place tells you it really isn't well-meaning.

I thought that were the thousands of news headlines along the lines of "worst summer ever; climate finally punishes us for our sins; repent now the end is nigh".

This would make a great drunken assertion but it feels kinda random in context.

Flash floods and earthquakes are probably my most feared natural disasters, since they give very little warning and there's no real workable contingency for their occurrence.

But as far as disaster preparedness, we humans simply aren't (yet) capable of holding back the forces of nature when they run amok.

Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."

There's almost nowhere on the planet you can keep your kids that won't be vulnerable to some natural disaster or other.

Civilization has mitigated so many threats that it is easy to feel safe and sound, but every single year there's a set of dice rolls that determine if a particular human settlement gets obliterated or not.

Unless we're willing to spend the entirety of global GDP attempting to disaster-proof every single town and city, we are to left with the option of praying to whatever higher power we believe in.

Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."

WW2 killed more people than any "act of God" in recorded history. I'd be more concerned about a nuclear exchange than I would about any natural disaster that's likely to happen during my life expectancy.

Guess that depends on whether you consider plagues or pandemics in that category.

And I'd specifically point out that WWII took a long time to kill that many people, whereas most natural disasters happen over minutes, to hours, to days at most.

In 2004, an earthquake/Tsunami combo killed like 225,000 people in a day.

So on a simple deaths/hour calculation, I'm not certain your point would hold.

A single hurricane allegedly releases almost as much energy as the entirety of humanity's nuclear bomb stockpile. And there's 5-15 of those per year.

Redditors are blaming Orange Man for DOGE's cuts to NOAA and NWS which they claimed contributed to the loss of life. I'd be less skeptical if this didn't sound almost exactly like the claims that Orange Man's cuts to the CDC caused grandma to die of Covid. From what I can tell, the flood deaths were mainly due to (1) the county not having a [modern?] warning system, (2) the camp leader not erring on the side of caution to evacuate [to be fair, this was a 100 year flood], and (3) the flood happening in the middle of the night. Did I miss anything?

Also, please say a quick prayer for the families of the victims if you're the praying type.

Similar to how I've advised previously with x.com, I'd advise others to consider blacklisting reddit.com in their machine's hosts file. There is utility in refusing to allow the darkest thoughts of the most troubled people into your mind space.

Imagining Mother Earth opening up and swallowing the children of your enemies as some kind of quasi-divine retribution for opposing your preferred flavor of government spending is insane. It's good to remember that quipping about how the "finding out phase is beginning" in response to little children dying at a real dinner party would earn you some pretty thick stares regardless of how blue the company.

Not a bad suggestion, luckily for me I don't really read much Reddit outside of niche subreddits that are devoid of politics. Reddit takes are too boring to even hate-read. I've also been able to quit 4chan this year for the same reason, it's complete braindead noise now.

Yeah, I... Yeah.

It's gotten really awful. I still go to /r/all sometimes to get a sense of what normies are seeing on social media and it is so brutal and bleak. Doesn't exactly ruin my day but I always come out of it terribly disheartened. The derangement, the self-righteousness, the absolute inability to imagine any other narrative. Clicking on threads which contain straightforward outrageous lies in the title only to find everyone nodding along, bashing 'MAGAs' for mostly-unrelated reasons, and one brave person pointing out that the whole thing is bogus -- only to be heavily downvoted of course. The speed and volume of the echo chamber are bewildering.

To be sure, though, niche communities are often still great, and that's what reddit's really about imo. It's a shame how much garbage has to be waded through to find them, but once the account is set up correctly it's fairly usable. Even if the toxicity has a way of working itself into everything eventually.

Also, the sheer popularity of trans-oriented comics drawn in hideous art styles is entirely baffling to me.

The most baffling I saw on the front page was a headline about how the University of Minnesota allows senior citizens to audit classes for 10 dollars a credit hour.

"Oh, how cute," I thought.

Redditors were furious.

I think there might be a dynamic going on whereby the kind of person who hangs out on big Reddit subs is looking to be angry, (either because that's their hobby or because of selective pressure on comments in a large subreddit), so pattern matches even completely innocuous stories into rage bait (in this case something about student debt and boomers stealing from the future).

Redditors were furious.

I sincerely can't imagine why.

Is reddit even "normie" anymore?

Last I checked it was still a top ten site, but idk.

The extreme popularity of lgbt (and especially t) content on the front page makes me wonder if it isn't just convergently evolving into another tumblr.

My experience with a very small sample size of normies (my wife) is that they use reddit to view only one or two hobby subreddits.

Tumblr is more ideologically diverse than Reddit these days.

I'm not sure I'd put this on kids or parenting attitudes. The important questions here are:

How foreseeable was this flooding? Is that a zone that historically floods? What was the worst ever flood there? Was this not the worst, only a bit worse than the worst ever, or like completely out of proportion with anything that ever happened in the area?

If it was reasonably foreseeable what was the plan to mitigate this risk and why did it fail?

And finally, if it was foreseeable and the plan was inadequate, whose idea was it to let kids in a vulnerable area there?

Is that a zone that historically floods?

It's part of an area called "Flash Flood Alley". So I think your most relevant question is

If it was reasonably foreseeable what was the plan to mitigate this risk and why did it fail?

The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!

You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.

'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.

Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.

This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.

Here is the summary of their report.

You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'

This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.

If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.

Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?

Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]

In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying

"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]

Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]

On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."

While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.

It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:

On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".

In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]

Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."

Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.

Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?

I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.

In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".

Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.

But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.

(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)

I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.

In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.

For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.

I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.

Lidia Thorpe is the whitest black person I’ve ever seen, and I’m old enough to remember Rachel Dolezal.

Do the noble Aboriginal people not have some kind of paper bag test they can use to keep these carpetbaggers out?

No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.

In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

Confident that they could, and so never having asked if they should, Australian eugenics scientists continue to pursue their goal of creating the whitest oppressed black person to ever live.

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics. I often found that strange, since it’s not typically the case with cross breeds of any other sort - any geneticists amateur or otherwise on themotte care to enlighten me why this is?

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the majority of white-passing "aboriginals" simply have negligible or <10% Caucasian ancestry. At that point, what's surprising about the fact that they look white?

Hapas just look white. 90% of the Cherokee just look white. Most white-hispanic babies look white. White middle easterner crosses too, but in fairness middle easterners are pretty white looking already(although I know a Maronite/Italian couple whose kids look, on average, whiter than either of them). Even the white/black crosses you're probably thinking of look more white than the popular portrayal; America's definition of 'black' just encompasses people of mixed ancestry. There are other countries, like South Africa and much of Latin America, where that's not the case and they're not perceived as looking black.

I don't think the the concept of more or less recessive phenotypes is particularly valid in the first place. Sure, hair and eye color are pretty much Mendelian, and I've noticed a few other discrete traits that seem to be pretty dominant/recessive (Hapas always seem to have the epicanthic fold and Blasians usually have darker skin than the median of their parents), but most traits seem to average out. The American understanding of White features being "recessive", particularly to Black features, probably derives from the existing admixture in the Black population (thus creating a broader range of "Black" phenotypes) and general cultural norms of hypodescent (the "one drop rule").

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics.

Looked this up but couldn’t find anything on it. If it is true might be a quirk of their archaic human ancestry.

I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.

Thanks for the info!

Very interesting stuff.

Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.

Even in places like Tasmania where the genocide was arguably complete the supply of self identified indigenous still somehow emerged

Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.

Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.

Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.

The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".

Do the Anglicans have the cash to give much? My impression is that while, like most established churches in the west, they have substantial real estate holdings, they don't have enough liquidity to even cover expenses and are reliant on generally-earmarked investments to keep the lights on, pay salaries, etc.

I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.

Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.

I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?

Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.

Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.

Complete sidenote but I read Alison Overeem as Alistair Overeem and was overcome for a moment with confusion about ethnicity.

I know you're tongue in cheek with this, but man I don't like that the lesson being taught internationally right now is: "If even a single member of a particular ethnic group survives, and your ancestors did something oppressive to their ancestors hundreds of years ago, they will use this to extract reparations from you in perpetuity and will never let you forget what happened."

Similar logic for why, if you depose a monarch, you have to kill off their entire extended family, lest some loyalists later track down their teenage second cousin thrice removed and try to restore them to the throne.

We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

Perhaps we can counter that logic by pointing out that whatever mechanism allows guilt to flow forward in time should also allow credit and pride to flow forward. So sure, maybe my great great great grandpappy beat some villagers that one time, but my family saved an awful lot of drowning children over the years too, so maybe it balances out.

Maybe, but it doesn't seem like most of these efforts get very far.

The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'

No that is not the lesson, there is nothing to fear from a "low performer". What you need to fear is the person or group who you dismissed as low performing but have the potential to not be, because if you fuck em there is a good chance they'll fuck you back and you will deserve it.

They can TRY to fuck you back, but they usually lack competence organically, which is why they failed in the first place. They only succeed because their nominal allies of convenience prefer wielding them as cudgels against their proximate enemy. White liberals play the oppression meta to discredit enemies, not to materially advance the cause of their pet projects. Without external support these low performers default to the limit of their capability.

They mostly have not done this. The black and indigenous minorities who are poor performers have tried; the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

isn't the US in a fentanyl epidemic?, last I heard it came to the US through Cartels that bought the necessary precursors from the Chinese.

Have not doesn't mean they will not.

Conceptually, I think the choice of "grifting" has a fairly limited cap on median outcomes. Limited cases might exist, but it's hard to sell indefinite affirmative action or reparations for a minority doing better than the median. I can't see democratic will supporting that for long, and it's unpopular even when isolated exceptions come up: Elizabeth Warren, or affirmative action for Obama's kids applying to college.

Chinese-Americans seem to have taken the "work hard and naturally do better than the median" option, which I think sounds better if it's available.

They tried with "Stop Asian Hate," but it turned out that Asians are doing better than whites by most measures and the people beating Chinese grandmas for bus money aren't white. So I think we've already seen how such a campaign would pan out (i.e. not at all).

I mean, I can envision an America where Asians run black-like racial advocacy. It's just not very plausible.

Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.

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Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.

Mgubu isn't smart enough to recognize when he's gotten the better deal. People of small hats mostly are, and for all of chairman Xi's attempts at becoming grand Chinaman of the race, people of slanted eyes are too.

Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.

Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.

As opposed to 'Mgubu the witless'?

Aside from the parallelism in 'people of small hats/people of slanted eyes' it doesn't seem offensive in isolation either.

people of slanted eyes are too.

Are smart enough? I'm parsing your sentence but the general tone seems dismissive, whereas this seems complimentary. The slant eyes bit is an odd moment of bluntness for you.

Might be.

But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.

It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim

Looking at the current geopolitical situation, there may have been other downsides.

The moment attitude to China changed from "how do we keep them in eternal poverty and civil war" to anything else, Americans lost.

It's that simple. They're mostly one people, they were backward for historical reasons. They are 1/2 of the world's high average IQ population.

Had US presidents read more Lothrop Stoddard, this would never have happened.

Fuck propping up the USSR to keep Chinese down would have made sense.

As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).

I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting.

Americans, even pretty smart ones (e.g. eigenrobot ) earnestly believe their country's hegemony is good, proper and should be maintained indefinitely despite material reality. Is that not even more off-putting than wanting to preserve hegemony and actually doing something towards that aim?

Other people’s sincere patriotism is always a little annoying because it’s generally a claim that they consider their country’s ways strictly superior to mine. Nevertheless, I believe that love of country is (usually) a healthy love to have. What I object to is those people deciding to kneecap everyone else.

I don’t necessarily disapprove of tariffs on the other hand. People don’t have to cooperate with their rivals, just ideally refrain from stomping them to the ground. Of course tactics like market flooding make this philosophy more complex to hold to.

If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

Because the comparison isn't America to some hypothetical perfect country. It's a comparison to China, and China's government is pretty shitty. If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.

Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.

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We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

But note that this is a civil matter, caused by women/the womanly/progressives seeking more social power. Any nag they can get their hands on will be used, and nags are quite powerful in democracies (commonly referred to as "women's tears winning in the marketplace of ideas"). This doesn't even require women having the vote to work- universal male suffrage is generally enough, the 18th Amendment being a good example of that.

Not allowing credit and pride to flow forward in the same measure as guilt is also a woman thing, because women aren't generally wired to seek credit and pride in the first place- so it makes sense they would simply ignore it exists [at best] and actively seek to devalue it [at worst]. This is related to inherent male disposability in an environment of excess men, and right now there are simply too many men (which doesn't require you actually be a man; which is why women who function like men complain about this just as much as men themselves do).


The reason incomplete genocides could work in the past is because the rulers at the time were less vulnerable to them; the womanly could cry "no ethical consumption under capitalism" all they wanted, but at the end of the day the only way they have power [outside of a post-industrial society where women are productive in their own right] is if a man listens. And men with power are far less likely to bow to the demands of useless people.

Is this risk completely mitigated? Well, no- you can still have the Church organize moral movements, but even in that case the Church is made up of people and property, those people have names and addresses, and since they have organization they have pre-scribed outlets for any charity they might feel (it's their own money, so the moral hazard is avoided). In a democracy like this you can't pull off that kind of suppression.


No evolved solution to this currently exists. Men are not wired to resist women when they believe themselves rich enough to be above needing to put themselves first (for a bunch of complicated reasons), but this is not symmetric. Only once men have been exposed to being poor will this change, and that only lasts for a little while.

Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space.

I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.

That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.

My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.

It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.

I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.

There's also this trend towards this Schrodinger's box of Indigenous society in which it simultaneously was too primitive to have concepts like land ownership and losing a war but also simultaneously owned the land and actively worked on upkeeping. Depending on the particular circumstances the declared nature of Indigenous society flip flops a lot in Australian politics.

Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:

  1. They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
  2. They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.

Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.

Ok, I have a perhaps stupid question. But my impression is that unlike Amerinds, who often have actual tribes and in some cases a continuation of the old tribal government, aboriginal Australians absolutely do not, only the names remain in most cases. So who would be the actual people that own the land and can overrule the Australian federal government? @RandomRanger @OliveTapenade

The short answer is no.

There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.

Yeah but the Maori had a bunch of hallmarks of settled agricultural society that the Indigenous lacked plus entrenched defensive positions which made it easier to just cut a deal with the local headsmen on the absolute colonial fringe.

In the Northern Territory (tropical, desert wasteland for the most part) and parts of Queensland there are tribes with some significant level of continuity from elder to elder. The last uncontacted ones were only found in the 1950s I believe. But that's not really the case down in the populated, developed south east of the country. American tribes were much more organized, they had chiefs who could negotiate treaties whereas the aboriginals never really got that far, it was all a very collaborative, collectivist, longhouse kind of society.

Part of the slogan we hear so often, at almost every event and in many meetings is some variation of:

acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.

At one point it was elders, past, present and emerging. But nobody really knows who is an emerging elder, so apparently the progressive thing to do is to take out the 'emerging'. There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

Torres Strait society was pretty different to Aboriginal society. Having done a year in Darwin and been around a bunch of those locations, they had agricultural and land ownership norms that weren't really a thing on the continent itself. I think the validity of their argument for ownership of their islands is more reasonable than the Aboriginal one by some degree.

True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.

Not really, no- indios in Latin America are very heavily the descendants of settled tribes. There's only a few thousand Chichimeca even left and they occupy the same very bottom of the racial hierarchy that Mayans do. Latin American racial snootiness is mostly about being whiter, sometimes with a dose of hybrid-vigor ideas, not about differences between various tribes.

Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.

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There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

I’ve got to admit, it would be pretty funny if, 80 years from now, there are just a bunch of lily-white, blonde, “Aboriginal” people leading the various tribes, like some sort of real life Burroughs or Haggard novel.

We're already there to a large extent: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/unsw-s-newest-indigenous-doctors-come-from-all-walks-of-life

But in 80 years they'll be Indian.

Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.

But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.

If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.

That's essentially what was proposed with the National Voice, which got shouted down hard in the most recent referendum. Now certain states (ironically the ones with by far the actual lowest population of Aborigines and highest population of liberal Whites) are trying it on a trial basis.

But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.

Is it possible that they worked with government to produce this? As you say, it allows the activists to perpetuate themselves but it also produces sympathy and understanding for the government. More reasonable proposals might have been harder to scotch.

You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.

They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.

What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?

Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.

So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.

As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.

Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.

It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.

It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.

It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.

The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.

I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.

In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.

So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.

To add to this, I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it). It's just... rural Oklahoma. There's no added racial tensions. There's probably some legal weirdness in the event of a felony but we're not committing those, or dealing with them against us. Not a lot of people really care.

I have relatives living near the only reservation in Louisiana. The locals are grateful for the casino money(there aren't enough working-age Indians left on the reservation to staff it) but the Indians aren't different enough from the locals for anyone to care about. The white/black(and on top of it, the creole black/economic migrant black) distinction dominates the local racial division to the exclusion of all else.

There's a pop culture portrayal of Indians as these brown-skinned sages with long hair, who may or may not be oppressed but probably have special powers. Lol. They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs. Some of them have unusual superstitions(when I worked construction I had a Cherokee coworker who wouldn't pick up sharp objects unless he knew who owned them) but they're pretty average.

I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it).

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs.

To be fair, this is mostly because they’ve intermarried with white people at high rates, particularly the Cherokee. Basically every white Oklahoman has some story about how great-aunt somebody or other was Cherokee and great-uncle sonofabitch didn’t let her sign up for the tribal roll.

I’m convinced this is mostly grifting — wouldn’t it be so nice if we could get some of that sweet oil casino money? But when Elizabeth Warren’s claims started to come under scrutiny, I never believed them, and I also thought it was really funny how she believed the grifting family legend enough to humiliate herself by taking a DNA test. Her pretendian thing isn’t weird, or unique — she’s just a white lady from Oklahoma.

I have cousins through adoption and marriage who are on tribal rolls. They’re ahem rednecks same as any rural white people.

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

Clear Creek Monastery(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clear_Creek_Abbey). No official connection; it's a daughterhouse of Fontgombault which isn't technically affiliated with apostolic work.

My words are chosen carefully and not subject to elaboration.

And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country."

That may be how it is in the Lower 48, but not so much here in Alaska. At least partially because the [Native corporations](Alaska Native Regional Corporations) serve as loci for activism, as well as helping maintain the individual tribal identities, but also that we have the highest population percent Native at 20.7%, and, further, we already have a precedent for reparations in ANCSA (even if it was meant to settle all such future claims, it hasn't stopped activists from seeking more).

I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.

To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.

but have you seen the other Commonwealth states

Have you seen the UK handing the Chagos over to Mauritius these last two months and paying for the privilege? That is just as, or even more, cucked. What happened to the spirit of Wellington or Mccaulay?

For all the UK's faults there is no doubt they would run the place more efficiently than the Mauritians ever could.

I've been shaking my head at that particular debacle, it seems that the UK is just about the only country on the planet that takes utterly toothless "international law" seriously. They could have told the Mauritian government to shove it, what would they have done, cancel discount holiday vouchers and row over in a canoe?

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I still find it all too tiresome.

Accurate. There is a cultural and probably (my theory) genetic temperament that makes whites share and care. Think European killing Winters in the old days.

Beyond this its performative luxury beliefs. Rich whiteys living in gated communities that will never need to deal with the consequences of their actions.

Happy to be corrected by others.

I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo

A great way to predict most western government actions these days

And this is why the activists win. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I don't really understand how this makes activists 'evil'. If they believe in A, how is trying to get to halfway to A first an illegitimate way to pursue your goals. Compromises never constitute a recognition on the part of one party that the new status quo is actually desirable, merely better than the alternative, and this is always how politics has functioned. Most obviously, as soon as each thought they had the ability to put their cause in a better position, those both North and South who had acceded to the compromises of 1820 and 1850 were more than willing to jettison them.

It is evil in the same way that when you strike a bargain, you ought to uphold the bargain.

Sure bargains are revisited after some time. But most people understand that a bargain is designed to last at least for some period of time; not weeks.

Activists therefore are violating the spirit of the bargain.

I also think activists frequently have wrongheaded goals and make things worse off but that’s a separate matter (though it no doubt makes me less favorably disposed to activists in general — in truth I think an activist is a shameful “profession.”)

I kind of see activists in a posiwid sense - yeah nothing is ever good enough for them, their job depends on it. What I find truly frustrating is that even after a decade of this, many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just - they will even joke about how useless activists are in one breath before condemning conservatives for racistly not want to throw money away on performative bullshit in the next.

many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just

This is natural- casting shade on people not wanting to conspicuously consume (in this case, from the society-wide patronage network that activists embody) is a thing rich people do naturally.

When you're rich in virtue, conspicuous consumption is saying "yeah, polygamy is totally for everyone".

When you're rich in rent-seeking, conspicuous consumption is saying "yes, my property values the environment is more important than developing the next generation".

It's not necessarily realized by people doing that, since this is just copying the fashions of the richest- but it is still that thing either way.

Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.

Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.

Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.

Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.

It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.

But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.

Why they probably have them:

Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.

The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.

Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.

Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.

So, in conclusion:

Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.

Announcing that they have the bombs would

  • feed Israeli narrative
  • not actually provide them with the required capability to deter anyone
  • cause normies in Israel/West to demand an actual end to Iranian nuclear program

the only upside would be boosting national pride.

So your claim is "Iran has the bomb but it is useless to them".

So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?

Also, it is not widely claimed that Iran has bombs, which would require some explanation. Does Mossad know? If yes, then why do they not make that claim? How can it be both in Israel's and Iran's interests to keep the world in the dark? If not, then how were they able to hide it?

Does the US know? Am I supposed to believe that Trump could avoid blabbering about it? Was Trump's bombing targeting finished bombs, or was it just a charade and if so for whose benefits?

that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days)

This seems plausible. 400kg of 60% U-235 corresponds to roughly 240kg pure U-235. If you start from natural uranium, you would have needed to process 34 tons to get that much U-235. If your bottleneck are centrifuges rather than raw uranium and fluorine (which seems likely), you will likely have processed twice that much because squeezing out the last 0.1% of U-235 is just not worth it.

Naively, I would expect that separation efficiency is proportional to the product of the fraction of both species, so the easiest percentage gain is going from 49.5% to 50.5%. However, you do not have to go back to 99.3%, because 85% is enough for a weapon. Plus you are dealing with much less material.

(Actually, the WP article on SWU contains the relevant formula. Producing 400kg 60% enriched U takes at least 34t SW. Splitting that into 140kg 85% and 260kg 46% takes about 140kg SW, or just 0.4% of the total separation work. Even separating it to the point where your tails are just 0.7% again will just take 1.3t SW.)

There is still some overhead, probably. Perhaps the Uranium is not stored as UF6 but in a more reduced form, and it certainly will take processing after it is sufficiently enriched. The mechanics of a bomb can be prototyped with depleted uranium, but at the end of the day you either need to test your device or trust your computer models. With regard to the latter "someone falsified a fission cross-section in literature" seems like an unlikely story, but so does "someone hacked the air-gapped Iranian centrifuge network".

So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?

The first stage of a hydrogen bomb is basically an implosion type fission bomb. They may also be aiming for a boosted fission weapon to get into high tens / low hundreds of kilotons range.

So why did they build it? Is it just a stepping stone to the hydrogen bomb?

Yeah, pretty much.

Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.

This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not

last time I checked Temple Mount was in Jerusalem, a major city

The whole city is not within the limits of the Temple Mount, and nuclear weapons are made in different magnitudes. So this could conceivably be accomplished with negligible loss of life.

As Temple Mount is part of Jerusalem you cannot target Temple Mount without targeting Jerusalem.

Intentionally bombing a mosque would be unacceptable even if it wasn’t a particularly important world cultural heritage site. And like @No_one was saying, it would lead to immediate massive nuclear retaliation by Israel and probably also by Pakistan and the United States.

So, they could do virtually zero damage, mortally offend most of the entire western world by deliberately targetting a religious site, and get properly nuked in return? The offense to deterrence ratio on that plan does not pencil.

Nuclear threats are for deterrence. You want the other country afraid to risk it. Israel’s highly religious minority cannot risk the grounds of the Temple Mount becoming contaminated, because it is unequivocally essential for their end of times prophecies. The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds. Some Haredi even believe that the Shechina is especially found at the Western Wall:

The real reason why the Western Wall was not destroyed was not the one that counts midrash – the reality is that the general assigned to demolish it was incapable of doing so. O midrash reveals that the Western Wall remained standing thanks to an oath from G-d promising its eternal survival. And, in fact, it teaches that the Divine Presence never withdrew from the Western Wall

When nuclear weapons are being launched, no one cares about offending someone’s sensibilities (lol). The threat may be enough to cause the ultra religious population of Israel to take a more diplomatic approach to Iran, unless their foolishness is the thing that causes the impossibility of their religious prophecy. That would be a big deal. An example of how serious they treat this stuff — the infamous tunnel under Chabad in NYC was to fulfill Rebbe Schneerson’s wish to attach two buildings together. So the literal world Chabad headquarters built a secret tunnel underneath Manhattan to connect the two buildings, and rioted when the police put an end to it, in order to fulfill the will of the Rebbe.

Iran should obviously see their current predicament as one of civilizational survival. Are they going to surrender to Israel for the rest of time, having no ability to ever fight back because of the pace of technological development, or are they going to try to retain sovereignty over their land? I know that if I were Iran, i would be nuke-maxxing and doing whatever it takes to ensure I have sovereignty in my country. Even if it is “offensive”

The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds.

Would the Messiah not just remove the fallout? If anything, it'd be a pretty good indicator that it was time to rebuild, plus now there's no existing competition for the site.

And radiation actually maps pretty well to existing divine wrath, specifically the Ark of the Covenant curses from 1 Samuel.

But after they had brought it to Gath, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic; he struck the inhabitants of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.

... For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there; those who did not die were stricken with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.

Why would it be impossible to rebuild the temple on Temple Mount if it's nuked? Just have the builders wear hazard suits.

Because if it’s rebuilt it’s like a whole thing. Sacrifices have to resume daily etc. And just the idea of the holiest of holies land becoming contaminated is a dissonant thought.

Should be possible to slaughter a calf in a rad suit -- the L*** helps those who help themselves, y'know?

It's mostly a film plot thing and also a way to get nuked. What would be the point ?

but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.

I've got a gut feeling that blasting Temple Mount into a shallow crater would make most Jews horrified but secretly relieved.
They've been Jews this long and had God wanted them to rebuild the temple, there'd have been a sign.

This seems to be missing the point. Iran doesn't need enough nukes to win, they just need enough to make the cost of a nuclear exchange so high Israel would never risk it. Think about Saddam Hussein in 2003, if he has 10-15 nukes would the U.S. be willing to invade? How many nuclear strikes on Israel, are an acceptable price to pay for getting rid of him?

That's what I am saying.

But the only way to do it is thermonuclear weapons.

20*20 kilotons on Israel would be catastrophic but it'd be survivable for Israel.

It'd not be survivable for Iranian government.

100*400 kilotons would destroy Israel, possibly even partially prevent retaliation.

That's the moment when Iran would have true deterrence and MAD with Israel.

Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.

Counterpoint- while Israël has plenty of crazy people in it, they don’t yet have the critical mass to trade Tel Aviv for the destruction of Iran. And if they ever do get that critical mass, the ‘extermination of Israël’ will not stop them because they believe building high rises in specific patches of desert will change the metaphysical structure of reality so Israël can’t lose.

States are made out of individual humans which make their decisions, not some abstract grand strategy player. For example, 9/11 was only a papercut for the US, something on the level of an animal killing a villager in Age of Empires, perhaps. But it still ended up shaping a decade of US politics, because people care more about this kind of things than deaths from traffic.

Getting nuked would be like 9/11, but worse. Normally, this is the place where I would say that there is no way Netanyahu would survive this politically, but given him doing just fine after the Hamas attacks suggests I do not have a working model of Israeli politics.

Politicians pay attention to tail risks, and try to avoid them. For a conventional Iran, the 1% most unfavorable outcome for Israel of an Israeli airstrike is that Iranian rockets fired in retaliation kill a couple of hundred Israeli. For a nuclear Iran, the 1% outcome is that they nuke a few Israeli cities, killing tens or hundreds of thousands.

The other thing to remember is that there is an escalation ladder even once the nukes start flying. For example, a nuclear Iran might nuke an Israeli airbase in retaliation to a conventional bombing. In this situation, Israel would not get a pass for whatever retaliation they might visit on Iran. Glassing Tehran would not be an option, at most they could nuke an Iranian base. Even if things get to the point where cities are nuked, Israel might get away with killing 10x as many Iranians as they kill Israelis, but not with 100x. If they glass all of the Iranian cities, they will get the same repercussions than if they had nuked them without provocation, so whatever considerations are keeping them from nuking Iran right now would still be the same.

Finally, we can use past prisoner exchanges to get an idea of how much citizens and enemies weight in the Israeli utility function (to the degree that it is coherent). The exchange rate peaked in 2011 at 1027 Arabs per Israeli, but has cratered since Hamas has taken their hostages. But I imagine that killing 2M Iranians for 100k Israeli, while being a favorable exchange rate given both population sizes, would not be seen as favorable by Israel.

But it still ended up shaping a decade of US politics, because people care more about this kind of things than deaths from traffic.

It shaped politics that much because it was basically a godsend, a moment some of the PNAC crowd have been secretly praying for.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions. A decision to suspend or terminate aircraft carrier production, as recommended by this report and as justified by the clear direction of military technology, will cause great upheaval.


Funny:

Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.

They were actually not that stupid and wanted to axe new carrier construction, but did not manage to do so.

Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.

If this were true, why would the animal world be full of animals that are mildly poisonous, taste bad, have spines etc.? Why do bees sting large animals that threaten the hive?

As long as your enemy's value function includes terms other than your destruction, any damage you can inflict upon them can be a deterrent. If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other enemies going forward, and simply make it harder for it to thrive as a nation. These are all considerations that might, in some situations, change the balance and make Israel decide to leave Iran alone even if they would rather attack it otherwise.

None of these animals are enemies of their predators, they're merely snacks. Those features you listed exist to induce the predator to choose another snack.

If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other

Nothing in my original post implies Israelis do not know this. Obviously they, the HOG are certain to know Iranians have nukes, or are right at the threshold. They're probably hard at work trying to get high-res photos of said nukes because accusations without proof aren't that interesting today.

they just need enough to make the cost of a nuclear exchange so high Israel would never risk it

But this has further implications that you omit.

If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.

In this way, the Hamasi would serve as the permanent Iranian veto over the [Ashke]nazi. Because they simply don't care if the Israelis nuke them in response- the fact is, the Israelis get hurt far more than the Palestinians, the Palestinians are suicidal, and that is sufficient to accomplish this goal.

Conversely, if Israel believes that Iran will, or already has, or will inevitably soon obtain, a bomb like this... then their only response is to start removing the local kebab as fast as humanly possible. They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.

The Iron Dome can stop a lot but the bomber is going to get through. And sure, Hamas could always attack from another country (perhaps one in which they seek refuge after the dust settles), but in that case that other country [and its people] are collateral the Israelis can threaten such that Hamas is kept down- since if Hamas manages to get an attack off then it's the entire host nation's problem, and Israel becomes the one with the nuclear veto.

If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.

Israel is obviously not going to agree to that. If Iran provides Hamas a bomb, Hamas will use it; Hamas does not have the self control to merely threaten for long, nor the ability to hide it for long (which means "use it or lose it" makes sense), regardless of what Israel does (aside from cease to exist). If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb, that's the same as Iran threatening to nuke Israel; the presence of Hamas changes nothing.

They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.

Little nukes like that don't change much unless they can get them into the Knesset. (And the settlers are irrelevant; every Israeli could fuck back off behind the Green Line and the Palestinians would still demand the river to the sea)

If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb

I don't think they'd going to threaten to do it, I think there would be no warning until some very important Israeli infrastructure just all of a sudden disappears. Besides, Israel "doesn't have" that kind of bomb anyway.

The point is to nullify the strategic advantage Israel has because it has enough bombs to check Iran (and outside US intervention is the only reason they haven't been conquered yet), and a smaller blatantly suicidal people are just the delivery vehicle Iran needs to do that. It doesn't matter if Israel then goes full Old Testament and kills every last Hamasi in the area (and maybe the US stops them, or maybe they don't, but if they stop they'll absolutely try it again)- the attack went off, that's what matters.

All the better if it hits something actually important (like, say, where Israel gets its water from), and while Hamas is surely too stupid to manage that... well, what if they aren't?

I think there would be no warning until some very important Israeli infrastructure just all of a sudden disappears.

Useless to Iran, because Israel and the US will know damn well who provided the bomb. I don't know what happens if a country starts a nuclear war, but the other nuclear powers of the world going "Oooh, aren't you tough, we'll just give you whatever you want" is not going to be on the table.

The point is to nullify the strategic advantage Israel has because it has enough bombs to check Iran (and outside US intervention is the only reason they haven't been conquered yet)

Israel's nukes aren't really doing much with respect to Iran. Because Israel can't start a nuclear war without the shit hitting the fan any more than Iran can, they can only be used in a retaliatory manner. And there's no need for that, because Israel is conventionally strong enough to defeat all comers. (Whether you think that's because of the US or not)

Iran would never give the Arabs they sponsor that kind of independent power.

No, you can't 'provide a bomb'.

It'd be obvious from the fallout where the bomb was from and you would end up being treated the same as if you had fired it yourself.

Couldn't your conclusion that 'If Hamas manages to get an attack off it's the entire host nations problem as well' apply to Iran giving them a nuke in the first place? Couldn't Israel just state preemptively they will regard any use of nukes by hamas as use by Iran and will nuke Tehran in response? In this case would the Iranian regime be willing to chain themselves to asa suicidal ally and provide Hamas with bombs in the first place?

I don't think having a suicidal ally changes the logic of mutually assured destruction much. That relies on your enemy drawing some arbitrary distinction that doesn't serve their interests.

Couldn't your conclusion that 'If Hamas manages to get an attack off it's the entire host nations problem as well' apply to Iran giving them a nuke in the first place?

No, because Iran is the only one capable of retaliating (in a nuclear fashion) hard enough to discourage that. And Israel doesn't need to go nuclear if this happens; a conventional war would be just as destructive for these nations and peoples. Perhaps that is part of why the neighboring countries are unwilling to host the Hamasi as refugees.

Couldn't Israel just state preemptively they will regard any use of nukes by hamas as use by Iran

Maybe, but I don't think Israel can win a war with Iran (hence the emphasis on keeping them down/contained). They're sufficiently equipped to wreck any country Iran allies with outside of that lovely mountain range that defines the western Iranian border, but unless the Americans want to put their boots on the ground and suffer the 3:1 attacker casualty rates to conquer Iran then Israel can't really touch them. Israel doesn't have those numbers, Iran's a peer nation (except for the nuclear weapons), and if either tries in the future are the Israel-hating Blues (and even Reds; Israeli influence might not be as stable in an era of Red reforms) even going to lift a finger?

Remember, the ultimate problem Israel is fighting is that, absent Rome/Europe/Washington and its religious fixation on holding Jerusalem, it is the natural geopolitical state of Judea to be in the Persian orbit. Hence the rhyme with Biblical times- Jews evict the Canaanites, then the Persians conquer the Jews.

it is the natural geopolitical state of Judea to be in the Persian orbit.

This is a very particular view of history that completely discounts the centuries the territory of Judea was held by Greece, Rome, or Babylon (probably missing a few). If anything, it is the natural state of Judea to be fought over by adjacent great powers.

How many nuclear strikes on Israel, are an acceptable price to pay for getting rid of him?

It’s an interesting question. Consider the following points:

  1. Half the world’s Jewish population lives outside Israel. Most are Zionists. Large reservoirs of highly fecund 6+ tfr Orthodox Jews live in the United States and indeed in Western Europe. It is unlikely that Iran nuking Israel would kill more Jews than the Holocaust, which the Jewish population will recover from in less than 100 years. The question is therefore some variant of “would a nuclear war between Israel and Iran spell the permanent end of (at least this iteration of) Jewish settlement in the Levant?”.

  2. Rich American and European Jews have the money to fund the reconstruction of Israel, which is possible unless it is overrun. If it is overrun then all reconstruction is impossible, since there are probably no mercenary armies capable of retaking it and even the US likely wouldn’t. However, Iran alone can’t mount a ground invasion of Israel and Iranian proxies have been badly damaged by the recent conflict. The overrunning scenario therefore involves a kind of organic jihad - post nuclear strike - in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, marching across into a ruined Israel and taking it. This is entirely possible and that should be acknowledged. However, such a march could be stymied by Western air support in service of a surviving Israeli civilian, military and mercenary force in theory, depending on the global geopolitical situation.

I think the answer is unclear. I don’t believe Israel would invite nuclear war. But that they would lose is not fully certain, even if it is likely for reasons of Israel’s Arab neighbors and Iran’s strategic depth and lower population density.

I think the idea is that Israel might want to avoid lots of its people dying, even if it wouldnt lead to ultimate defeat. Your analysis makes sense only if you think the conflict has to be to the death in the log term.

Video game ass logic.

The current Supreme Ayatollah declared a fatwa against nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons

Now, obviously, the degree of adherence to this is obviously not strict (why else have such facilities capable of it?) but the Islamic clerics may not know to what precise degree their nuclear program is progressing, or have the technical know-how to really understand it. So it's hard to say if Iran 'knows' anything, or to ascribe rational-actor motives to them, if only because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. How much information is the IRGC relaying to the clerics that supposedly rule the country?

I suppose only the Mossad really knows what is actually happening.

Good, didn't know about this.

Great way to promote ambiguity, though only very naive people will fall for it.

Generally, religious people actually believe in their religion. Politicians lie all the time, like Ulbricht denying the plan to build the Berlin Wall, Bush lying about Saddam having WMDs or Putin denying his intent to invade Ukraine. Clerics deceiving their followers about matters of religion are at least rarer.

For a theocracy like Iran, having the leaders following god's will is their fundamental claim to legitimacy. When religious leaders reveal that a proclamation of doctrine (e.g. a fatwa or encyclical) was just a ruse to mislead the unbelievers, they are making a mockery of the religion. Nor do they control their population to a degree where they can just retcon everything -- "We were always at war with Eurasia" / "The ayatollah had always said that nuclear weapons are great tools of the jihad".

This does not mean that I would update very much on an anti-nuke fatwa -- I would certainly read the fine print, consider how often these things are overturned and so forth, but I would likely update a fair bit more than I would on Putin's claim that his troops were just conducting a military exercise.

Of course, a fatwa against nukes would also be a good reason why Iran -- despite having reached 400kg @ 60% enrichment, which is very much within grasping distance of a nuclear weapon stopped just short of building nukes for now.

When religious leaders reveal that a proclamation of doctrine (e.g. a fatwa or encyclical) was just a ruse to mislead the unbelievers, they are making a mockery of the religion

On the contrary, lying about one’s true beliefs for the purpose of self-preservation is explicitly permitted in Twelver Shia jurisprudence.

I would argue that there are important differences here. A central example of Taqiyya seems to be to pay lip service to whatever religion the local strongman tells you to follow. At the worst, this creates an ambiguity about whom of the locals are still faithful to Shia Islam.

The grand ayatollah proclaiming false doctrine would be much more serious than that, because it would create ambiguity about the teaching of Shia Islam.

Indeed, WP states (My emphasis) :

By Shia, acting according to religion is incumbent on every one, but if the expression of a belief endanger one's life, honor and property, he can conceal his belief as the verse 16: 106 implies. It is as a weapon for the weak before the tyrants.[186] If Dissimulation cause the disappearance of the religion or the fundamentals of the religion, it is forbidden and Muslims are to give up their lives but if there is no advantage in their being killed, it is to dissimulate. There is no place for Dissimulation regarding the teaching of the doctrines of the religion.[187]

Obviously, this is also doctrine, so if a religion allowed preaching false doctrine, this would be suspect. Realistically, clerics will balance temporal advantages and the need to keep their faithful unified. If pretending to be anti-nuke had caused the world to send tons of HEU to Iran and sped along their nuclear weapon program by two decades, then perhaps a cleric might be tempted to proclaim false doctrine (at the cost of his followers forever worrying if he and his successors mean what they preach).

But the world predictably did not update on the fatwa a lot, it being proclaimed was not the difference between life and death for Iran. Not worth setting up a precedent weakening religious unity for.

Look, I have more of a theory of mind for highly clerical religious prohibitions- there’s disassembled bombs held by the IRGC. Maybe ‘disassembled’ is the wrong word- it’s something that’s technically more of a lump of HEU but can become a bomb in about an hour, with a technician-not-engineer level of expertise.

Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.

No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.

In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?

Hamas's actions were causal for Hezbollah's decision to open the northern front artillery campaign after Oct 7, which in turn led to foursignificant strategic setbacks for Iran that made their recent performance in the 12 day war possible.

First, it drove and culminated in the bushwhacking of Hezbollah's leadership via the pager and other campaigns, neutering Iran's premier proxy-ally-extension in the region. Hezbollah is a direct partner of Iran's IRGC, which is Iran's primary power-projection force, and this lost an ally whose reason for existing (from the Iranian backing perspective) is to help out in the kind of conflict that they just did not.

Second, because Hezbollah (and non-trivial amounts of its Syria-based infrastructure) were whacked by Israel, Iran lacked a proxy militia to stabilize Assad in Syria, allowing the momentum building that saw Iran's primary state-ally/client/main supply route into Lebanon cut while Iraqi-based militia groups were trying to drive over the desert. The loss of Syria was a loss of not just an ally, but a decade of significant investments in trying to establish and protect that interest.

Third, because Assad fell, the Syrian air corridor between Israel and Iran opened up. Israel was able to access previously denied airspace with vulnerable but capability-extending aircraft (like tankers and slower drones) that enabled the air war over Iran that led to Iran losing control of its own airspace. Israel would not have been able to generate as many air sorties over Iran as it did were Asad still in power.

Fourth, because the anti-Hezbollah campaign was being coordinated from an annex of the Iranian embassy in Syria, when Israel struck that in response, the Iranian response-response was the missile campaign between Israel and Iran. Not only did this deplete a considerable share of Iran's missile force, it also led to the Israel strikes on the Iranian air defense systems that also contributed to Iran's recent not-so-great showing.

As for Hamas's incompetence, that depends whose theory you want to subscribe to. Allegedly, Sinwar (the departed head of Hamas in Gaza who led the Oct 7 attack) was planning on reaching the West Bank and sparking a general uprising / Intifada. This not only did not happen, but the West Bank was so uninvolved that Hamas' only 'direct' allies in the conflict they wanted to make into a race war were... Hezbollah (who paid a high price) and the Houthis (who blockaded most of the Arab states from benefiting from of the primary Arab ethno-nationalist interests, the Suez Canal).

In so much that Sinwar's Plan B for the conflict was to have Gaza be pummeled in hopes the world would take the Palestinian's side, he certainly got Gaza pummeled, and the actual benefits for the Palestinians are sure to manifest any day week month year now.

A common thread I saw on the gazanow telegram channel (now deleted) was that Hamas was uploading their livestream of civilian massacres not for goreporn likes, but to prove the IDF was a hollow shell without the USA and that the entire rotten edifice was kicked open so the rest of the arab world, especially West Bank but Hezbollah and Syria too, could roll in to clean out the yahudi with no effort. I still don't know if this was a particularly inspired attempt to justify the gleeful livestreamed executions and rape aftermaths as serving some strategic reason, or if it was a sincerely held belief that Israel was nothing without the USA and Hamas had struck the singular crippling blow, or y'know, both.

The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.

Maybe trading bodies for international sympathy could work as a viable end state wild card, but previous trends don't really bear it out. The intifadas didn't result in a materially improved ground condition for the Palestinians and for all the hatred Israel gets it still has a growing population and economy. If that is losing for Israel, I'm sure Israel will collapse immediately like most of the world wishes it would.

'The entire rotten edifice will go down with one good kick' ranks up there with 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight' in my personal list of 'big indicators of really bad strategy.' There are historical examples of it happening, and you can even identify trends that make it more likely to happen, but strategies that bet on it happening, as opposed to factor in the possiblity, tend to be poor strategies.

The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.

This presupposes that they didn't have as much of a greenlight as could be expected, with the patron parties distancing themselves from Hamas's decision after it became clear it wasn't going to spark the regional bonfire. Which, from my memory of those first few weeks, was pretty apparent in the first day(s). Hezbollah in particular had a pretty big anticlimatic drawdown in which they spun up the media organs like they were going to directly enter the conflict, demurred, and then 'quietly' began the artillery campaign after a bit later.

Though to be fair to past considerations, I am on record as believing that Iran has kind of lost the plot on managing its proxy warfare strategy. The curse of the deep state / cult of the offense strikes again, conflating strategic means with strategic ends and over-leveraging a strategic asset (the proxy network) beyond diminishing returns and into outright counter-productive tendencies.