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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29706 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

I get it.

Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

So we are stuck.

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.

But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.

I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."

Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

  • -23

Interestingly enough, I'm pretty sure if this kind of thing went to court, the typical Executive latitude over foreign affairs probably isn't enough for actual treason convictions. You need a Congressional statute to work off of. Maybe not a full declaration of war, though a really pedantic judge might say so for the most direct "treason" charges, but something that they've put out. Now, given, a few of these Congressional bills do devolve some judgement to the Executive, but I could easily see even the current conservative court make a ruling against it being enough for treason based on the Major Questions doctrine. After all, it's quite literally not (inherently) the President's job (normally) to decide who is an enemy and who is not. I think for this reason, the administration is probably a little wary of actually bringing treason or similar charges against certain people supporting certain groups, because legally some of them are not slam dunks and can even backfire. Funnily enough, there's a parallel for why the president of the Confederacy didn't end up getting prosecuted at the end of the day even though he was jailed - lawyers were at least a little worried that awkward questions would be asked in court about the legality of secession.

Now, politically that's a different story. And I can't remember the exact incidents off the top of my head, but Trump has thrown around the "treason" word already in at least several cases where the word obviously does not apply, so I don't consider him representative at all.

With that said, getting shunned by people for helping enemies/evil people is already part of modern politics to some extent. See not only Hamas supporters, but also BDS types shunning pro-Israel people, to give the obvious example. But rhetoric is free and part of free speech. Personally though I'd put a strong line between "persona non grata in society" and "we run them out of town".

In terms of enforcement, usually the line is "material support". That is, sending money or physical stuff to questionable groups or people. Again, congressional statute regulates these penalties and where the lines are, for the most part. In some cases, you're even forbidden to send money to a Hamas member for humanitarian purposes (because they might then use the freed budget to support military action, I think this was in the news recently).

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever.

It would be helpful if you could give much more specific examples for those of us who haven't been following domestic political developments as closely as you have.

But, that said, I think the tendency to rally political opinion around the flag in wartime is generally far too strong. If it's been counterbalanced by modem partisanship then that's worrying, but worrying for what it says about partisanship rather than for any other reason.

Even if I thought your specific arguments for this were better it still wouldn't be worth suppressing anti-war arguments (at least among intelligent people), because said arguments are how we understand the world, how we figure out if we should continue the war or not, how we figure out in which way we should do either (because there are a million different ways to prosecute a war and a million different ways to exit a war, and they will have very different consequences).

The people who manipulated Trump into starting the war are the “traitors” in my book, though this isn’t the legal definition. Lindsey Graham shouldn’t be coached by Mossad on how to neurolinguistically program Trump’s 80yo mind into joining a war. That’s the most insane thing I have ever read. It is baffling that this happened. And I don’t trust “confirmed bachelor” Lindsey Graham in Tel Aviv in the Epstein era at all:

To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence community. "They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me," he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.

A law should be passed to deport people who do this to Mogadishu along with their nearest kin, extending even to second cousins, along with banning any of their interns of assistants from working in government. Imagine the best salesmen in the world working for years to figure out how to sell you something, and they are able to use a friend of yours to do so. They have an infinite budget and have collated tens of thousands of hours of your speeches and conversations to determine priming words and anchoring words according to your facial expressions and vocal tenor. Oh, and you’re 80 years old and easily impressionable. This is the capability of Mossad, plus infinitely more.

we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel

I would sooner support America formally declaring war on Israel than believe this, or support someone who believes this. This is not the assessment of the American intelligence community. This is an Israeli talking point.

“confirmed bachelor” Lindsey Graham in Tel Aviv in the Epstein era

We know he likes bottoming for fit male escorts. One of them blabbed to the media about how in D.C. all the male escorts know him and call him "Lady G". That actually makes him immune to blackmail since there are already first hand published accounts of what his asshole looks like when getting prepped for anal. He likes hot guys and the Israelis can't hold that over him.

Now that homosexuality itself isn't blackmail material I guess the sheer promiscuousness of the average partaker and lack of spontaneous extramarital offspring makes it quite hard to blackmail

I'm not 100% convinced that Israel wanted this particular approach, although my only evidence is that neocons have been sending mixed signals.

It could just be that they're still in "Get Trump" mode, but maybe they wanted Trump to do something else than what he actually did?

Does anyone have any interesting articles which point the finger somewhere else? The Gulf states, maybe?

Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.

This is not NLP mind control, this is how military decisions should be made. You may object that Trump is just too stupid to assess military intelligence - okay great, thanks for you input. Or you can object that the intel was bad - obviously a baseless objection, but if you think Israel is secretly evil then I see where you're coming from. But to object to the President making a military decision based on military intelligence is completely asinine.

You failed to read. This part is NLP:

Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence community. "They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me," he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action

The part you selected is only Trump being lied to, as our own intelligence does not agree with what Netanyahu said, and Israel has previously lied to get us into war. A fool would trust their intel without vetting.

assess military intelligence

Its not American military intel, its whatever Netanyahu said.

IMO the fault really lies in the American populace for weighting the specific political agenda of candidates higher than an assessment of their character, personal judgement, and trustworthiness. And here, Trump specifically for being an easily convinced idiot. But "congressmen can't visit foreign countries and bring back advice for the president" has literally never been forbidden, and it would be silly to do so, and impossible to draw a rational line about what kind of advice/exactly which countries/etc.

Edit: of course, if you just want to badmouth and shame Graham for doing this, have at it and I encourage it, that's fine.

Trump has been talking about fucking up Iran since the days of the Embassy Hostage Crisis, and there are multiple people in his cabinet (Vance and Hegseth foremost among them) who have a personal beef with the IRGC.

I know a bunch of veterans who were stationed on the Iraq/Iran border during the Second US/Iraq War and they have told me stories about both the IRGC and the absolutely asinine policies of the Obama administration in regards to them. Stories about receiving instructions not to interfere with IRGC death-squads operating in their AO because acknowledging their presence or worse yet, US troops "accidentally" shooting an Iranian citizen (even if that Iranian had shot at US troops or Iraqi citizens first) might negatively impact JCPOA negotiations.

I also find your characterization of Trump as some sort of senescent meat-puppet especially rich given who he replaced.

If Trump had ran on war with Iran he would have lost. He ran on the opposite as the "peace" candidate.

He ran on "Make America Great Again" and part of being "great" is people heed your warnings. As I said in one of the earlier threads on the topic Trump is not Obama, when he sets a "red-line" he means it.

when he sets a "red-line" he means it.

And when he didn't mean it after all, then it wasn't a real red line to begin with, right?

Trump has been talking about fucking up Iran since the days of the Embassy Hostage Crisis

Both Trump and Vance explicitly ran as anti-war-with-Iran.

Oh, and you’re 80 years old and easily impressionable. This is the capability of Mossad, plus infinitely more.

Why does responsibility not lie with Trump / Hegseth etc here, or even Americans who voted for someone allegedly so easily manipulated? It’s very much “the Tsar’s advisors are the real problem”.

Imagine the best salesmen in the world working for years to figure out how to sell you something.

The best salesmen in the world are working right now to sell you Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Fanduel, Kalshi, day trading, laundry detergent, whatever. That doesn’t mean one can’t criticize the lifestyle decisions of gluttons, gamblers and spendthrifts.

The best salesmen in the world are at the intelligence agencies because they have access to psychological research that has never been published, and because such a job is more rewarding than working at Coca Cola. McDonald’s does not have a team focused specifically on targetting you, as an individual, using all your data, with access to your friend while you’re in a golf-induced trance state. If they did then you would prostrate before the Big Arch and salivate upon hearing “I’m lovin’ it”.

I've met people who work in intelligence work and I've met apex businessmen - guess who is usually more persuasive?

Career progression in government work is sometimes based around success but is often just based around politics and staying. Meanwhile business rewards skill, and many fields like production in real estate finance, represent one of the few ways to end up with million dollar pay checks without equity.

The best salesmen work in sales, because if you are truly good at sales you can become absolutely filthy rich and retire at 50 and spend the rest of your days at golf clubs nobody has heard of.

Well yeah, we do blame Trump, or at least I do. But that's an even worse problem, because it proves that these loyalties to Israel have to be rooted out of our government on both the D and R side, it's not a matter of just "find someone with higher agency who can balance these concerns more responsibly". I'm never supporting a candidate who vocally supports Israel, ever again. Compromise is impossible- "Trump is based but he supports Israel, we'll support him in hopes he gives use the change we want without compromising the very existence of our Empire on behalf of the Jews." Didn't work. The Right-Wing Zionist/Brown Alliance the BAP sphere insists upon in opposition to "peasant antisemitism" is impossible. It's not just about the advisors, it's about the politicians themselves. Supporting Israel should make you unelectable in both parties, it's the only solution. Newsom is pivoting hard in that direction, reading the writing on the wall. Woke shit sucks, but it's not nearly as dangerous as this fifth column, and demonstrated loyalty to that fifth column even if it's bundled with based rhetoric should be a disqualifier whether you are left-wing or right-wing.

So I agree with you, I can criticize the lifestyle of people who indulge while at the same time resolve that nobody in bed with those salesmen should have power anywhere in America.

along with their nearest kin, extending even to second cousins

United States Constitution, Article III, section 3, paragraph 2:

no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood

They had experience with governments punishing the relatives of traitors and wanted no part of it.

If you told the founders that we were entering a needless war of foreign intervention 6000 miles away in Persia, they would consider their constitution a failure, and may be partial to my helpful revision.

"From the Halls of Montezu-uma,

to the shores of Tripoli,

but not twenty-five percent fa-arther,

cause that'd just be crazy!"

Seems like it ruins the original's meter and spirit.

Maybe focus on "needless"; don't throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Tripoli and Mexico were not interventions into foreign affairs as they secured the wellbeing of Americans exclusively. The lyrics are “we fight our country's battles […] to keep our honor clean”. Not, “we fight Israel’s battles and lose all our honor by killing 100 children in the first salvo, while also killing a Muslim leader in their holy month backhandedly while lying about negotiations, all while harming our own interests among Arab allies in the region”. Our plan going into Tripoli was to secure a deal to benefit Americans, not trying to kill everyone in the government and military and hoping for the best. Leave such dishonor to Israel. In any case this is a 1930s authorization, not really traditional enough for me.

to keep our honor clean

That ship sailed, and was turned away, in 1939. Unitedstatesian acts in defence of Israel can be justified many ways, but one of them is to restore that honour.

(Also, Iran supported the Houthis, and the Houthis touched our boats.)

Also if the place was still called "Persia", we likely wouldn't be having this issue.

First - Trump will get Congress on board. He may have to pay yuuge price, but even the biggest doves and biggest morons in Congress know that US trying to overthrow regime and failing means the empire is over and there will be many more challengers in the years to come. There is reason why Russia is hellbent on finishing the SMO on their own terms. If you want to know how international relationships work - go watch the Godfather. So far USA haven't failed in overthrowing a regime after committing the needed forces.

Second - speaking against the special military operation is not treason.

Third - the best time to have dialogue about the war was before and during the protests. The second best was after them. The third best is now.

Fourth - the year is still young. There is chance that the US may actually win with low bodycount.

The Logan Act and saying things on the internet can get to a very stretchy version of a violation. The law is probably too vague even before this stretch but nowadays some dude in Iowa can literally talk to Putin directly on the internet.

Unless he got paid for speaking pro Russian propaganda - I am not sure how the dude in Iowa will be held responsible. You are totally allowed to spew enemy propaganda. Just not commercially.

Ever since Flynn I am paranoid on lawfare and how stretchy something like treason or sedition could be.

Even something small like talking to a Russian bot on a message board telling them “everyone in my house would fight against Trump” would be giving an adversary a small amount of intelligence

[Michael] Flynn

News article for whippersnappers who don't remember this like me

Text of acts admitted to in guilty plea

It was nowhere near that simple, but to be fair, you really had to be there. Once the long-awaited OIG report dropped detailing serious Shenanigans[1], Flynn motioned to withdraw his guilty plea. Here is a supplement that details the misconduct of Covington & Burling LLP, his original lawyers in his case, and here[2] is the supplement that spells out the relevant parts of the FBI and DOJ misconduct in his case. As new evidence, such as the official closing of the Flynn investigation on 1/4/17, and an email documenting an unofficial promise not to prosecute Mike Jr.[3], continued to accumulate, Brandon Van Grack was removed from the case. By May, the DOJ was motioning to dismiss, but even as exculpatory evidence continued to be produced, the circus just kept going.

Revisiting all of this the better part of a decade later, I've had significant difficulty locating the some of the supplements and exhibits that I remember reading that provide even more context, which is frustrating to say the least. It's admittedly possible that they have all blurred together in my memory, as I followed all of that business rather closely. This is a preface to say that what I have linked here is merely what I hope is a decent sampling of the evidence underlying the smorgasbord of bullshit that was the Flynn prosecution. Alas, I have spent the bulk of my evening typing this lone reply rather than attending to my own needs and despite (allegedly) knowing better. More fool me.

[1]. As with all good political documents, the devil is in the details while the executive summary is considerably more... neutered tidy. More importantly, Flynn's new counsel had repeatedly filed motions to compel Brady material, aka exculpatory evidence, which the FBI and DOJ both denied existed.

[2]. This supplement rebutted the DOJ's downplaying of the OIG report, saying that it wasn't that bad and that it didn't pertain to Flynn, which considering that Flynn was in fact Crossfire Razor, was a lie "lacked candor" in OIG-speak.

[3]. This bit was relevant both because Van Grack denied threatening to prosecute Flynn Jr. and also because he would have been required to report an official agreement, hence the unofficial nature of the offer detailed in the email.

I feel like the US has lost plenty of times and been fine. Korea had an unsatisfactory stalemate (that still haunts us). Vietnam was a clear loss and retreat. Iraq and Afghanistan were immediate victories followed by long drawn out slogs that no one feels we "won" at.

The 1990 Gulf war was a victory of sorts, but that seems to have happened because we didn't get involved in regime change in Iraq at that time. Otherwise you have to go back to WWII for a clear victory.

Your specific phrase "overthrowing the regime" is kind of a strange victory condition. We have arguably already done that in Iran. Bunch of their leaders dead on day one. There might be a technical continuance of governance, but there is already going to be a different set of people in charge in Iran. And historically our attempts at regime change in the middle east have gone poorly. It's why no one wants us committed to a ground war.

The USA did not lose Vietnam, although the public thinks we did. America concluded(wrongly) that south Vietnam was capable of fending of a north Vietnamese invasion, and declined to bail them out when this turned out not to be the case- the republic of Vietnam was independent for several years without US troops or support, and the commies had promised not to invade in exchange for American withdrawal. Nixon and Kissinger surely knew that they would go back on this promise, but the ARVN fended off a full scale invasion without US support before reshuffling their general staff due to political turmoil and then losing the next round.

Vietnam is weird. People who are like "hurr hurr USA hasn't won a war since WW2" are obviously wrong

But the USA fought a war for many years with the explicit goal of preventing South Vietnam from being communist. They then made assumptions the ARVN could stand on its own, which was a convenient assumption given the political unrest at home. Regardless of the assumption, they were wrong. You don't get points for saying "okay but at the time we really did believe it". They were wrong, and south Vietnam was taken over by the communists. The war that was fought, the lives that were spent, did NOT achieve the outcome. Full stop. I would call that a strategic loss, despite the numerous and overwhelming tactical victories. I think Clausewitz would agree.

although the public thinks we did

Amusingly, I think this is actually the most important part in this context. Power is exercised much more about belief than kinetic force. That's much more efficient too. The belief of your kinetic power means it doesn't get tested. Once that belief starts to slip, it gets much harder to maintain your power. You still can, especially with lots of kinetic force, but that comes with many costs of its own. It's way way cheaper when everyone respects the big stick, using it a lot sucks, and if absolutely everyone says "fuck you, bring it" you can only hit so many of them...

Vietnam was a strategic loss, that’s true. But also the ARVN did stand on its own until political turmoil in the Republic of Vietnam caused coup-proofing shakeup in the army’s leadership post-US withdrawal, leading to a collapse of the front in the face of the north Vietnamese 1975 offensive- the ARVN had been highly successful with 0 direct US assistance for three years at that point. It would be like if Ukraine suddenly fired all its generals and put a rando in charge who proceeded to lose the war in a matter of weeks.

I agree with everything you've said, except

There might be a technical continuance of governance, but there is already going to be a different set of people in charge in Iran.

I wouldn't call that regime change. I think you'd need substantial change in the policies/views/beliefs/actions in the governance of Iran for it to count as "Regime change". Ending the war right now means the IGRC #100, #101, #101... people step up and get right back to "death to America, death to the Jews" after 24-48 months of rebuilding.

I would not call Venezuela regime change either by that metric. Although it did seem to very much alter the relationship between Venezuela and America's respective "regimes".

Although it did seem to very much alter the relationship between Venezuela and America's respective "regimes".

Mostly unilaterally, on the part of the United States.

Otherwise you have to go back to WWII for a clear victory.

It's not quite that dire. Grenada and Panama were fairly unambiguous successes and the NATO mission in the Balkans can reasonably be characterized as a success as well.

Korea and Vietnam happened during the height of the Cold War, when the world was perceived as bipolar. In a way - some losses here and there were baked in. After the 90s (or 80s - I don't think anyone took seriously the USSR in 1985) - we live in Pax Americana. And one of the things that underpins Pax Americana is that US has mightier military than the next 20 combined.

And while Afghanistan and Iraq could be considered as political losses - the US forces never lost a battle there. I am not even sure that they lost many during the korean and vietnam wars.

Whereas leaving Iran in the hands of the islamic revolution after such fireworks display will be a first of a kind post Cold war.

Failing in Vietnam and Afghanistan did not end the so-called empire, why would failing to overthrow Iran's government end the empire?

If the USA can't even shit on the middle east like it used to

Uh, the US is totally shitting on the Middle East right now.

Luckily I'm not american, so I don't have to bother with considering whether I'm committing treason by disliking this stupid war.

I just wanna zoom in on this paragraph:

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.

Is it your position that Congress passing a resolution compelling the President to cease hostilities is "probably" treasonous?

I’m not going to say treason. I don’t think it fits. But I will say that in my opinion, most of the bad outcomes from wars in the twentieth century and twenty first for that matter come not so much because of the war itself, but because the nation wasn’t fully committed to winning. Asking the president to “just stop” isn’t going to bring peace, because it simply shows the world that the USA refuses to win wars. Why would Iran or other nations like Iran be worried about a weekend bombing that leaves the country mostly intact and most of the leadership still in power? You punched the bully once in the face, but stopped short and without forcing him to stop hitting. What he learned is if he can survive the first punch, he can do as he pleases. I don’t think America will stop, but I can’t imagine this sort of thing isn’t giving Iran a reason to not bother to negotiate.

I don't disagree but I think a key prerequisite missing here is the President builds support, both in Congress and in the public, before launching hostilities. The President deciding to bomb some people and then everyone has to go along with it so we don't look weak isn't, and ought not be, how it works either.

It appears to be OP's position that the majority of the American public is engaged in some level of treason against itself.

From the perspective of someone who lives in a country that also started a war widely considered to be unjust recently and then also got mired in it:

I don't give a fuck. Treason shmeason, it's their job to fill the hole back up after digging themselves into it. I don't buy the noises on how the country is going to collapse as soon as we give an inch of whatever, it's all lies. The truth is that failure will hurt the politician class (the current ones at least, which I hate and want ruined) more than it could ever hurt regular people. Fuck them. And if it does hurt regular people, fuck the government stooges anyway. They're afraid of ruin more than we are.

Not that I can do anything actively with a reasonable chance to get away with it, but they don't get a mote of loyalty from me.

Even if you don't want to burn them all down, you should still proceed with an understanding that the elites will lie about the consequences of not going along with their shit.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

That would be a very good reason not to start wars that lack democratic approval.

The purpose of requiring a congressional declaration of war is to make sure that you avoid this problem by having democratic backing for your war effort.

The purpose of requiring a congressional declaration of war is to make sure that you avoid this problem by having democratic backing for your war effort.

I agree, but given that the last time the US declared war on anyone prior to starting hostilities was WW2, at this point that ship has not only sailed, but wrecked and sank to the ocean floor.

But even when the US didn't formally declare war, Congress has generally implicitly consented to military actions by the president by agreeing to fund them.

Congress didn't do that here.

On the one hand, I tend to agree with this.

On the other hand, it seems plausible that Congress would have signed off on the war, since the Senate declined to do anything about it under the War Powers Act.

On the gripping hand, the first undeclared* war waged by the United States was in 1798(!) by John Adams(!!) against the French(!!!) and the second was in 1801 by noted hawk** Thomas Jefferson against Algiers. A series of Supreme Court rulings essentially signed off on the use of military force without an explicit declaration of war, although it's important to note that Congress favored and at least to some degree authorized both actions, as I understand it.

I wonder if part of the reason Congress is so lackadaisical about using or tightening up the War Powers Act is because they are afraid the Supreme Court would rule against any really meaningful preemptive restrictions on Presidential use of military force, potentially even weakening their power to conduct oversight of executive action relative to the current status quo.

*at least by the United States

** this is sarcasm

What stands out to me is that virtually no one seems willing to defend the war on the merits. Even the people who support it focus on how the IRI is bad or how we need to trust the president or how - per OP - not supporting the war is disloyal.

I'll defend it on the merits as the Republican position has been remarkably consistent on the matter. If we (the US) are going to occupy the role of global hegemon we need to act like a global hegemon.

Khomeini's government had been warned repeatedly that there would be consequences if they started shooting protestors or continued to threaten international trade. Khomeini ignored those warnings and now Khomeini is dead. This is known as "Fuck around and find out".

Khomeini's government had been warned repeatedly that there would be consequences if they started shooting protestors or continued to threaten international trade. Khomeini ignored those warnings and now Khomeini is dead. This is known as "Fuck around and find out".

I would find this more convincing if the government was actually saying it. Instead, they offer up a medley of different explanations and goals, depending on who is being asked, who’s doing the asking, the day of the week, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. “Fuck it, we ball” is no way to run a military.

Well Khomeini died peacefully in bed after achieving his wildest dreams. If your going to advocate for attacking a country maybe at least know the name of it's leader?

Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khameini, Potato, Potatah.

Khomeini's government had been warned repeatedly that there would be consequences if they started shooting protestors or continued to threaten international trade.

It would be a bit easier to believe any of this was done out of care for Iranian lives if you weren't bombing their desalination plants and turning their country into a hellscape.

I don't recall anyone saying anything about care for Iranian lives.

Sorry, "don't kill Iranians, that's our job", then.

Have fun playing hegemon, but this war is insane, and nothing good will come of it.

It's not about "having fun" it's about doing one's duty

If your duty is to keep some sort of order in the world, this war is in it's active dereliction. If your duty is to be hegemon for the same of being hegemon, it's no different from "having fun".

More comments

You literally said these are the consequences of shooting protestors.

The merits seem to change on a daily basis, and have not been explained publicly in any way. I watched Hegseth's interview on 60 minutes last night, his explanation of the demand for "unconditional surrender" was vague to the point of incoherence. He smirked and played coy about whether there were troops on the ground ("well I sure wouldn't tell you that would I?" "we're not ruling anything out"), until the interviewer pointed out that he had said there were no troops on the ground earlier in the week at which point he claimed that was accurate.

As Daryl Cooper pointed out during the Gaza war, when Unconditional Surrender Grant or Eisenhower or Mcarthur demanded Unconditional Surrender from their foes, there was a basic understanding that once the foe surrendered, the conqueror would take on the government of the surrendered territory. We do not seem to intend to do that.

"Unconditional surrender" means exactly that; you surrender, and what the enemy does to you is up to them. If you've been watching Trump at all, you know that a demand for "unconditional surrender" by him just means "make me an offer".

This stuff reminds me painfully of Russian justifications for continuing our own, original Special Military Operation (funny how nobody bothers to declare wars anymore, by the way). «Yeah maybe it was a bad call but now that we're there, gotta finish what we started, else Ukrainians will just rearm, get NATO nukes, and then… anyway, shut up traitor». This is all born out of a belief in impunity, which at least in the Russian case was clearly delusional. Anyway if it's treason to "defang the war effort", then certainly it's a legitimate big boy war for the nation's vital interests, why not declare it as such?

But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.

I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."

Well, what are you doing? What are you, even?

YOU are bombing a civilian population, unleashing toxic rain on them, destroying their desalination facilities, generally committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while your "president" gloats with all the wit of a stunted 8 year old sadist. It seems that even the attack on that girls' school was deliberate, and it's likely you double-tapped, and your "president" is lying about it. By the way, IRGC children went to that school, so maybe it's just routine Amalek beheading. Israel is brutalizing civilians, in Iran and in Lebanon and in the West Bank, because it's a brutish expansionist Middle Eastern theocracy populated by savage people with a Mongol tier unreconstructed bronze age religion built around breeding, conquest and ethnic narcissism, and is not some wholesome chungus bulwark of the Western Civilization; for all the eloquent vile snark our resident UMC Jews can use to shut down this obvious conclusion based on their own words (thank G-d we have AI translate now) and actions. Your own state religion, expressed by Trump, Hegseth, Graham and other profound thinkers, amounts to sadism and serving Israel in terrorizing its enemies and furthering the subjugation of the entire Middle East. From the external point of view, you're moral equals to the regime of Ayatollah at best. Given that even I agree culling IRGC upper ranks was morally justified, it's a very legitimate question if a nation like yours deserves to exist. Accordingly, many American nationals who are not spiritual Middle Easterners and have some sort of affinity for Western civilization would prefer it to be some other kind of nation. It's a debate about the fate of your nation and your people, not "treason", to oppose this bullshit and try to obstruct it.

YOU are bombing a civilian population, unleashing toxic rain on them, destroying their desalination facilities, generally committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while your "president" gloats with all the wit of a stunted 8 year old sadist.

The hypocrisy of it also annoys the absolute piss out of me, considering the sheer amount of criticism the US levels at virtually every other country for exercising any degree of regional power (unless they're US vassals, then it's all okay). Russia is bad for starting shit with Ukraine after NATO threatened to expand into the literal historic core of Kievan Rus without so much as a pretence of a buffer zone. China is bad because of Hong Kong and why can't they stop being mean to Taiwan and something something territorial claims in the South China Sea.

It is, apparently, A-OK for America and its allies to ceaselessly fuck with Afghanistan, fuck with Libya, fuck with Venezuela, fuck with Iran and destabilise or outright destroy countless other societies while justifying it all with flimsy excuses or worse, invoking their Civilising Mission of proselytising Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy to rescue these poor unwashed natives from their state of barbarism (this is even applied to countries whose material conditions could not be further from their own, and where instituting an America-esque "liberal democracy" is barely feasible and cannot work). It is a national pastime for Americans, producing propaganda to justify their endless imperialism around the world while at the same time condemning when regional powers attempt to exercise influence over their immediate geopolitical sphere without the US's permission.

I'm not a leftist (I have spilled enough ink in the process of explaining how much I dislike them), but the only thing I do agree with the hippie crowd on is that US foreign intervention is absolute poison. And that's not to mention their laughable domestic politics, the likes of which they regularly export anywhere they have even the slightest amount of influence. Just unconscionable, the fact that such a country is a hegemon is disgraceful.

It seems that even the attack on that girls' school was deliberate,

This is an EXTREMELY inflammatory claim not supported by your article. Do you have any evidence for this?

destroying their desalination facilities

Is there evidence beyond the words of the Iranian regime that you support removing that the US has targeted Iranian desalination facilities?

It seems that even the attack on that girls' school was deliberate

Just to be clear, is your position that the US used a Tomahawk mission on a girls' school intentionally, knowing that is was a girls' school?

  1. The evidence is mainly lack of any reason to think to the contrary and Trump's bizarre whataboutist reaction to the question.

  2. I find that likely, though a little surprising (I doubted the intentionality just yesterday, but it being a double tap and the new actions on Tehran…). Tomahawks are very good and precise missiles (CEP like 10 meters) and the US has demonstrated immense competence in target selection.

Re: #1, the link you had includes something like a denial by Trump. I would not be surprised if the desalination plants were hit, but the neighboring states seem like more likely culprits than the United States to me. Iran claiming such a strike falsely, or using it on themselves, and then using it as a justification to strike said states desalination plants also seems quite conceivable. The targets I would expect the US to hit first if they were settling in for a longer phase of the war would be related to power generation.

Re: #2, it is possible the building was struck intentionally due to being misclassified as a target, or that the coordinates for the target strike were entered incorrectly (the school was near an IRGC facility, IIRC). Even a tenth of a percent of error makes a mistake likely over the course of thousands of target sets. That seems much more likely to me than a coordinated decision to strike a children's school.

Iran claiming such a strike falsely, or using it on themselves

Enough of this nonsense, please. Ukrainians don't bomb their own schools, Russians don't bomb their own pipelines, neither do Iranians or Israelis strike themselves, false flag is the standard excuse. I'll give you that local Arabs may have been involved but I don't see why they'd escalate in this specific manner (inviting symmetrical retaliation that's way way worse for them because they demand more on desalinated water, it can get literally existential). And on the other hand, the US-Israeli axis is clearly enjoying the carnage, have you listened to Hegseth recently? Why should I give him any benefit of the doubt? This guy is a fanatic, a drunkard and a low IQ butcher, he belongs in an asylum. Presumably the chain of command is similar.

That seems much more likely to me than a coordinated decision to strike a children's school.

Children's school or training grounds for IRGC Khameneijugend? But yes, maybe they thought it's something else. Probably they decided to err on the side of caution (ie not allowing IRGC adjacent facilities to survive).

Ukrainians don't bomb their own schools

They probably do garrison troops there. (IIRC, Amnesty International caught them dispersing vehicles in civilian areas).

false flag is the standard excuse

I don't really think you can rule false flags out, they are a pretty obvious part of a covert services toolkit with a long known history (and presumably every so often they work so well they are never detected).

I do think it's stupid to blame every single thing on a false flag - there has to be a rationale for it. As you point out below, Iran stands to asymmetrically gain from attacking desalination plants. Has there been any satellite confirmation such an attack even occurred? Because the Iranians might also just be lying or mistaken.

(inviting symmetrical retaliation that's way way worse for them because they demand more on desalinated water, it can get literally existential)

Right, so...why would the US do this? Presumably this would alienate its regional allies!

Probably they decided to err on the side of caution (ie not allowing IRGC adjacent facilities to survive).

My understanding is that the building was initially part of (within the walls of) the IRGC compound. It seems likely to me that the US used an old target set list. Probably what happened is something like this:

  • There is a list of assessed-to-be-active IRGC facilities
  • There is a list of GPS coordinates associated with those facilities
  • These lists are being reviewed and updated periodically. They were first compiled before the school perimeter change (in the 2000s or 2010s)
  • The team tasked with reviewing the first list (correctly) determined the IRGC facilities was still active
  • The team (or I might even guess at this point image-matching software) looking at the imagery to see if anything changed confirmed the relevant IRGC facility still had the same buildings at the same coordinates
  • The detail that the perimeter had changed was not noticed or taken into account
  • The US triple-tapped a girl's school

Regarding the school, all signs point to it being a (massive and easily avoidable) fuckup by US intelligence. The school building was, until sometime about 10 years ago, part of the IRGC base which was targeted. It is now fenced off from the base (because it is a school) but from the air appears to be part of the same complex (because a decade ago, it was). A clinic which also was once part of the base was destroyed as well. By all appearances the government rushed into this war without adequate planning or preparation. It is highly likely that a commander pulled up this base from a target list which had been drawn up before that building was converted to a school, and which had never been updated. Certainly that’s more likely than the same commander sitting down and deciding “in addition to this military base, I also want to bomb the school next door.”

You can refer to the photos in this article: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5735801/satellite-imagery-shows-strike-that-destroyed-iranian-school-was-more-extensive-than-first-reported. NPR is an American source, of course, but not one with any interest in making Trump’s moronic war of choice look good.

I must note that this “stupidity defense” is indeed not a very strong defense, morally speaking. We are still directly responsible for the deaths of over 100 innocent civilians, mostly children. But there’s no reason to think the US intentionally bombed a school. Occam’s razor. What would there be to gain by doing so? The effect of the bombing is only to strengthen Iranians’ will to fight, weaken American support for the war, and reduce the chances of neutral countries choosing our side.

In that case, wouldn't a large portion of the blame lie with the IRGC for placing a school and hospital so close to a military base so as to be virtually indistinguishable from the air? That sounds an awful lot like fortifying your military position with innocent bodies to me.

There are plenty of overseas US bases that have medical facilities and schools for families of soldiers. And plenty of US military facilities that are directly in the middle of urban areas: San Diego, San Antonio, Norfolk, Alameda, Annapolis, and so on.

Unfortunately screwups are common enough in large war as to be unavoidable. The lesson I take from these sorts of things is "if it's not worth killing a bunch of schoolkids, don't go to war."

I donated to Trump, I voted for him in the primary, and all three elections. From 2015 to 2025, my main complaint about Trump was that taco was happening too often.

I think attacking Iran was probably the worst strategic blunder in history. 20% of the world's crude oil flows through Hormuz. Worse 30% of the world's LNG and 30% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer. Thanks to a bunch of brilliant people we feed 8 billion people and counting thanks mostly to nitrogen fertilizer. It needs to be in place with planting which leaves a narrow window to get the supply that hasn't moved for almost a week moving. Finally a significant percentage of the world's sulfer also flows through there (it's a byproduct of refining crude). Sulfer is needed for copper refining so when that stockpile is used up so does semiconductor production (if LNG electricity in Taiwan doesn't stop it first). There are a massive web of gigantic world economic industries that all depend on inputs from inside the Persian Gulf.

Insurance is gone for a straight of Hormuz crossing. Every P&I Club pulled their policies effective Thursday. In a best case scenario and hostilities cease now, there's no guarantee it comes back because the risk of it happening again remains and is costly to calculate and they don't have enough capital to backstop the new business reality.

It takes time for governments to set up backstops and in that time we are very likely to miss important milestones like Taiwan runs out of natural gas or fertilizer never gets applied to spring 2026 planting.

Worse, there almost nothing that can be offered to Iran to get them to stop. if we try to make them stop. They have 90 million people in a mountain fortress full of missiles and drones and a week of bombing has only gotten potentially half the launchers. They make the drones that have completely stalemated Ukraine and Russia, so a ground invasion into endless drones is a slow costly bloody mess. Nukes don't solve this problem, and leave the US and Israel as pariah states or potentially kick off MAD.

There is nothing 90% of voters want or care about to be gained by hostilities and every other exit is massively costly. This was a giant, obvious trap (everything I mentioned above was or should have been well known to planners in advance of bombings) and Trump walked right into it thanks to at best flattery and at worst being a blackmailed child rapist.

We didn't even refill the SPR from the drawdowns, before attacking the nation that any idiot on the street would tell you they'd threaten Hormuz. Inexcusable blunder in my opinion.

Yeah, the whole ground invasion thing seems like it's going to be a meatgrinder for whatever forces get sent in, you'd need excellent air defense cover against drones to protect your own soldiers on enemy land, otherwise we're getting drone videos posted to /r/CombatFootage with Americans getting blown up instead of Russians, which at the very least will garner some interesting reactions...

Lol. Obviously the mods, failing that the admins, failing that the government of the United States would never let footage of American troops getting brutally merc'd onto /r/combatfootage.

I was right by the way.

It'll just be on the infinite plethora of Russian/Chinese sites that'll pop up to host and mirror. The CCP would happily and enthusiastically dump any number of millions of dollars into "dead American warporn YouTube"

Is there reason to think the Iranians have procured tactical antipersonnel drones in large numbers? It would make sense for them to do that, it's just that most of the media I've seen covering Iranian done procurement has been about Shaheds.

Obviously they are trivially easy to make, but I'm not sure if Iran is in a position to procure them quickly in large numbers if they don't have them stockpiled.

Every P&I Club pulled their policies effective Thursday.

Yeah, they're the only friend Iran has.

Ok bad or not it's I doubt it's even in the top 1000 strategic blunders in history, however this ends it's unlikely to end with the entire population of the United States, or even a mere twentieth of its population, dead or destitute or enslaved or similar, and that is not true of a lot of strategic blunders.

I'm still so fucking mad about the mRNA vaccines

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3

any idiot on the street would tell you they'd threaten Hormuz

It's probably worth noting that not attacking Iran doesn't guarantee they won't threaten Hormuz. In fact the last time an Iran was involved in shutting down an international waterway was...2025.

Furthermore, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon (and allegedly their opening stance in negotiations with the US was "we're sitting on 11 bombs worth of uranium right now" then its ability to close the strait will arguably be enhanced, since they will be a nuclear-armed state.

I think it's all right to be skeptical of this action – I've argued against past proposals for intervention in Iran – and, well, we'll see how this one turns out. I think the points you raise here are fair. I just want to flag the counterpoint is that "Iran doing this but with nukes" is worse. And while Americans often flatter ourselves that just leaving everyone the heck alone would remove the incentive for people to do things that hurt us, the truth is that Iran might very well close the strait in a regional tiff with its neighbors that has nothing to do with us.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the US-as-global-hegemon. I think it corrupts our incentives and our institutions. But the benefits of someone saying "I will explode you if you touch the global trade routes" are greater than zero.

I think taking the country and the troops hostage to your insane decisions is spiritually treasonous, if not treason by the letter of the law. Even if we grant (which I do not) that we really are irrevocably committed, the first thing to do would be to remove Trump and his cabinet and replace them with less corrupt, inept, and irresponsible leadership.

Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.

See, I think what is going to happen is that we're going to bomb them for a while more, kill a bunch of people, and then proclaim victory and go home having accomplished very little. Sure, we'll have blown up some Iranian military hardware, destroyed a bunch of civilian infrastructure, killed some replaceable autocrats, and killed a lot of civilians. After which the IRI will rebuild and redouble its quest for a nuclear weapon. Trump does not believe in the Pottery Barn principle and he has a notoriously short attention span. Hegseth has openly stated that we're not in it for regime change and thinks war crimes are badass. So from where I stand, the options are 1) stop the war now and stop killing people, despite the job being 'unfinished' 2) keep the war going, killing a lot more people, and still leave the job unfinished. Either way, at the end of this we're going to be back to negotiating with IRI leadership.

Really, Trump II has really cemented my opinion that we need to gut the executive. The ability of the presidency to embroil the US in a major conflict unilaterally is untenable, and the notional justification for this broad authority doesn't seem to have much real-world basis.

them with less corrupt, inept, and irresponsible leadership.

I have a news for you - there isn't any. It's neocons all the way down. At least Trump with adventures - he keeps like Clinton only in the air and with low US body count.

Really, Trump II has really cemented my opinion that we need to gut the executive

The Congress has spent the better part of a century removing power from itself and piling it onto the executive. Why do you think that it will be easily reversed when the Dems are hungry to do the imperial presidency too.

There are no people left in the congress willing to defend the commons.

Skibboleth did not actually say that he thought gutting the executive would be easy, or that it is on the Dems' agenda. He said that it needs to be done. It may very well be that no one will do the necessary thing, but it's still necessary.

If the war is called off now, the IRGC will press to finish developing nuclear weapons, engage in an extraordinary program of domestic repression and ultimately emerge as the much firmer, more cemented, and even more indisputable ruling elite of Iran. Will they nuke Israel after a cessation of hostilities? I doubt it. If there is a nuclear attack it will happen during a long war of at least several months, probably a rough or dirty bomb using the current 60% enriched material, put together quickly over a month, smuggled into Israel, Dubai, or somewhere else by an IRGC remnant unit operating under limited central authority. Someone like Pezeshkian wouldn’t even know about it until it happened.

The problem is, all of that might happen anyway, underscoring what a poor decision this war has been so far. As I said, there was only one chance to do this and it would have been while 2m+ Iranians were protesting, take out the leadership, police stations, basij, IRGC hubs, then hope that the institutions get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of human movement before anyone regroups, and then bring in US forces to ‘defend’ the (counter)revolution either overtly or quietly. Doing it after all the most aggressive / low inhibition protestors have been killed is pointless, a bunch of scared middle class people in Tehran are now supposed to, what, message each other on Telegram and try to storm parliament, when there are 800,000 soldiers, some who care and some who don’t, and 150,000 deeply ideologically committed IRGC fighters out to avenge their spiritual leader?

You don't think this measurably increases the chance of a proactive nuclear attack? (terrorist or otherwise).

I imagine the more religious end of Iranian politics would push hard for it.

It increases it hugely during a conflict. Afterwards the incentives change, especially after a very shameful US withdrawal / unilateral cessation of hostilities, in which case the smart move for them is to complete the bomb, display it publicly, make clear there are many spares distributed across hardened underground facilities, and so a state of nuclear MAD has been reached with Israel.

Twelver Shias really do have a millenarian eschatology but I don’t think that says much about how likely they would be to use that nuclear weapon. In addition, there would be a price to pay for breaking the 80 year nuclear taboo diplomatically, including with Russia and China (since a successful wartime use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly lead to Poland, Japan and others getting the bomb, which is contrary to the political desires of those states).

Lastly, it’s unclear that a nuclear attack on Israel, depending on scale, would 100% be the end of Israel or (viable) Zionism. It might well be, and presumably this theory involves the subsequent storming (after the deaths of 800k+ Israelis) of the country from multiple sides by an army of angry Muslims, both ‘axis of resistance’ and otherwise Sunnis from Egypt, Syria etc just caught up in the nature of things. But it also might not, Israel would retaliate with nuclear attacks, the population is well armed, it’s possible the US could intervene, there could be a period of anarchy before a Jewish state of a kind is restored, there a number of scenarios.

So certainly it increases the chance, yes. But I don’t think that a regime that survives intact under, say, Khamenei’s son will necessarily do it. That an Iran that survives will get nuclear weapons though is inevitable, surely.

Lastly, it’s unclear that a nuclear attack on Israel, depending on scale, would 100% be the end of Israel or (viable) Zionism.

Does Iran even have a sufficiently reliable delivery mechanism for this to be viable? At least a decent chunk of their ballistic attacks have been intercepted. Landing a nuclear warhead might have some (debatable) tactical/strategic benefit, but a bunch of spicy isotopes getting detected after a ballistic missile interception only has all of the fallout (heh). Existing nuclear powers trying to limit the viability of proliferation, and so forth.

And given Israel's intelligence victories over Iran previously, it seems likely they'd have advance knowledge of such an attempt, and likely have interceptor missiles earmarked specifically for, uh, non-conventional warheads.

Trump could offer a Palestinian State and the expulsion of the Jews from the West Bank in exchange for significant compromise on Iran's nuclear capabilities and tech.

No nuclear enrichment, lift sanctions, Palestinian state, expel the Jews from the West Bank and make the West Bank part of Palestine. No Israeli presence in Syria.

The real problem is the only sane offramps would go against Israel, we aren't actually in an unresolvable situation, it only seems there's no offramp because we aren't allowed to compromise the interests of Israel for the interests of America and the rest of the world.

No nuclear enrichment, lift sanctions, Palestinian state, expel the Jews from the West Bank and make the West Bank part of Palestine. No Israeli presence in Syria.

Would Iran also have to publically dismantle its Doomsday Countdown Clock?

Broadly I agree with that kind of two state solution but it’s also very explicitly against the absolute antizionism embedded in the foundation of the Islamic revolution, in which any Israeli state ie ‘Zionist entity’ is illegitimate; this was the Iranian position even when in the late 1980s and early 1990s a two state solution that involved the removal of most Jewish settlements was on the table.

Given the last 40 years there is no reason to believe that either party would take those limitations seriously so you might as well premise your "peace" deal on alien space bats and magical unicorn farts.

The Palestinians and Arab States have had multiple opportunities to implement a two state solution and they've blown it up every time.

Here's an easy deal: you can call it treason after Congress declares war (or otherwise formally approves military operations against Iran).

Up until that point this is purely the whims of the President, not the elected representatives of the country. Opposing Trump is no more treason than opposing Biden or Obama.

Okay we hold back and don't use the big scary T word, which is fair, the legislature needs to be able to express itself even if it's a terrible idea.

But again, what happens if we just stop now? Everyone is worse off - Americans and everyone else will likely die.

Doesn't that make the actions un-American? Irresponsible?

Being mad that we are here doesn't seem unreasonable. Trying to make everything worse in the frustration doesn't seem wise.

Is Trump's invasion un-American and irresponsible? I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish. If he wants to remove the Islamic Republic and ensure that they never get nukes, he isn't going to do that by lobbing missiles at them. He needs to put an invasion force together of about a half-million troops to occupy the cities and find and permanently destroy all of the nuclear sites, and make a firm commitment that they will not leave until the mission is accomplished, even if it takes decades. Of course, he won't do that, because it would be incredibly unpopular, but his current stance amounts to some sort of permanent dicking around, and his own intelligence tells him that. If he stops the war and resigns then Vance or whoever might be able to do a sufficient amount of groveling to avoid the worst of the repercussions.

Doesn't that make the actions un-American? Irresponsible?

No. A reasonable person can look at the situation in Iran and conclude that the best thing for American interests is to get out now. You obviously disagree with that, and that's fine (I'm not actually trying to take a stand on that point), but the contrary position is not somehow beyond the pale such that one can't imagine someone would take it up only in a bad-faith attempt to make our country worse off.

We spent 20 years in Afghanistan with literally nothing to show for it but lost blood and treasure. That makes "We can't stop now, we'll have accomplished nothing" a much weaker argument.

I don't object, per se, to acting against Iran. Contra our Jew-haters, it's in our interests as much as Israel's to put an end to the regime.

But I have no confidence in Trump's vision or plan. I expect we'll bomb them for a while, Trump will declare victory and stop, and Iran will still be Iran, just shaken, somewhat weakened, and still hankering for revenge.

But I have no confidence in Trump's vision or plan. I expect we'll bomb them for a while, Trump will declare victory and stop, and Iran will still be Iran, just shaken, somewhat weakened, and still hankering for revenge.

This is exactly my concern. An Afghanistan style solution does not seem likely to be helpful, Israel and the US Military (but perhaps, not Trump) may have a plan that could work - but if the propaganda apparatus is efficacious enough Trump will bail and we'll be stuck with a hankering for revenge outcome.

That's worse for everybody.

Israel and the US Military (but perhaps, not Trump) may have a plan that could work - but if the propaganda apparatus is efficacious enough Trump will bail and we'll be stuck with a hankering for revenge outcome.

Does anyone actually have any idea what this plan is? Has it been expressed to anyone publicly?

If it's a plan that won't work, isn't it treasonous to support it by your standard?

The problem is that America is a democratic republic. A section of Trump's vote was won on no more war/America first, or at least a leader that represented their interests in no war.

Now it appears as if the vast unaccountable artifice that wants war is actually more capable of setting foreign policy than the leader. This signals that the leader is useless at representing the people's interests.

If they want popular support for the war, the war needs to be successfully sold to the public, with reasons given for why the war is in America's best interest. If this is not done, the public will come up with their own explanations.

They didn't supply a good, or even bad reason. They didn't give a reason at all. I'm sure someone could come up with great explanations for why this was necessary, and a nuclear armed Iran doesn't seem great. But the incoherent noises from the government when asked to explain their situation do not inspire confidence.

There is a conspiracy theory that this is all a test, like a ratchet, to see how much people are willing to accept from their leaders. The hypernormalization of involvement in conflict, without a perceivable reason. There is another conspiracy theory that this is being done to distract from the frustration around the Epstein files, or the slightly related one that Mossad has significant kompromat on key American politicians related to Epstein and is using it as a lever to get them to assist with their war effort. There is another conspiracy theory that the evangelical wing of American politics has struck a deal with the Zionists to usher in the fucking apocalypse.

After Covid, I can no longer discount even the wildest of conspiracy theories as entirely without merit.

There is a conspiracy theory that this is all a test, like a ratchet, to see how much people are willing to accept from their leaders

It might not be an intentional test, but there is definitely a test going on for just how much the so called "conservatives" have sold their soul into a cult of personality. I always assumed in 1984 when they said "we've always been at war with Eurasia", the government would have at least taken down all the "we are not at war with Eurasia" propaganda first.

But the point about loyalty tests is the absurdity. The more you're willing to show blatant disregard for basic reason in favor of bootlicking, the more trustworthy you seem.

There is another conspiracy theory that the evangelical wing of American politics has struck a deal with the Zionists to usher in the fucking apocalypse.

The evangelical right has been very open about this for decades. It's not a conspiracy theory when they literally say it is their motivation.

Trump was the one who decided to do this, not some faceless artifice you can conveniently point to. He’s been very publicly suffering from some sort of war mania for quite some time now.

I’m sure some deeper figures in the war and Israel lobby apparatus talked him up a great game of how easy and great it was going to be. But the one who has been obviously giddy about blowing things up in foreign lands is the guy at the top as well as all of his top advisors.

Why do you describe it like Trump was simply absent when all this was decided? Trump didn't simply fail to stop them, he is on board with it.

The people who wanted no war voted for a guy who constantly flip-flops, and this was a completely foreseeable outcome of that.

In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel

So the line of argument is this:

Israel and America start bombing Iran in a predictably ineffective campaign to incite regime change - Israelis hardest hit since the Iranians might nuke Israel in retaliation. So the bombing must continue and intensify, perhaps followed up by a ground invasion since bombing alone isn't going to work!

Saddam Hussein launched a full ground invasion of Iran. He gassed Iranian civilians as part of a terror bombing campaign (with the support of much of the international community, including the US). The war lasted 8 years. The Iranians did not later acquire nukes and did not nuke Baghdad, they did not even gas the Iraqis back. Iraq was not even a nuclear power so there were no especially strong reasons not to nuke Iraq.

Why would Iran nuke Israel now when it didn't nuke Iraq? Israel has hundreds of nukes and would doubtless fire back.

And what is the proposed plan to finish the job? Destabilize the region more by bombing Iran harder, having Iran bomb the Gulf harder? Bombing alone has proven ineffective at achieving regime change. A ground invasion of an extremely mountainous country of 90 million? The US military would be fighting alone and would almost certainly get bogged down as China floods Iran with arms and aid. Meanwhile Iran would've suffered enormous casualties and be, if anything, more inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Clearly their conventional forces are not sufficient to deter foreign attack! An enormous, bloody, ruinously expensive, strategically disastrous clusterfuck.

What the US really needs is smart leaders who appreciate what can and cannot be done with military power, who can judge the risks and benefits clearly, who have the wisdom to ignore the latest dossier of Israeli 'intelligence' about WMDs.

Leaving the job 'half done' is the best case scenario here. The US is not militarily or politically strong enough to launch a successful ground invasion. Nothing short of a ground invasion is going to achieve the kind of regime America is looking for. Probably not even that. You can't bomb people into becoming pro-Israeli.

I think that's kind of treasonous?

It is not treasonous for Americans to pursue American interests by enforcing constitutional constraints on waging war. I am not American for what its worth.

Being opposed to the war is not treason. Treason would be something like assisting Iran. It's conceivably possible that a congressman might do this, but it probably looks more like Bob Menendez-type behavior than a political stunt.

As far as democrats' political behavior, this is pretty normal for late-stage republics. Iran can't really hurt us that much; obviously attacking them was dumb, but we're kind of committed now. The real question is 'is the local allies part of the plan going to work'. I don't have the highest hopes, but Iran is kind of falling apart right now.

Being opposed to the war is not treason.

I feel like my point was missed by the majority of posters (which could easily be my fault).

The problem is not opposing the war, it's serving as opposition to the war effort, which some people are clearly doing.

You have a difference between not wanting to spend American lives in Vietnam and giving aid to the VC, or even just hoping that the VC win.

I mean I get the argument on pragmatic grounds, but in theory the political process (i.e. the democratic part of government) is specifically entrusted with deciding who to go to war against and how. So on that level it's nonsensical to say opposing (non-democratic!) decisions about going to war isn't or shouldn't be allowed.

In other words, there's an okay argument you can make that it would be nice if people supported the war effort even if they oppose the war, but upgrading that to people ought to support the war effort even if they oppose the war is an argument that's at least out of sync with the Constitution and our history. Morally sure, you can still say that, everyone can have their opinion.

Haven't all American wars had significant numbers serving as opposition to the war efforts? Even WWII? And riots in New York city against conscription during the Civil War? Is there something different with what's going on now that I'm not seeing?

Yeah, the near-unanimity. Or apparent near-unanimity, anyway. Everywhere I look the story is that the US cannot win this war, in fact is losing as we speak, and has hit nothing but civilian infrastructure, schools, and world heritage sites. That Iran's launch capability cannot be stopped, that their nuclear materials are being recovered as we speak, and that the US can do nothing about their nuclear program. That Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed indefinitely and there's nothing the US can do about it, that the IRGC will remain in control and remain defiant, and that the question is not whether the Iranian regime can survive this war but whether the American one can.

Or maybe it's just CNN, X, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Reuters, AP, and The Wall Street Journal.

An American joining a chant of "Death to America" probably isn't treason (but if the American knew the chant was organized by the hostile state, I could see it), but it's pretty bad nevertheless. This is getting pretty close to the line, assuming any of those people are actually American citizens. "Solidarity with Iran" is pretty bad in terms of "adhering to their enemies".

(Why can I find no mention of this in US media... including Fox? Maybe nobody at any of those agencies speaks Farsi)

It's probably not mentioned because at least going by the one picture, this is like 30 people. Size of protests matter. You can pretty easily get 30 people to show up at a protest over a pretty stupid issue, especially in NYC

This is getting pretty close to the line

That is protected 1st amendment speech. And who actually cares what those privileged mamma's boys say? Blow them off, tell them to their face's they're assholes, or punch them in the nose and take the consequences. But spoiled brats acting out suggests not at all that the FBI and Justice Department need to be involved because Western Civilization is about to collapse.

A DIA analysts secretly passing intel reports to Iran or their proxies would be treason. This isn't just not in that neighborhood, it's not even in the same zip code.

The United States exists in the first place because a bunch of people committed treason. Treason is not automatically bad. It's kind of incoherent for an American to criticize treason. What even is treason? It's a very "in the eye of the beholder" thing, isn't it? Is the US government currently encouraging Iranian civilians to commit treason against their government?

If we follow your logic, the US government will be able to start any war it wants to at any time and, if stopping it half-way might cause chaos, we'll have to support it. We will have to suspend attempts to attack the ruling administration, since that might interfere with the war. Basically, we would turn the US into a country that is regularly ruled by military dictators. Maybe we'd even bring back the Espionage Act and make it illegal to criticize the war effort. I don't like that idea.

The United States exists in the first place because a bunch of people committed treason. Treason is not automatically bad. It's kind of incoherent for an American to criticize treason. What even is treason? It's a very "in the eye of the beholder" thing, isn't it?

If it's in the eye of the beholder then where's the problem in finding some actions unjustified and others not?

"Treason is a charge invented by winners as an excuse to hang the losers."

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?/Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

--Sir John Harington, who might have also invented the flushing toilet.

It's kind of incoherent for an American to criticize treason.

Not really. A traitor breaks the social compact/sacred bond that binds countrymen.

And a big grievance of the American revolutionaries was that (from their perspective) the British government broke that social compact/sacred bond first.

Thank you. I could go off on a long rant about this, but best not to distract the conversation so much.

It's the type of 'historical revisionism bordering on a lie' that even Americans have started to believe it.

Makes part of me want to dust off my half-finished effortpost about the larger theoretical justifications for secession/revolution. It's actually a pretty diverse set of belief systems.

However you're right, generally speaking that's the US approach in terms of its political heritage, so a reasonable default. The Confederacy tried to pull that card, but the Northerners (rightly, IMO) said that OK, fine, even if you think that the North is breaking the slavery-compact part of the Constitution (not even a 'fundamental right'), you were mostly whiny losers about it (leaving when Lincoln gets elected and before he even does anything) instead of trying to exhaust all reasonable options first (what the Declaration of Independence was claiming the colonies had done).

Now whether you think the OG Founders were exaggerating when they claimed that their revolution was the only, reluctantly embraced option or not is a separate issue :)

instead of trying to exhaust all reasonable options first

It's probably worth noting that South Carolina pretty much yoloed themselves into it face first. Some of the other states (I don't recall the breakdown off the top of my head) did not secede until after it was very clear that Lincoln was actually going to march an army to take them back.

whether you think the OG Founders were exaggerating when they claimed that their revolution was the only, reluctantly embraced option or not is a separate issue :)

I think there's decent evidence they overfit a pattern of British conduct and attributed it to malice. Something like a sincere but perhaps not fully rational belief.

Having had a British education, I always find myself chuckling when extremely-online libs start fulminating about how Confederates were "traitors". Maybe you should have paid for your tea!

More seriously, I think the motte definition of treason in an American context is "aiding enemies of the country in a context where the right of revolution does not apply". The concept of the right of revolution is critical to the Founders' political thought, for obvious reasons (vide), but it was a complex concept that is inextricable from the right of self-defense in e.g. Hobbes/Locke and can't easily be applied in a modern context.

Having had a British education, I always find myself chuckling when extremely-online libs start fulminating about how Confederates were "traitors". Maybe you should have paid for your tea!

When I'm in a snarky mood, I refer to the American War of Independence and the American Civil War as the "First Slavers' Treason" and "Second Slavers' Treason" respectively.

Hobbes/Locke and can't easily be applied in a modern context.

Former commentors here like David Friedman and HlynkaCG would disagree but that's also a big part of why they're former commentors.

To be clear, I am a big fan of both thinkers, particularly Hobbes - just because an idea is difficult to apply doesn't mean that it's not productive or even necessary to do so. But they're difficult, even if they're both excellent writers, and it's very easy to get them wrong if you're approaching with a modern conceptual vocabulary (e.g. the kudzu tangle that is the modern conception of "rights"). Argued plenty with good old Hlynka over Hobbes.

I'm assuming those two people were banned (I've seen references to Hlynka before) but what does that have to do with Hobbes/Locke? I'm assuming the mods aren't massive haters of those two philosophers lol

Hlynka talked about Hobbes a lot (that wasn't why he was banned though).

both in the firm prosecutable sort

Treason is defined by the Constitution and does not include criticism of the President or his policies. I know this is trivially dismissing the premise, but thems the facts.

In a less formal sense: I recall the mood during the invasion of Iraq. A lot of support and also plenty of bitter criticism. This is normal in the post-Vietnam era.

"Treason" is covered under title 18 of the US federal code and is defined as levying war against the United States or aiding others in doing so.

So in this context actively helping the Iranian regime defend themselves against US military aggression, or engaging in sabotage activities to limit the US military's ability to fight would arguably be "Treason", but that's not really the sort of thing we are talking about here is it?

The sort of culture war fodder we're talking about here would fall under "Sedition" which is much less clearly defined but basically boils down to plotting or advocating for the overthrow of the US government. I feel like a lot of people are using the term "treasonous" when they really mean "seditious" or "morally bankrupt" to get that extra little bit of rhetorical punch in describing something that is "treason adjacent" even if it isn't treason itself.

I'll eat my hat if 10% of Americans could define sedition. The reason people call it treason is because modern Americans have lost the vocabulary to communicate subtlety.

When the metric keeps changing it's a very useless term to use. Just a few months ago it was mainstream Republican view that interventionism and fucking with the middle east was a waste of time even at best and potentially dangerous. We spent the whole last year justifying the admin's dwindling support of Ukraine as a "pivot to Asia" and now we're back in the middle east again for ?????? They won't even give a cohesive explanation, the reasons keep shifting around at their whim (likely because if you give an actual goal, then you actually have to achieve it instead of just claiming victory whenever you feel like it). Even before the election the conservative argument was that Harris would be the one shooting missiles into Iran and potentially putting soldiers on the ground, the this you account on Twitter has documented a few of them.

It's absolutely insane that some people are trying to argue having actual principles and beliefs instead of being hypocrite liars who turn on a dime because Israel and Trump under them told them to is treasonous behavior. If anyone is a traitor, it's the people who lie to the American public (with the aid of foreign spy agencies mind you) and get elected on false promises. That's not loyalty to Americans, that's treating us citizen goyims as cattle and sheep who you think are too stupid to recognize it and won't notice. Well too bad, this war is really unpopular and there hasn't been a "rally around the flag" effect. Turns out the American people aren't brainless and don't just become your fans over a war you started because Israel told you to.

Edit: Also quite interesting this happens just a few days before they had to release the part of the Epstein files where we find out the guards were talking about a coverup of Epstein's death, saying he was killed, and also mysteriously depositing tons of money in cash over a period of a few months right around that time. What a strange coincidence that Israel and the US would want a headline consuming war started right at this exact time.

I agree with a lot of your concerns, but a clear case for Iran now can be made as part of a pivot to Asia. That basically gives US full control over the global oil market. It would just be Russia outside of the American block. US would have a credible card of cutting Chinese oil supplies 80% during a Taiwan War.

The US already had those cards given its ability to sanction or blockade pretty much any oil exporter at will and/or blockade China. The only reason that Chinese purchases dominated Venezuelan and Iranian exports in the first place is that they were pretty much the only ones who would buy from them thanks to US sanctions, and as much as the sanction discount was easy money for the Chinese it isn't that important. China also buys lots of oil (much more than from Iran and Venezuela combined) from Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, along with Iraq. Are we going to sanction all of them as well?

"simply blockage the Malacca strait" needs to stop. I honestly might make a copy pasta for this.

Here's a lazy version:

  1. it is likely, but not guaranteed, that the USA could station enough forces to maintain a blockade , but we'll assume it does for the rest of this analysis

  2. blockades are effective, but not a kill switch. Germany got blockaded quite hard in both world wars. It definitely contributed to its downfall. That downfall still took many years and massive amounts of boots on the ground effort and death.

  3. China shares a massive land border with a massive oil producer who hates the USA, Russia. They don't have enough pipelines, and it's actually odd that China is slow rolling the power of Siberia 2, but they could speed it up if they wanted.

  4. a clear part of belt and road was to start hedging against a Malacca blockade (and to soak up absurd domestic construction capacity), it's not going great , but they're thinking about it

  5. speaking of thinking about it, China is a world leader in solar and EVs , you ever wonder why they're going balls deep into tech that reduces oil dependency??? They can run their warships and planes for years on domestic production, storage, and Russian imports.

  6. China is calorie self sufficient. They import a ton of food, but they could live off their own rice if they had to. They also share a giant land border with a country that grows a ton of food and hates America (it's Russia again!).

  7. the Chinese people can soak a lot of pain. They won't like having no gas and eating rice, but their grandparents remember way worse.

  8. if you think China has an energy/calorie import problem, you should look at Taiwan and Japan. Both of them need to import WAY WAY more of their energy/calories as a % of demand. Japan could get away with only offloading with Pacific ports, although that would suck. Taiwan just immediately starves to death and collapses. There are no (0) ports that Taiwan can use that can't be missile/mine spammed from the Chinese mainland.

  9. on another note, a ridiculous amount of global trade goes through Malacca. The USA will deeply upset the rest of the world by doing this. You can say "yes but fuck the rest of the world, we have super carriers" which is true. But when you're in a peer fight against a peer who's got home field advantage, you are not helping yourself by doing this.

I'm so fucking sick of "erm, we'll simply blockade the straits of Malacca and they'll fold, gg" when the entire population of Taiwan will have starved 5 times over before China even starts going "damn are we sure we want to spend the fuel on this sortie right now?"

United States Constitution, Article III, section 3:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

A U. S. citizen joining an Iranian foreign volunteer brigade and shooting at U. S. troops would be guilty of treason. A U. S. citizen giving Iranian intelligence the encryption keys to U. S. military communications would be guilty of treason. Advocating that the United States stop waging war against Iran, however ill-advised that course of action may be, is not treason.

This is why I drove a distinction between (T)reason and (t)reason in my post.

What about lying about the state of the war to help Iranian propaganda efforts? Say, creating AI videos that purport to show Iran winning military victories against the US and presenting them as real news?

What did we consider Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw? But is it different if they're just being fooled by Iranian propaganda and reporting what they believe is the truth (and making AI videos or other art to display said "truth"), vice actively taking official marching orders from the regime?

That's the blurry edge. What's the difference between a gullible idiot and someone just explicitly rooting for the other side?

Personally, for my own safety's sake, I'd rather we err heavily on the side of "assuming people are/protecting gullible idiots".

That's fine and fair. I more think this is a ripe scenario for thought experiments and teasing the outlines of things, than I am, say, calling for twitter posters to be jailed.

Imagine you were a juror in a case involving this sort of thing. What kind of evidence would you want to see to conclude that a person was an actively bad actor trying to sabotage their own nation? Or do you think idiocy is a fully general defense?

What is your (interpretation of the) definition of treason such that it being a lie rather than the truth makes a difference?

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

If the claims are literally true, then there would be reasonable value in propagating them beyond being a partisan for the other side. If the claims are not true, and you reasonable ought to have known that (as in, you had to have an AI generate the footage you're purporting to supply as "news" because it just doesn't exist), then your actions are a much cleaner, likely entirely indefensible, fit for "giving them Aid and Comfort".

The reason that I would speculate there may be some actual treason or sedition cases during this war, in particular, is because of the huge network of Arab/Islamic "Advocacy" organizations in the US, many of which already stand credibly accused of funneling money and materials to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are Iranian proxies. I would not be surprised to learn many of them are sending cash or intel to the IRGC.

huge network of Arab/Islamic "Advocacy" organizations in the US, many of which already stand credibly accused of funneling money and materials to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are Iranian proxies. I would not be surprised to learn many of them are sending cash or intel to the IRGC.

You'd at least have half a case for those being treason. What isn't treason, what is ipso fatso unconstitutional to treat as treason, is expressing disagreement with government policy.

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." --Edward R. Murrow

Why would I bring up money if I was talking about speech?

The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge.

That's a quote from Talaat Pasha, who has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide. In some sense he was not wrong. After the war Armenians systematically assassinated a bunch of Ottomon war criminals involved in the genocide, including Pasha himself. Pasha was murdered in Berlin where he lived after the war. His Armenian killer said during the trial "I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer." The German court proceeded the acquit him from murder.

"Okay maybe we started an unjust war, but now we have to finish our killing otherwise they might take revenge" might well be a factually correct statement, but it isn't going to get you a lot of sympathy.

It sounds like you disagree with what is happening. The point is that people are turning that disagreement into making things worse for everyone or attempting to do so.

So don't do that.

Treason would be literally aiding and abetting the enemy, which despite many people's attempts to claim it is so during every conflict, does not include "Speaking out against the war."

Also, you need a declared war for there to be treason.

Taking your point more figuratively, you're just arguing that we should all get on board because Trump made it a fait accompli. But Trump has a short attention span and no conviction. Opponents of the war have every reason to believe he'll TACO if popularity drops. If you believe the war is a bad idea to begin with, 'leaving it half done ' isn't a compelling argument to keep going.

Treason would be literally aiding and abetting the enemy, which despite many people's attempts to claim it is so during every conflict, does not include "Speaking out against the war."

Eh, there's a point where colloquial usage is fair. I would say that if an opposition Senator gave information to the Iranian regime, that ought to count enough for "slander" purposes, even without a formal declaration.

But Trump has a short attention span and no conviction.

Trump has been talking about fucking up Iran since the 80s.

Also, you need a declared war for there to be treason.

This is simply not true, over the last century numerous people have been successfully prosecuted on charges of Treason and even executed for aiding enemies of the United States (most notably the Soviet Union) outside of a declared war.

The Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, not treason. The last person executed for treason was during the Civil War.

When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

Never? Unless you're trying some bait and switch with "criticism" in scare quotes.

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

If you're asking that question, I'm not sure that you do.

We've got an unpopular president starting a war in the middle east while conservatives close rank and accuse anyone against it to be unpatriotic traitors. Is it 2001 or 2026? I'm eagerly awaiting the return of freedom fries and politicians being pressured into wearing US flags on their lapels.

A significant part of the case for Trump in 2016 was people swearing up and down that Trump was a non-interventionist, that Killary Clinton was a mad warmongerer in the lineage of Bush who would kick off WW3 and MAGA was the only political faction that wouldn't send us to war. Trump's second term has been nothing but foreign intervention and saber-rattling! Where are those people who told me this would never happen? Weren't you one of them?

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

'Hey, I just made the case for why the guy I voted into office made a terrible decision that I swore he never would that could easily cost us trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. But ignore all that! Now that it's happened, you have to put aside your silly bickering and support the president and flag.'

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?

I have to admit, this is one of the funniest timelines. A year or so ago conservatives here were smugly telling me that Biden and Harris had ushered in a golden age for conservatives, that the left was imploding and Christianity was ascendant. Today Trump is massively unpopular, immigration agenda in shambles, and he literally decided that taking a page out of the Bush's playbook was a good idea. If he manages to preside over another financial crisis or recession, well, that would just be the cherry on top.

I'd say that I'm looking forward to hearing what those people think about the war in Iran, but if I'm being honest, it's probably just going to be more blackpills and fedposting about the fourth box of liberty.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?

More like we left the job half done in Vietnam. Afghanistan was a counter-insurgency and nation-building fight, whereas this is a pretty straight-forward destroy-the-enemy fight. We don't even need our own troops on the ground to provide advisors and support to the Artesh, communications tech has come a long way since the 60s. And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

We left the job done in Vietnam, though- the war goals never included the destruction of the north Vietnamese commie regime.

Judging by the assessment of John McNaughton (assistant secdef for international security affairs) in March 1965, we achieved 20% of our aims.

  1. US aims:

70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

Also—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

Not—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay if asked out.

And with the US withdrawal from the conflict, we left with 90-100% of our war goals accomplished- South Vietnam remained an independent state for several years following American withdrawal, and North Vietnam promising to respect its territorial integrity was a key promise to obtain that withdrawal. That North Vietnam reneged on that promise was perhaps predictable, but when the US agreed to withdraw all of American war aims were met at the time of withdrawal.

If in 1947 Nazi Germany somehow reconquered continental Europe then the US 'winning' WW2 is rather irrelevant and minimal even if American troops marched through Berlin and went home with a peace treaty. The political goal was a failure.

I don't think the media was the main factor that made the US lose in Vietnam. The main factors were:

  1. Fear of Soviet and Chinese intervention prevented the US from invading North Vietnam.
  2. Conscription made the war more than just an abstract political event for the American population. There had been conscription during the Korean War, too, but that war ended quickly enough for conscription to not become a major political problem.

I would argue that the war ended because of media coverage of the Tet offensive. Most media treated it as a massive blow to the US, a surprise attack that showed the strength of the enemy. But militarily the offensive was a failure. It didn't meet its objectives and was very costly for the Vietcong. The media portrayed this incorrectly because they were already ideologically against the war. I agree there are many factors, but ultimately I think the US lost that war because of demoralization and successful psyops from the Vietnamese.

But the US continued waging the war for 5 years after the Tet Offensive. It still had plenty of time to win the war, and/or to make the South Vietnamese military capable of defending South Vietnam, and it failed. The US did draw down its troop strength after the Tet Offensive, which likely played a role in its failure to win the war. But even 2 years after the offensive, the US troop strength was higher than it had been in 1965.

I do think the Tet Offensive and media coverage played a large role, just not a decisive one.

If the US had used an entirely volunteer military instead of using conscription, the war would still have been very unpopular in leftist circles, but the appeal of the anti-war side would have stayed relatively limited compared to the historical timeline. After all, this was the same country that went on to elect Nixon with 60% of the electoral vote in 1972 over the anti-war McGovern, despite the conscription and the failures to win the war. The hardcore anti-Vietnam-War leftists were a small subset of the US population who loom larger than their actual size because they made a large fraction of their generation's enduring movies, music, and writing — and also because the US defeat adds to the tendency to see them as having been right. It was the draft that gave the antiwawr cause resonant widespread appeal among the youth.

If the US had invaded North Vietnam, and China and the Soviet Union did not send land troops to stop the invasion in response, the US would have suffered heavy casualties but would have almost certainly won the war decisively as a result. The fear of China and the Soviet Union sending land troops into Vietnam, and/or the Soviet Union attacking Western Europe, and/or either using nukes, was the main thing that stopped the US from invading North Vietnam.

The ARVN was capable of defending Vietnam, they defeated the first invasion following US withdrawal. But the Republic of Vietnam was an corrupt dictatorship which removed their competent generals for political reasons, leading to the army collapsing in a subsequent invasion.

Would you, personally, be in favor of a ground invasion involving 400,000–500,000 US troops? How many US killed in action do you think we should be willing to commit to? 5,000? 30,000? 50,000?

Personally I wouldn't support a ground invasion at all. If I were the boss, I would be willing to commit troops to special operations and direct action missions that would provide outsized impacts that we couldn't achieve from long range strikes - but it's not clear to me that there are many targets that require that. What exactly would be the purpose of an invasion?

Also, there aren't 500,000 currently deployable ground troops in the entire US military. There may be that many troops in total, but to get most of those units ready to deploy would take months, and then months and months more to ship them overseas a few at a time. For more context, at the peak of the Iraq war we had 170,000 troops on the ground, and less than 5,000 were killed over the course of 8 years. I'm not sure you're really calibrated on this.

I chose the invasion force numbers based on Gen. Eric Shineski's testimony before congress in 2003, when he estimated that it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfoqitz eviscerated him for this, as they knew that such numbers likely wouldn't fly with the public, whom they were trying to convince that a more nimble operation would be successful. They ended up sending about 150,000 troops for the initial invasion, but those numbers were augmented by 50,000 troops from other countries. I don't know how many troops Israel would be willing to send, but I think it's safe to say that we can't expect much help from elsewhere.

In the end, I don't know why you're bringing up actual troop numbers in Iraq at all, since that's obviously not a war we want to emulate. If we assume that Shineski's estimates were correct, and account for the fact that Iran has double the population and several times the land area, 500,000 seems like a reasonable estimate for what it would take to control the country. I brought up the casualty numbers not because I think any of those numbers are likely, but because we don't know what kind of numbers would be likely. We lost 5,000 in Iraq, but 50,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Korea.

I brought all this up because on the one hand you talk about how we weren't willing to fully commit in Vietnam but on the other talk about how this is a fight we can "easily win", and your reply makes it clear that you don't want to commit any ground troops. Well, which is it? Do you want to win, or are you willing to walk away if the air campaign doesn't achieve the objectives (which, it should be said, aren't clear right now). To my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has never been an instance where a government has been toppled due to air power alone. Libya fell due to a counterinsurgency, and again, I'm not sure that's an example we want to follow here. What do we do after we've bombed every legitimate target and the regime is still in power? Walk away? If so, that's fine, but it's also evidence that "we really didn't want to win". We may not have 500,000 troops at the ready, but we're certainly able to commit that many if necessary. We've committed more when the population was a lot lower.

it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq

I think this is the key point. He was talking about invading and occupying the country. I don't think anyone, even the most rabid war hawks, is suggesting we should occupy the whole of Iran. From what I've seen, most of the usual hawks don't want troops on the ground at all.

As I've said before, the aim seems to be to destroy the ability of the IRGC to wage war in the hope that the Artesh or some insurgent group can move in and take control. And in the case that no such group succeeds, we can still be happy with destroying as much of the IRGC military infrastructure as we can. The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.

Iran is a problem because of:

  1. Their sponsorship of terrorist groups in other countries
  2. Their nuclear program

Neither of these have to do with their conventional capabilities, which nobody was talking about until recently. They were already conventionally weak and destroying these capabilities further doesn't accomplish anything, except to possibly exacerbate the existing problems. If you want those problems to go away, you have to either negotiate or control the country. Trump didn't want to negotiate, and due to his recent actions the Iranians aren't going to be willing to negotiate either, so that option is off the table. We already hit their nuclear sites last summer, and Trump said that anyone claiming that it didn't solve the nuclear issue was reporting fake news. 8 months later and they're back to being two weeks away from a bomb. They aren't going to install a new government without some kind of occupation, and they aren't going to be able to get to the nuclear sites without boots on the ground occupying and destroying them. There's no precedent for a country capitulating due to bombing alone, except maybe Japan in 1945 if you only count the mainland. And even then we had total air and naval superiority and still had to both use nukes and send an occupying force of more than 400,000 for a country that's smaller than Iran. I have no idea what Trump thinks is magically going to happen.

The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.

How can you say that when you don't know what the cost is yet? Should Americans pay $7/gallon for gas for a year for this? Will Iranian insurgent groups periodically drone oil tankers in the Gulf for the foreseeable future? How long will it take global shipping to recover? How much money are you personally willing to lose because of this war?

So far we've seen no attempt at any action against the regime. I think the IRGC has successfully neutered all the opposition; there's no armed rival to take control. And the hard-line regime may be deep enough that you simply can't kill enough of them to find anyone willing to make a deal; if you keep killing you may just reduce the nation to ungoverned chaos.

And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

Yeah, I don't think the media is problem here. The media loves a good war.

The problem is that war is fundamentally about willpower, not firepower, and Trump has made no effort to build public support for this war. This has, in fact, been a more general aspect US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The American public isn't willing to tolerate casualties or pain because they don't believe enough in the causes their support is being demanded for, not because they're soft or because the troops are being stabbed in the back by the media.

Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"

On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).

On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".

The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) had called for sustained strong leadership to further grow the number of women employed in the sector.

The CIF said it is essential to support the drive to meet Ireland's housing, infrastructure and climate challenges.

According to the federation, just 11% of those employed in construction in Ireland are women.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee.

"The challenge is too big, and the opportunity to attract and retain the best talent to our industry is too important," he added.

The CIF is hosting an International Women’s Day Summit in Co Meath today.

The event is focused on highlighting pathways to careers in construction for women including via STEM subjects and construction-related apprenticeships.

"Our industry is changing and evolving every day and we will become even stronger as our workforce diversifies," said Joanne Treacy, Southern Regional Director with CIF.

"Our International Women’s Day Summit, which this year has the theme 'Give to Gain', will showcase an exceptional line-up of leading female experts to illustrate to women and girls from school-age onwards the vast opportunities a career in construction can bring," Ms Treacy said.

Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).

Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:

The greatest education I have ever received was in the workplace.

There is nothing quite like learning on the job, having systems and processes seared into your psyche through repetition, and occasionally learning things the hardest way of all – by enduring the shame of doing a task completely wrong and being told off.

But there is also great learning in having a job you don’t enjoy.

...The 17-year-old also learned some valuable life lessons during his recent week of work experience. He managed to get a few days working in a food production facility, and there he also learned a lot about modern food production, specifically, that much as he loves the end product, he’s not wild about being part of the magical process of making it.

It was an incredibly demanding few days, with dawn starts, long hours, and working at breakneck speeds to keep up with those around him. I’ve seen him take two days to unload a dishwasher so I can only imagine the pressure he felt.

But the experience made him start thinking about the future – any time we try to bring up college or career, he seems not to have any particular plan, or even really grasp the concept, but his work experience helped him focus on that in the same way I did.

After leaving school and dropping out of college, I worked in a kitchen for two years, where I learned a lot, mainly that I have absolutely no culinary talent, but also that I needed to go back to college and get some qualifications so I could get a job where I didn’t have to chop onions for ten hours a day.

And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.

So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".

Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".

On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).

Maybe I'm being uncharitable/overgeneralizing, but my experience is that the sort of person who says this sort of thing doesn't want women to do this kind of work, they want it as something to justifying subordinating women.

As the person who said such a thing in a recent thread with @HereAndGone2 that definitely isn't my position. I don't want women to go back to working in coal mines, I just want consistency from feminists who largely seem to only push for greater female representation in cushy white collar jobs. Or, alternatively, an admission from feminists that there are actually fundamental differences between men and women, and each are better suited for different jobs and roles in life. I am not claiming that men are superior to women when I claim they are fundamentally different, though that tends to be be the kneejerk assumption feminists make when I say such a thing. I do believe that when women attempt to live like men and assume male roles in life, they generally end up effectively becoming inferior males. But I believe the same is true of men who assume female roles.

It's mildly refreshing to see a trade organization appear to be consistent about gender equality, though I believe the real motives behind their statement are not so high-minded. I am also extremely doubtful that there will be any significant follow-through in terms of hiring trends (i.e. discrimination against men), outreach programs, etc. like we've seen for women in STEM. Most construction jobs require significant physical strength that most women are lacking, and it's far harder to paper over those differences than it is in less physical fields.

Weirdly, my younger (in college, lesbian) sister, when pressed, will outright claim that "women are better than men in every way" yet decline to call this sexism. I'm still a bit flummoxed on how to address this - I think her classic argument is along the lines of how you must view anything like racism or sexism in context of the direction of traditional oppression, but we usually don't get that far before feelings are hurt so that's the one topic we try to avoid recently when family gathers. I guess I'm inclined to simply call this a lack of emotional maturity rather than a genuine intellectual failing for now, we'll see if she feels the same in 5 years, much as that feels stereotypical or possibly-paternalistic/hubristic to type.

More generally, I think the issue here comes down to "money". Money is powerful. Money distorts emotions. Money buys lots of things, notably including many nontangible items too (indirectly). Money ends up being a power system in and of itself. I think unless we manage to agree on the moral nature of money and what it does to people and society, we're going to have trouble coming to grips with the intersection of gender and careers. I don't think that's a super hippie-commie thing to say, nor a super-religious thing to say, just plain truth. My mini-thesis, at least.

I'd be very interested to see some of these thread responses paired with "what do you think about money, its role in society, and its personal influence?" (Bonus points: paired with how financially comfortable are you/secure in your future)

yet decline to call this sexism

It's only sexism if it's against women.

It remains a gynosupremacist statement, however; X-supremacy was what "X-ism"s were invented to prosecute.

Almost every construction trade organization will mouth some BS about wanting to increase the percentage of female -whatever- into the high rather than low single digits. It's simply something they're expected to say.

It's obviously more efficient for the general economy and trade to have half your population working than sitting around at home doing nothing productive and no amount of "traditional values" or desires will change that basic fact.

Even history, despite the poor conceptualizations of it among many nowadays, does not refute it. Women historically did work plenty, they just didn't do it at a typical job. Almost all of the "women's work" nowadays is the easy baby casual mode difficulty of what they had to do back then. Doing laundry manually is exhausting and that's despite our understanding of detergents and cleaners being better (a lot of women would burn their hands from the lye and not know better). Cooking and handling food before refrigerators, modern preservatives and supply chains that help keep the food fresh even before you get it and widespread electricity (and thus appliances) is quite difficult. Clothes were way way more expensive and that's if you could even buy them (during the Great depression things were so bad you might even make clothes out of flour bags) and thus sewing wasn't a relaxing hobby but a time intensive necessity so your kids had functional clothing. Even many of the lower noblewomen, who might have a few servants but not many, had a fair bit of of work to be done. And of course many of those servants were women too.

The modern tradwife stereotype is a fiction, one created by automation and modern supply chains. Women were spending their days doing work and being productive, it's just work that isn't needed nowadays.

Clothes were way way more expensive

Indeed and clothes circa a hundred years ago were as expensive as cars today. Working professionals used to spend a significant portion of their yearly income on a meager set of clothing.

Likely depends on the clothing, I don't know if it's that bad but yeah apparel was like 14% of the household budget back in 1901.

Actually considering that the standard recommendation for a car payment is about 10%, if we don't include gas or other costs and just the vehicle alone then cars are actually cheaper than clothes were back then relative to budgets. Of course plenty of people go over that recommendation but still a great showcase of how expensive labor intensive work like that was and how much poorer we were in general. And that's of course still ~100 years after the sewing machine, I can only imagine it must have been even greater before that.

And even more so because it was so expensive, they had less outfits than we do now as well. Double whammy! Way more expensive for a lot less.

Housewives, especially with children, are doing valuable and productive work which simply doesn't contribute to corporate bottom lines. They're doing less of it than they did in the past, but men also work fewer hours(six twelves was literally considered a desirable schedule at one point!).

sitting around at home doing nothing productive

So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing"?

Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was, in fact, sitting around doing nothing productive! Whereas if I worked for a contract cleaning firm doing the exact same job of cleaning but in an office building, not my home, that would be Real Productive Work!

So... cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking care of husband and children, being involved in elder care, maintaining the house - that's all "sitting around doing nothing?

Yes that is relatively nothing compared to the work women had to do in the past. Compare the ease of starting an oven and going to the fridge/pantry and then setting a timer for your food to stir every once in a while vs having to pile up firewood in your wood burning oven (or more likely, you're using a hearth) and it's extremely hot and you also have to monitor it far more because the temperatures were rather variable between meals. You might spend four hours a day just on work related to the stove

Throughout the day, the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of coal or wood - an average of fifty pounds a day. At least twice a day, the ash box had to be emptied, a task which required a woman to gather ashes and cinders in a grate and then dump them into a pan below. Altogether, a housewife spent four hours every day sifting ashes, adjusting dampers, lighting fires, carrying coal or wood, and rubbing the stove with thick black wax to keep it from rusting.

Cleaning is a bit harder too, you'd probably be making your own soap (and like many women would not have great knowledge on it so you'd hurt yourself from the lye), and using stuff like vinegar and rum as cleaning aids. You don't have vacuum cleaners, there's soot and ash everywhere from the aforementioned wood ovens, stoves and hearths, no dishwashers, and like I explained in the previous comment laundry is way harder. People complain about doing the laundry now when it's basically just "put soap and clothes into machine and press button" easy, imagine doing it all by hand and having to seriously worry about colors blending and mixing and coming off because the detergent tech wasn't there yet either for mixing to go well. The skin peeling off your hands after laundry day because of the hours (often over days it was that intensive) of work scrubbing the clothes in abrasive poorly made soap.

It's not literally nothing, but life is way way easier nowadays and much of that labor shifted from domestic chores to other work.

Gosh, I had no idea my house miraculously looked after itself so all that scrubbing I did this morning was completely unneeded and was

this morning

It only took you the morning huh? I guess the evening was to manage and prepare livestock, haul some water, mending your children's clothes, pounding sugar loaves, sifting the flour, and plenty of other chores.

Honey bun, I grew up with no running water and my mother washing clothes for a family of six by hand. Don't tell me I have no idea about the difficulties of past labour, it wasn't in the past so far as I and the neighbours around me were concerned.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets. All the modern conveniences did take the physical labour out of things, but there is still work to be done. And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

You're pretty much either really really old, not American, or were the super poor and rural folk if you grew up a substantial amount of time without running water. I'll believe it, but it's definitely rare enough to be questionable. But even with that, you were a kid and not experiencing all the adult parts of life for yourself. You were the one being taken care of, not the caretaker so it's bound to look and seem a lot easier from your life perspective anyway.

Additionally while "without running water" is worse off than people have it nowadays, that's only one of the various improvements that technology has brought to household work. Unless you wanna say your mother also cleared out the ash and soot from a wood stove, killed and defeathered live chickens from the market, and hauled tons of firewood on top.

There's still a lot of work to be done in households now; we expect washing to be done regularly, not just on one specific day. The house should be cleaned every day, not just once a week or longer intervals where you would take up carpets

If you're spending a whole morning every day cleaning up now, then your family is either top percent dirty or you're OCD. That is not common or necessary for most families.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available".

Exactly, many women with newfound time available to them got jobs to fill that time with new work.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives,

Exactly! Women, thanks to technology, are spending less of their time in hard labor tasks and more of their time bonding directly with their children. It is in some way "work" still yes, but this comes about because there's so much more free time when you don't have to beat the rugs or mend the shoes or make the soap.

She's Irish.

Well I got no idea what conditions would have been like for the Irish housewife then. I would guess it's rather similar but I can't say for sure.

And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.

Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.

It's kind of sad, isn't it? One of those things that makes me think mankind's problems are inherently unsolvable.

At least not solvable with productivity gains. But yes, you do kinda run headfirst into human nature there.

(side note: no amount of life extension tech can make a life spent on social media feel longer)

We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.

I mean you know workers in the workforce also work fewer hours, right? We're a wealthier society and people don't work as long.

There's an old joke about this. Something along the lines of two economists are talking. One mentions that a local wealthy man married his maid recently. The second laments how that will harm the GDP.

I mean it’s only short term more efficient. Essentially, the idea is the same as eating your seed corn. Sure, short term it’s more efficient to eat every single seed of corn you produce. Except that eventually you come to the next season, have no corn to plant and thus will have no future crops to harvest. And essentially, I think this is how our entire society is structured— what matters is not long term success, but the next quarter, the next year, or the next whatever, *even if it means destroying the long term future of your company and society.”

Considering that women were already participating in labor intensive work, just unpaid domestic work that doesn't fit the "job" archetype, I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.

Maybe there's some sort of difference in the work of sitting typing in an office into a spreadsheet vs doing laundry manually for hours, spending hours sewing clothes, getting fresh water and the other types of hard and time consuming house work that women were doing which promotes fertility in the latter but not the former but it's not a very clear difference.

It’s not just working that’s at issue. It’s working for other people outside of the home, thus creating a situation where the woman is tasked with keeping house and cooking after a full on workday. Add to this that such an arrangement pretty much requires that the family fork over tens of thousands of dollars a year to warehouse the kids while mom and dad work, and that if anything less than ideal happens to the kids, they’re blamed, and you have a situation where having a child (let alone 3-5) is just so daunting time and money wise that a lots of couples don’t even try.

I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.

It's the double whammy of having to have a job outside the home, then you come home and the ordinary work still has to be done, plus you have to be available for demands of work. If you need to take time off for bringing kids to the doctor, dentist, stay home with a sick child, etc. then you find yourself falling behind or even let go because "yeah you're not here to do the job you're being paid to do". If you want to get on in your career, you need to be able to devote yourself to the job at least in the early years. If you want a life where eventually you can afford to have kids, you need that career. If you have kids early on, you can't have that career. It's catch-22.

Now, it's not impossible, I'm working in a place where lower middle-class to middle-middle class are working, and managing to have families. But it's not going to be the kind of "this is High Value Human Capital Driving The Economy Line Go Up Better World Through Progress" work and careers that is also complained about (not enough Smart Productive People having babies, why not? Because it's very damn difficult to eat the cake and still have it, is why).

The obvious difference is moving from an environment where it is easy to watch children to one where children are effectively prohibited. A pre-modern woman doing domestic labor is working fairly hard, but it's work that (for the most part) allows you to keep one eye on the kids and can be easily interrupted. As work increasingly moves out of the home, that stops being practical. This isn't that big a deal when men do it, because they weren't doing much childrearing anyway, but when women do it forces a choice between working and taking care of your children.

A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting - but making every day Bring Your Child To Work Day doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. And I imagine managers and business owners would not be thrilled about it.

A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting

I recall the topic of corporate-provided childcare coming up in a company-wide chat at a medium-sized tech company I once worked at that considered itself employee-friendly and kept a sponsored GP doctor on site to encourage annual physicals. At the time the executive response was largely centered around insurance costs and liability. To be fair, the response was similar when asked about a pool for the company gym, but it does seem a reasonable concern that a jury would find the company liable for incidents regardless of the internal structure in ways that a separate building next door with no legal ties.

Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Although I did also once work at a startup where someone started bringing their dog to work daily. At least it was pretty well-behaved.

Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Multisite corporate daycares are a thing in the UK, but the reason you don't see large corporate chain daycares is the lack of economies of scale. It is a business which depends on the quality of on-site management, and the best way to motivate and retain quality on-site management is to let them own the business. This is why so many chain restaurants are franchises. And there is no point in franchising daycare because there is no travelling trade of people who have to choose their daycare based on a national brand.

there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

You could do it, but it would be expensive. And also probably taxed, because it would be considered benefit-in-kind. Would people be willing to work for Company A if it paid less because "and we include subsidised/free child care" than Company B which pays more (but you have to source and pay for your own child care)?

Also, just thinking about most office buildings and where they're located, it probably would be tough to convert part of the building into childcare facility (e.g. you need some kind of outdoor space/playground area for the kids to run around. Believe me, you got a room full of hyped-up four year olds, you want them to run around and burn off that energy). I do imagine your insurance premiums would go up by a hefty amount. Here's an example from Irish insurance provider for child care centres:

Public Liability (€13,000,000)
Employers Liability (€13,000,000)
Personal Accident cover for children and employees
Professional Liability (€6,500,000)
Directors and Officers Liability (€2,500,000)
Business Interruption (standard package includes cover of €150,000, increased to €200,000 for ECI members. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Contents cover (standard package includes cover of €20,000, increased to €25,000 for ECI and Direct Créche scheme. This cover can be increased further upon request)
Option to include buildings cover
Fidelity Guarantee – this covers loss of money or property belonging to your business as a result of fraud, theft or dishonesty committed by employees (€100,000)
Money cover – this covers loss of money from business premises (€15,000)
Legal Expenses cover – provides access to legal advice and support including a helpline, and legal costs, in the event of a dispute

It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.

I'm talking about children young enough to not be enrolled in school. The truant officer isn't going to come and arrest you for bringing your 1-year old to the office, but your boss will probably be annoyed if you keep doing it.

That's what I'm talking about as well.

The other thing you need is an environment where it's acceptable to keep only one eye on the kids rather than both, and if the kids do escape supervision and get into trouble, it's considered normal and not neglect.

Historically, a lot of women’s work took place inside the household economy rather than in the formal labor market. That kind of domestic production, cooking, childcare, clothing repair, food preservation, was productive but largely untaxed. When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.

Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.

Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.

The idea of taxation suppressing productivity and income is obvious, so obvious that it is a basic tenet of economics.

When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.

Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.

In theory yes, in practice almost half of US households don't pay an income tax to begin with. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

They might pay some other forms of taxes like social security, but they aren't paying an income tax. And even then, most of it is still just the high earners who already make so much that the taxation isn't suppressing things in the same way it would with someone poorer.

Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.

Now this isn't true both because the premise isn't real but also the obvious part that if working wasn't meaningfully more beneficial than staying at home and watching TV, people would stay at home and watch TV. The idea that it isn't better is disputed by the chosen actions of the everyday American.

I agree that focusing only on income tax probably doesn’t capture the full picture. A more useful way to approach the issue is to look at the overall cost of living and the net resources households actually have available. Housing, childcare, healthcare, education, and other expenses can place a significant burden on families regardless of whether their income tax liability is high or low.

Regarding the second point, my argument is simply that reproduction in any natural system requires a positive inflow of resources. For humans, that translates to having sufficient financial stability to support children, and for most people: maintaining a desired standard of living. People have different expectations for quality of life, and most are not willing to significantly lower their living standards just to have one or more additional childeren. I would argue that if families could maintain their current social and economic position while experiencing an increase in disposable income, many would be more inclined to have more children.

Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.

Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.

There is absolutely no reason to take this article seriously. It's the head of a trade group saying this, that is a political job, he is probably just repeating politically fashionable ideas.

So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it.

Well it's not necessarily practical as an individual solution. But you have just identified the "two income trap" solution

Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".

I think that is part of the problem. Off-shoring, immigration, automation and AI have stratified the economy into high-paying niche jobs or fake jobs; and low paying commodity slave jobs. We don't actually need more people in the workforce, we have more workers than we know what to do with. But if you want to have a job that pays to the middle-class or upper-middle class standard you are accustomed to, its going to be a niche job, and that makes it quite precarious. And the precarious nature of the job makes it dangerous not to have both parents in the workforce. What if the bread-winners niche dries up? The family is screwed.

for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.

This is a choice everyone's making, yes. Because we value qualifications more than we value children. As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college. I like college, I enjoyed going, and am the sort of person who might have just kept going forever if I could have, but it's not actually the case that the only jobs that need to get done are chopping onions 10 hrs a day, or academic tasks. And AI is set to gut the college level tasks before the manual ones anyway. If our civilization is wealthy enough to provide it, I'm basically still fine with every young adult getting to go make friends and read books for several years, it's lovely, but it's not inevitable.

I agree with other commenters that both parents working outside the home is also, to a large extent, a choice most people are making, because otherwise we'd have to make a lot of sacrifices for unclear benefits. Being a stay at home parent of young children is exhausting and frustrating. Being a stay at home wife without children, or with older children, is not respectable. I know people who are homeschooling their children while their husbands work perfectly ordinary lower middle class jobs, it's possible for people who really want to do it. It's just kind of frustrating, lonely, and tedious for those who aren't naturally inclined that way (which seems to be most people).

As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college.

The first college students studied under professors without college degrees!

Almost 1000 years ago - I think the only autochthonous universities are Paris, Bologna and Oxford with all subsequent universities being founded with professors who graduated from existing universities.

And even if you go back to the three original universities, there is a continuous development from cathedral schools to universities. The doctors who granted the first degrees were learned priests who had a formal education and a formal certification from the Church that they had completed it, even if it wasn't called a degree. So the original authority to grant degrees comes from God, not from a group of autodictats declaring themselves the first professors.

The first chicken was born from a non-chicken.

In the US the prime aged male labor force participation rate has fallen from 97% to 83% from the 1960’s to today. You have a lot of workers by boosting that percentage.

A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.

Charts I'm seeing show the prime age male labor force participation rate to be at 89.5% as of last September, and the lowest it ever was was in April 2020, at 86.3%. This decline has been more or less steady since the early 1960s, though local drops seem to happen concurrent with economic downturns. If you look at prime age female labor participation rate, it's a much different story. When this started being tracked in the mid 1950s it was around 40%. It hit 50% in 1970, 60% in 1978, and 70% in 1985. From there, though, growth slowed; it took until 1997 to hit 77%, and from there it's more or less plateaued in the mid-70s. At most recent count it stands at 77.7%, which is close to an all-time high, but it's not much above where it was 30 years ago. If female labor force participation rate had much to do with male labor force participation rate you'd expect to see the largest drops in the male rate correspond to the largest gains in the female rate. The female rate jumped 20 points between 1970 and 1985, while the male rate dropped 1 point. The male rate dropped 1.5 points between 1997 and the present, while the female rate didn't change at all.

If you want to drill down to the real reason working-age men aren't working, you have to look at more detailed data about exactly who these people are. There are about 64 million prime-age men in the US, and about 7.36 million aren't looking for work. Before we can go any further, there are two things we need to get out of the way. The first is that approximately 900,000 prime-age men are currently incarcerated, accounting for about 1/8 of the total. This is probably an undercount, as the numbers I used don't include people in local jails who, whether awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than two years are largely out of the labor force. I don't know what your opinion on work-release programs is, but I doubt it would be wise to allow all of them to have regular jobs, and since it's an undercount anyway I'll assume we both agree that these people shouldn't be working and omit them, which lowers the current rate to around 90.9%.

Second, according to the New York Fed, about 7% of prime-age people have a disability of some kind. The numbers aren't broken down by sex, so I'll assume they're similar for men and women. That gives us 4.48 million prime age men who have disabilities. I should add that the numbers come from the US Census, so this means that they consider themselves disabled, not that they're getting Social Security disability payments. Among disabled people, 45% are employed. I don't have workforce participation numbers, but given the current unemployment rate of 4.4%, and that disabled people have more trouble finding work than healthy people, we'll say that the disabled unemployment rate is 5%, which gives us a nice 50% labor participation rate. Of course, a lot of these people could probably work if push came to shove, since self-identification is the only criterion. I hate to hazard a guess, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that half of those who identify as disabled could work if they absolutely had to. This means that there are roughly 1.1 million truly disabled people in the 25-54 age bracket. Adding it to our incarcerated population gives us 2 million people who aren't working because they actually can't. That brings the rate up to 92.6%

That's an improvement but it's still far below 1960s rates and doesn't account for the entire phenomenon. Labor participation rates tend to be highest in big, trendy cities like Denver and San Francisco, and in places like oil boom towns in West Texas. The rates tend to be lowest in Rust Belt cities, Appalachia, and depopulated rural areas. These men are also disproportionately poorly educated, with either a high school diploma or less, and don't have much in the way of skills. Not coincidentally, this is the same demographic that's likely to have a drug problem, which probably also contributes to a lack of desire for work. In other words, these are the people who, if they had to get jobs, wouldn't get very pleasant jobs, or very high paying jobs. It makes sense that the labor force participation rate would go down over time as employers require more skilled workers and as the geography of employment changes.

All that being said, what it means is that the solutions aren't that sexy, and don't play into any culture war narratives. Saying we need to increase economic opportunities for unskilled workers in Youngstown or West Virginia is about the coldest take in American politics.

I meant with job. I could have sworn I saw it at 83%. Your data seems roughly right from what I’m seeing from grok. Subtract 3-4% to get with job from participation so 86-87%. It’s still fallen a lot. Not as much as I said.

Before we can go any further, there are two things we need to get out of the way. The first is that approximately 900,000 prime-age men are currently incarcerated, accounting for about 1/8 of the total.

The denominator of the labor force participation rate is "Civilian noninstitutional population", which excludes the incarcerated. So these have no effect.

That might be the official definition, but I don't know that it's broken out in practice. I included the prison population because when I was looking at the DoL's county by county maps, I noticed that Forest County, PA had a male labor force participation rate of only 8.2%. Being familiar with the area, I knew that the state prison at Marienville skews all of the demographic statistics, as it contains 2300 people in a county that only has about 6900 total. By contrast, Cameron County is similarly small and mostly forested, with no large population centers and no industry, and it has a male workforce participation rate of 81%, and no prison. I don't know if the prison population affects the numbers on a national scale, but given the local breakdown it seemed like I should take that into consideration.

There's no methodology on that map, and it comes from a completely different part of the Department of Labor (the Women's Bureau) than the official LFPR.

I misspoke I prefer working versus labor force participation rate for this reason. So that still gets included.

A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.

This might be mistaking cause and effect (or, more likely, it's a more complicated relationship). Equally plausible is that, when a job becomes less entrepreneurial, more stable, and more bureaucratic, it drops in stature and becomes more appealing to women. E.g. when vets were predominantly male, the job was typically a sole practitioner who traveled from farm to farm, essentially permanently on-call and dealing with inclement weather; messy, rough workspaces; and large, relatively dangerous animals. Nowadays, the job is typically in clinics (increasingly consolidated), with set hours, treating small companionate animals like dogs and cats, with a much heavier layer of accreditation.

Horse doctors are still heavily male.

The last psychiatrist puts this as pursuing the power or the trappings of power:

I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important? I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic accomplishment by the ABC Network. The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC?

I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd? "Women aren't as corrupt or money hungry." Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.

This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also more XY in it than ever. But who made it more powerful? It wasn't nurses. And if you're playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint. "I'm not gay." Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything.

I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator. But for everyone else, what is the significance? One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm. That's progress, I guess.

The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She's probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: "hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.

[...]

I know, I know, women get paid less then men. Sigh. There are a million reasons for this, but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job, and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same people. Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement.

I can easily buy that decreased risk appetite and increased internal focus makes jobs more appealing to women, causatively, in fact I think even liberal sociologists would quickly agree, but I'm not quite sure it follows that the profession drops in stature. But not for the two candidate reasons listed.

It's a little bit of an awkward self-reinforcing question, or poorly defined, because in my view what we typically call "status" or "stature" is mostly set by men for men (invoking a sense of ranking, not just goodness or desirability) while women operate their own parallel system of "status": perhaps "respectability" that mostly dovetails but diverges in some key ways, as a system by women for men; and something like "social capital" which more often operates by women for women. The systems often dovetail but are not in fact interchangeable because they prioritize differently (but correlate well because the primary drivers such as exclusivity, intellectual rigor, social function, or most commonly, wealth generation are super similar). You might notice that, for example, how prestigious high-risk jobs are highlight this.

I don't think the difference is huge so that's a valid objection, but I do think it's a very real piece of nuance that pops up particularly in certain fields. I'm not denying/ignoring that surveys seem to find predictive power in feminization of professors and prestige, just that we have to be pretty careful about the words and might be doing that thing where two people think they are talking about the same thing but really aren't. A man and a woman, in different contexts, might both call all of my 3 proposed paradigms above "status"!

I haven't gone digging too deeply, but I'm pretty sure the classic "prestige surveys" do not attempt to disambiguate, like at all. It's a collapsed index. There's a small handful of studies exploring power dynamics and prestige as distinct IIRC, but very little else. I think this is mostly because the money-prestige link is so dominant! Which to my eyes signals that you simply cannot consider them in isolation, and statistically creates a lot of traps all over the place. At any rate, when I skimmed a few studies related to this, quite a few of them seem to admit straight up that prestige alone is very likely a flawed construct with iffy methodological rigor.

But as you say to the broader point, it's still quite open whether broadly speaking, jobs change -> therefore women enter or women enter -> therefore the jobs change. As to whether women enter -> men flee is the right factual framing (are we talking absolute numbers, proportions, changes in training pipelines?) to be honest I don't know what the data suggests there.

"We can’t afford, economically or socially to draw from only half the population," said CIF CEO Andrew Brownlee

That's a rather bold claim to be made by a CEO in the construction sector.

Right now we do have a shortage of workers in that sector. When the boom collapsed with the demise of the Celtic Tiger, a lot of the Eastern European workers went home, and the native Irish workers had no jobs so went abroad to look for work. So there's a shortage of skilled workers to take up any slack to expand the industry, hence the "we need a bigger pool to draw apprentices from" messaging.

I've seen women start in the trades. Bosses discriminate, but not enough to actually stop them.

Heterosexual women invariably need fewer, more predictable hours and get stuck in particular niches. Lesbians might make it though.

The other issue is more generalized: it's easier to bear discrimination if there's some kind of minimum, critical mass of "people like you" alongside. Thus exceptionally asymmetric professions tend to stay that way without some effort simply due to self-selection after an attempt to break into the career, even if you don't have heavy pre-selection pressure.

The liberals aren't wrong about how this load is real. Not insurmountable, but like in aggregate real, and also personally noticeable. My soon-to-be-aunt, for example, works as one of just something like 4 women in an office of 50 male engineers in a very specific niche industry (she is office staff and part HR, yes). But she's got frustration. For example, pointing out some serious design (and also UX) issues with their terrible looking, outdated website. Ignored and belittled, sadly, despite putting some effort into a strong proposal. These weren't like, 'matter of taste/branding' changes they were 'universal design principle' type things, too. And yeah, over time that's the kind of thing that makes people quit even if it's not like, a dealbreaker by itself. However, having one or two other women in the room for a decision too does seem to be a big tipping-point difference anecdotally in terms of limiting discrimination.

Interestingly enough if you run the math, it's quite helpful to avoid auto-self-segregation if you insist on even basic diversity quotas. And I think segregation is bad for society. It's probably bad for business too, but I think there's a few quite large caveats involved.

Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form

This is the underlying problem, not a functional constraint. We easily have enough wealth in the Western world to afford a one-worker household. The problem is that wealth is being siphoned off into a boomer class of homeowners who got in under the old scheme and demand house price appreciation/free medicine, a migrant class that soaks up welfare/scams and a giant bureaucratic class that chokes the productive economy with idiotic rules.

This is the result of a lack of patriotism and virtue. Greedy boomers demand more welfare and fewer taxes (to hell with investment and science if it pays off after they're dead!) Treacherous politicians invite in low-performing populations to prop up their voter base (and drive more productive, sceptical, informed voters out of their electorates), aided by short-termist business lobbies looking for cheap labour. They set up huge DEI infrastructure that complicates and worsens everything with quotas, they let criminals out onto the streets. Bureaucrats do empire building and feel-good wrecking of energy infrastructure for the climate, they wreck national defence while the politicians start stupid wars. Everything is far more expensive than it needs to be.

Voters and sensible people generally get disillusioned with politics, leaving the corrupt and stupid to become leaders. Everything compounds on everything else, metastasizing.

Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site. Yet productivity has actually been falling because unions and lobbies refuse to allow superior methods, because imported labour does a shoddy job, because the bureaucrats drown everything in idiotic regulations, because there's woeful planning and administration of infrastructure projects needed to go alongside housing... In the UK they actually employ humans to wander around buildings checking for fires. It's retarded. They have de-automated the fire alarm. They stupidly built flammable cladding, stupidly adhered to a policy of 'have people stay in their apartments and burn', realized that was bad and mandated a 24/7 'waking watch' instead. A system run by this kind of intellect isn't going to produce good outcomes.

In 2024, construction began on just 107,530 homes in the UK — a drop of 29.5% from 2023 and 40% from 2022.

Much of the West is in a multi-causal social death spiral that technology and the industrial economy have been heroically outpacing, most of the time.

Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site.

It's dubious that prefabrication offers any savings to building in-situ for SFH. It turns out it's really expensive to ship a bunch of stuff that needs to get assembled anyway.

I'm rooting for 3-D printed houses to take off more, I like the aesthetics of how they can have curves more easily, and kind of like the extruded concrete look. I suppose roofing is still an impediment; the ones that stack up to a skylight on top are kind of weird and not versatile for multiple rooms.

Things are not looking great on that front either, but time will tell.

Also I think curves kind of suck - what kind of furniture are you going to put against a curved wall?

It's true that there are issues with low volume and transportation. Prefabrication works best for bigger projects like multi-family houses or apartments. Even so there are still some gains from prefabrication and related but distinct techniques like panelization: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705816301734

This case study compares panelization and modularization for a single house. It does not compare either technique to conventional building methods. I'd recommend reading the link I posted.

The link you posted just looks at Sweden and America and finds no clear evidence of overall construction productivity gains, despite them being wholly different countries with different regulations, environment, scale and market dynamics. It's not very useful, which is why I didn't address it.

My link is also, on reflection, not particularly helpful.

Prefabrication is not a silver bullet, it's just one part of a series of improvements that should be made. There should be prefabrication (especially in the larger projects where it's most helpful), consolidation of the construction sector, planning reform, expert management of large infrastructure projects and cost-efficient safety and environmental regulation.

Mobile homes are much cheaper than equivalent stick build, so at some level prefab has to pay off.

Mobile homes are about 10%-35% cheaper than site-built homes. The big advantage of mobile homes vs prefabricated components is that there's basically no assembly required, which is a big savings.

In the US, stick-built, modular/prefabricated, and panelized houses all are built to the same state building code, while manufactured homes are built to a completely separate federal code. It's my understanding that the federal code is a sufficiently lower bar that comparing stick-built/modular/panelized and manufactured is like comparing apples and oranges (though I haven't actually read it).

It’s not really about feminism or women being “uppity”. It’s about incentives built into the modern economy.

From a purely economic perspective, it’s better for GDP if more people are in the workforce, so governments and industries push for higher labor participation, including women. But what’s good for GDP isn’t automatically what’s good for (non capital owning) people.

The real issue is cost of living. Housing, childcare, and basic living costs are now so high that a single income usually isn’t enough to support a family anymore. When both adults have to work full-time just to qualify for a mortgage, the idea that one parent could stay home becomes unrealistic.

If houses were affordable enough that one income could support a family, my hypothesis is that you would naturally see more more couples with a partner working less and also a higher fertility rate.

So the debate about whether women should work kind of misses the point, most families simply don’t have a choice.

That's it. Mother having a part-time job or no job while the kids are small, because Father can earn enough to provide a reasonable life, was the default. But the push for economic growth meant "get more women into the workplace" and now economic factors mean "if you want to pay the bills, both of you have to be working".

I don't know the solution to that. I don't think there's an easy solution.

It mostly isn't the businesses themselves pushing for women in construction. Construction businesses will hire, literally, anyone. That's why illegals and drug addicts do it. But businesses don't care who they hire.

These woke 'women in construction' pushes are executed through industry advocacy groups and unions(which have time for bullshit). Not through businesses, which have long since made their peace with hiring out of the probation office(they just wish they could get more people). They'll play along, because they'll give anyone a chance. But it's important to bear in mind that it's a push by groups which have time for BS and it doesn't work very well.

Now, can our society go back to a one-income society? Yes, quite easily, housewives are not unicorns and are found at all income levels. The question is will our society make the sacrifices required. I think it should, others think it shouldn't, but it is obviously possible.

My huge, blaring objection is that this is all tied up in the same set of incentives that moved us to an equilibrium where the college degree is de facto required... even though it doesn't really lead to higher performance/productivity/pay in most cases.

Yes, that is what was 'promised', but in practice, college degrees don't confer extra prestige, status, or compensation.

The reason college became so critical is because more people started going, and there was a direct push to get female enrollment up.

I've pointed out precisely when Federal Education policy shifted to ease financing of student loans and encourage females to attend.

Quoth:

1994 also saw The Gender Equity in Education Act which made it actual policy to push for more education programs geared towards women, and might be attributable to the general decline in male performance in school, which would then play into the college issue.

Increasing the demand for college and the supply of college degrees has various unfortunate side impacts, which Scott covered in Against Tulip Subsidies.

Remove this incentive, and make it less viable for everyone to attend college, relieve the 'need' for college degrees for many, many jobs. Save people from a ton of extra debt and four years of 'wasted' time.

Basically college is only a 'gate' for such valuable employment because we can't escape the Nash Equilibrium we intentionally created without some top-down policy adjustments.

Leaving aside that women who go to college sort into majors that pay less.

Leaving aside that they end up with far more student debt than males, and take longer to pay it off.

Oh, and let's leave aside that women who become doctors (and thus take up a residency slot) tend to leave the field early. Read that again. We spend a metric ton of resources to train up doctors... and we expect to get a lot of work out of them. We spend the same amount of resources regardless of the gender of the doctor... but for almost half of women they'll duck out early without supplying nearly as much work as their male counterparts. MASSIVE supply constraint in an already constrained and critical field.

But leave all that aside.

Try and articulate specifically why a woman getting a college degree would make her more valuable. Either to a company, or a potential partner, or even the economy at large.

I mean, really, lay out the case for why that is her most economically useful/productive course. I want to hear the steeliest steelman for it. (Bonus points if you don't reference the sudden spike in demand for female laborers that occurred during World War II).

Because I'd just point out that even IF you have an intelligent, driven woman who would accel in a college environment and could be extremely productive in a high-impact field...

It is almost certainly better for her to have some kids with a worthy male and use her talents to raise them as high achievers than it is for her to cut her reproductive window short pursuing personal advancement... which she'll have to cut short to have kids (remember those doctors up there).

We need more smart kids. This means we need smart women to have kids. There's no other way about it. Which means we need to be economizing for smart women having more kids... and that inherently pushes against them using their most fertile years on the dubious benefit of four years (or MORE! Women are more likely to pursue graduate degrees!) of formal education for a degree that won't substantively improve their lives.

And that's only ONE dimension to that argument. I'm not saying this is 'fair' or 'optimal across all possible universes.' But I AM saying its a massively preferable equilibrium to the one we currently find ourselves in.

(And this equilibrium suggests a lot fewer males attending college too, I'm not really making it a targeted gender thing)

And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.

Yeah, it's Scott's Moloch all the way down. Nobody planned to set it up this way, but it has now come to the point that we're wrecking ourselves but can't stop because if we do the entire house of cards falls down and then it's dystopia time.

I have some fatally optimistic faith that we'll figure something out just in time, and kludge together some kind of solution to stave off disaster.

But in my pessimistic days it really does feel like a 'rot' has set in and a 'soft reset' is our best case scenario.

And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.

This doesn't help. For decades you could already read books (e.g. The Feynman Lectures on Physics and watch lectures (e.g. Walter Lewin) created by the greatest professors in the world, at a fraction of the price of going to college. It made no difference, because what's valuable about university is the piece of paper, which is the only legal way to discriminate between job applicants.

It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.

The work of actually learning things is hard, and shortcuts are tempting. But perhaps there could be a business model for something like AP tests without the rest of what colleges provide.

It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.

Does it cost $10,000 to give a test? Of course not. But giving such tests directly is illegal. And using the most general test that predicts your ability to learn the material before you even do so is most illegal of all.

But giving such tests directly is illegal.

Is it? The College Board lets kids take AP tests that are accepted as college credit at lots of colleges. I assume a university could allow testing out of most/all classes, but AFAIK this is limited because professors (who have sway over that decision), especially outside of hard sciences, want students to have to take their courses to justify their jobs. And administrators want to keep collecting rent tuition.

There might be Civil Rights Act concerns for something novel, but universities mostly skirt by those with Tradition and maintaining a positive reputation with the justice system.

I think it could probably be done, but it's less clear that it's actually what students want or that developing the tests and maintaining integrity (cheating, leaking test questions) would be economical. IIRC some states don't require law school to sit for the bar exam, but it's not a popular option even there.

It's called the CLEP exam. You can take a CLEP test at any community college to test out of the course and then transfer it to a public university(which the majority of students attend).

CLEPs help (each exam costs $100 and is usually good for three credits, while a single credit at a state university like UF or FIU costs $200) but are seriously hampered by:

  1. Limited selection. There are only 34 CLEP exams, most of them targeting introductory college courses like calculus (or, in some cases, high school courses like algebra).

  2. Credit caps. Most schools will limit the number of credits you can earn by examination.

Using UF and FIU again as examples, you can see from their tables that CLEPs only award credits for courses at the 1000 (freshman) and 2000 (sophomore) levels, and are limited to a maximum of 45 credits. So, at most, you might be able to shave a year and a half from a four-year degree and fulfill your general education requirements by exam.

Still, I'd definitely recommend anyone doing a bachelor's degree save time and money by maxing out their exam credits, both CLEP and AP.

I'd argue that what is TRULY valuable about university has long been the network of similarly situated intelligent comrades, and the later access to institutions connected to said people, gated by their familiarity with the institution.

The paper cert has value only to the extent it unlocks the right doors.

At this point, I have little problem envisioning university that are basically, call it 'social clubs', where AI professors do all the lecturing, grading, etc., but students are paying to get in the door amongst others who are of a particular class and have particular resources they can leverage once they're done learning.

If there is no difference in the quality of education, the only possible advantage I can see is creating networks that will put like minded individuals in contact and allow them to gain some edge over those in competing networks.

My kneejerk read on college is the upper class used to send their children to college to round them out and have them obtain their prestige certificate. The rest of society then got the causal arrow backwards and decided college was the key to improving normies and began pushing it as a moral imperative. Worse, it worked for a bit as a signaler, early results were accidentally promising and we've been stuck with this shit ever since.

Yeah this seems incredibly on point especially that it did actually work for a little bit which let it entrench itself.

Yep.

A bit of cargo-culting.

"OMG all the successful elites went to college, and they send their kids to college, that must be the shortcut to success!"

And in very small instances it sure would be. Get a bright, talented kid in a room with the future CEOs and political leaders and they might be able to navigate that into wealth and/or fame (shoutout to JD Vance).

But the second tier and below colleges were happy to ride coattails on the implicit promise. Although there's probably still some benefits on a regional level.

Historically there were multiple types of colleges -- the rounding-out kind were only one. Polytechnics, engineering schools, normal schools (teacher's colleges), mining colleges, and agricultural/A&M colleges were all about improving the students. The distinctions are vestigal nowadays, though.

The reason the industry wants to recruit women is because they want to spend less money on paying workers, so that they (the owners) can make more money. We really need to stop trusting business owners when they say there is a shortage of workers. A true shortage means that the owner no longer owns a mansion.

if you want a reasonable standard of living

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went. For such a wife, men would be happy with one pair of clothes and taking buses and living in a shack. Many men would give up all their luxuries for this singular luxury. What square footage, expensive watch, or number of baubles could ever compensate for a stressful partner who nags because both have to work and there are domestic duties that need to be done and everyone is exhausted and you have to order microplastic slop because no one was trained to cook or has time to cook? Hard to imagine more harm done to standard of living than this. Didn't we learn anything from Shrek? Or Rousseau?

But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved"

You’ve got about a century to find the solution before the native Irish population is dropped to below 20%, ie you have lost the game of life. The most practical solution (because anyone can do it) is to form patriarchal microcultures where women are excommunicated for certain lines of work while commended to train in the traditional feminine arts. Then you can once again go back to the norm of happy families and SAHMs. You can share wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest members in this community, as was tradition in Christian Ireland for many-a-century. Then you just add some community rituals and you have yourself a functioning above-TFR community forever. The gypsies do this and they are dominating Europe’s TFR scene; the Irish travelers do it and have above 2 TFR. The alternative is to persuade the elites to care about their nation, which seems… delusional.

wants to listen to how their day went

Absolutely fucking not. This question is either a shit test, or a continuing assessment of the beta bux potential. I wish back when I had or was anything I had a lover who explicitly didn't give a damn about how my day went.

There's a difference between "wants to listen to how their day went" and "wants to know how their day went". I interpreted the hypothetical as a wife who's happy to listen if you need to vent, not one who will necessarily ask if you'd rather talk about something else.

Mostly it’s just a way to learn more about your partner’s life and a jumping off point for further discussion

Much like how a Stasi officer asking what you've been reading is looking for literary recommendations.

Can you give an example of when answering this question honestly led to negative consequences?

It's in the aggregate, where the best possible result is maintaining the status quo, and the likely result is a downgrade. Those add up.

Can you give an example of a situation where this led to a downgrade?

I respond with something negative, she thinks less of me, repeat X times, the relationship is done.

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Conspicuously missing in your analysis is the possibility that the emotional distance from not having these conversations causes the relationship to decay. I would submit that insufficient communication is likelier to cause two people to fall out of love with each other than repeated communication that multiplies the opportunities for minor annoyances and disagreements to build up, even if I agree the latter can happen.

Women and men have different modes of communication; it's not like women don't like to talk other women's ears off as well.

In broad strokes, men don't like to revisit past events to form narratives and emotional bonding around them; if they must be revisited, then it's for the goal of finding a solution to some unpleasantry, to be finished as quickly as possible. Women prefer the opposite. Not understanding this leads to conflict. Men offering unsolicited solutions to women who just want to do shared narrative forming, and women talking the ears off men about Karen at work while men do the interminable emotional labor of pretending to care. Neither is right or wrong, just differing gendered styles, and the solution is for both parties to realize this and meet in the middle.

women talking the ears off men about Karen

But this is not what I responded to. Back in the day I found being asked about my day particularly dangerous and/or demeaning. Listening about hers is merely annoying.

Have you considered the possibility that whatever relationship you were in was unusually dysfunctional (and in your choice of internet forums, you sought out a selected crowd with similar experiences)? Over here in relatively functional land, I don't think I know anyone who would consider being asked about their day "dangerous and/or demeaning", don't know any couples who don't keep each other updated about their day or suffer any danger to their health or status from providing accurate information, and see a shared understanding that anyone suggesting otherwise would soon be met with advice to break up for their own and their partner's good.

I have considered it and I have rejected it. Have you considered that if you're not lying you're in a unusually functional relationship?

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That's kind of funny, hereabouts it's AFAICT a whole trope that men are prone to bonding over the shared (ridiculously alien to regular modern life and in many ways unpleasant) experiences of the semi-mandatory military service, and the ladies will get vocally frustrated if the dudes don't have the good sense to keep away from that immensely boring-to-them topic when they're around.

For some reason it reminds me of the old green text where a cashier tells anon to have a nice day.

>wife asks me how day at work was

>tell her it was good

>it wasn’t 😈

I have experienced "shit tests" and annoying interrogations from women, but "How was your day?" isn't one of them.

"What is your plan for the day?" is the dangerous one.

Multiply that by frequency.

What does that even mean? She asks how your day was every day? And you interpret this as a hostile interrogation?

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does. No sex object has ever been asked about how their day has been.

When it's an every day question where you can't win and can only lose, rarely catastrophically and frequently marginally, then the purpose of that interrogation is what it does.

dude, if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness. Me and my wife ask each other how ours days went basically every day, it's just a pulse check. The last psychiatrist has this to say about boring routine conversations which I think strikes true:

But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose. Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call.

Domestic questions are good, life isn't a scripted move where every line can have depth and pointed purpose. You need small talk and mundane connection.

if this is how any relationship you've been is functions then you need to get out of it, that's madness

I definitely got out of the relationship business after a couple of attempts. Nowadays, even aided by me being borderline broke, where I couldn't get back even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

Flip me sideways, I never thought I'd be quoting a Tumblr post of all things, but here we go.

So, to cut it short: person posting talked about how they asked their husband "what are you doing?" and he got all defensive and upset. Couldn't understand why, so she asked him "what did you hear me saying?" and he replied "I thought you were angry with me, why wasn't I doing something, why was I being lazy?" She only meant literally "what are you doing?" as signal of being interested in him.

Conclusion of post was that asking about "what did you hear me saying" for both of them saved a lot of arguments, trouble, and misunderstanding.

I think this applies to our friend here; if what they are hearing from "how was your day?" is the start of an attack, then it's either Mommy Issues from childhood or maybe they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time.

they need to work out why they are dating/involved with crazy bitches all the time

Because of heterosexuality.

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Sometimes I wonder what kind of women people are dating. They describe sex vampires who only want your money, and then are bitter because asking "How was your day?" is some kind of malicious kafka-trap.

A normal person asking how your day was is... asking how your day was. If she is your girlfriend/wife, it is generally because she cares about how your day was (or at least is willing to engage in a minimal level of concern to show affection and empathy). That's how things work in normal relationships. Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

If your partner is just a "sex object," of course you aren't going to ask how her day has been because you don't care. That's not actually a partner.

The word "partner" is a whole can of worms I will lovingly save for some other time, but I need to clarify something: I want me to be the sex object. There are only two kinds of objects in a relationship, a sex object or a resource object, and I can't stand being the latter one. And "personality" is a kind of a resource, perhaps the most humiliating one, a speculative investment instrument for resources of a more material kind.

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Do I actually care about how her day was? Eh, not unless something notable happened. But I will still ask because women like it when you do that. And they do the same thing.

You have inspired me to make an "I hate the Antichrist" comic edit depicting the disgust that I feel for such institutionalized untruthfulness.

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Agreed. I would add "How was your day?" is also a way for her to judge your emotional state and adjust accordingly. Most guys (and I include myself in this group until my wife started explicitly pointing it out) don't realize that when we first come home from work, especially if theres a shit commute involved, that we're about the grouchiest we will be all day.

You know you've been spending too much time on the internet when your reaction to your hypothetical wife asking 'how was your day?' is 'Don't you manipulate me she-devil! You just want my money!'

No, many years ago I turned to the internet to understand why the consequences of honestly answering were so disastrous. I found the answers convincing.

Really? Which part of the internet told you to never tell your wife how your day was (or conversely, so get a woman who doesn't care)?

/r/theredpill, /r/purplepilldebate, and the tale of Henry of the Radicalizing the Romanceless fame.

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling. Any guys who end up happily married or in relationships aren't gonna stick around, so you're stuck in an echo chamber or men who have failed to coexist happily with the opposite sex.

The second is that intelligence isn't merely reversed stupidity. The Red Pill guys might be right that the mainstream is lying to you about women and relationships, but that doesn't mean they have good advice on how to exist in the world they describe. As someone said the other day on here, they have a correct description but an incorrect prescription. That's why they're so unhappy.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling.

I can't see when the sub was created, but the years I'm talking about were near its beginnings.

Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?

I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.

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I can kind of see it in the same vein as "women think they want an emotionally-sensitive man until they actually have one," or the kind of messaging that led Scott to write both Untitled and Reverse Any Advice.

You should be honest with your wife, of course, and a wife that cares about your day is a blessing! But one should be aware that there's probably a limit to that.

I find my job dissatisfying but stable and hard to escape, I figured out where my wife's limit is on me bitching about it, so it didn't take too long to get to an agreement with "ssdd" and I'll reserve elaboration for when I really need to.

Dude in all my relationships I've never had disastrous consequences for answering this question. But I was also just giving a basic answer. I suspect some of your problem in how you were answering are you way over explaining and laying out every neurotic insecurity. Or as others have said it's the type of woman you are choosing. Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Either way the fact that everyone is disagreeing with you should indicate it's a you problem.

Freedom_of_speech.jpg

If she's a housewife, she doesn't just want your money, she needs it. Wanting a housewife and wanting a woman who isn't excessively interested in your earning potential would, in a sane world, be incompatible.

Yeah A bunch of redpill/internet manosophere types are really incoherent about this. A bunch of them look down on career women and say stuff like men provide resources women provide beauty. But then they get mad or at least annoyed about women considering those resources, and then they constantly worry about "divorce rape" and a woman taking half your shit or even women in general taking half the shit of hardworking men. And they never consider deliberately dating a woman with a career or gasp one who even makes more then them to allay these worries. It just feels like a ball of physchosexual anxieties when what they should do is have a sober analysis about whether to go for a women who wants to stay home or have a career.

The ideal of a "stress-free woman" is not how human relationships work, including marriage as a logical subset. I mean I didn't think it needed to be said, and maybe this wasn't your intent, but women are people too, and ALL (meaningful) relationships take some kind of work or investment. And no, simply paying the bills doesn't count (although it IS a large input). With that said, yes I agree that a decent share of (especially current modern) men would take that tradeoff. Truly, money and status doth corrupt and lead to nearsighted, misguided happiness pursuits. Including many 'liberal' efforts that are counterproductive (from claims that 'all happiness is relative' ignoring basic needs to overly self-indulgent prioritization to rejecting some fundamental human patterns).

I also think "excommunicating for certain lines of work" is an unacceptable values tradeoff, even if it's practical in the sense that it's been done before and 'worked'. As a culture we certainly are too individualistic, the extremes need to be dialed back, and yeah it's possible that as a society we need to figure out if there are better ways of wealth sharing for mutual baseline prosperity than some of the lackluster or downright harmful solutions some have proposed or tried (e.g. communism). As a sort of system-first moderate, I honestly think the Bernie liberals might be on to something with the idea that we can get something decent with smart and targeted tax and governmental policy, but there's probably still at least some kind of gap beyond that. Ideally, I think the uber-rich should do a better job of self-cultivating values of giving back on a more direct level (beyond just creating vanity projects, larger yachts, and giving indirectly via somewhat useless nonprofits), though as a society we can't really force that to happen very easily if at all.

Regardless, I feel like cultural technology can solve this problem even if we haven't quite yet. Along those lines, I don't view stuff like 10% quotas bad at all - some decent research suggests that many fields have "tipping points" where being too homogenous hurts (perhaps in output, but definitely in terms of allowing the minority class to feel welcome or stable). That is not to say that 50% in every field is an ideal. Just that some reasonable minimum allows the society to fulfill the value of "allow people to do and work how and where they want without making it a major pain" while still permitting some 'natural' gender differentiation. In that sense, of course lots of modern liberal efforts are misguided alongside their disproportionate effort, but it doesn't mean all modern liberal efforts at better parity are worthless!

It’s a reality in cultures with traditional conditioning, although I understand that it’s hard to imagine such a thing in our present culture where, as far as I can tell, there does not exist a single piece of media or art, or a even single role model, or even a song or a small paragraph of text, intended to condition the values of thanks, selfless love, meekness, or obedience in women. These are the fruits of traditional social value conditioning, with heroines and saints and God, and cultural behavioral techniques like meditation in the east and prayer in the West. Were you born in the time of Albrecht Dürer, girls would venerate “Mary meek and mild” in the same way they now venerate some ice skater or pop singer, and you would meet women like Mama Dürer who had zero stress despite living hell on earth:

We do know that he had a very close relationship to his mother, Barbara Dürer, who was only nineteen when Albrecht, her third child, was born. In the course of the following twenty-one years she gave birth to another fifteen children, the last in 1492. All but Dürer and two very much younger brothers died; as he describes it: ‘some in their childhood, others as they were growing up’. Reading his observations on his mother’s nature in his Family Chronicle, we are struck by the associations they evoke of contemplative descriptions of the Virgin Mother. Thus Dürer tells us that her favourite pastime was to speak of God and praise him, that she suffered ‘illnesses, poverty, mockery, contempt, and snide words, fears and obstacles, and yet felt no spite’, but quietly continued ‘her pious ways and acts of mercy to every man’, observing her children’s religious upbringing, and habitually receiving and dismissing Albrecht and his brothers with the same phrase: ‘Go in the name of Christ’.

On its face, training women in such a fashion does seem delusional, absurd, ridiculous… but the thing is, all the other options are even more delusional, and in fact have never been done before. Germany with its incredible maternal benefits failed to move the needle, and they will be a lot poorer for the next centuries. If what we want is happiness and existence then I think we have to throw away the false gods of individualism, “self-actualization”, and “education” (the very things which got us into this mess, and other messes).

IIRC conservative gender roles are measured by how many women work traditionally male jobs, not by female workforce participation- because female workforce participation is often initially driven by poverty, market penetration, etc. as much as feminism. 'Excluding women from certain lines of work' appears to be the sine qua non of conservative gender roles.

I bet half of men would accept living a poorer lifestyle if it meant coming home from work to a sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went.

I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

The reality of traditional marriage, of course, was that many husbands were not honorable or good around the house or happy being providers, many wives were not sweet or good cooks or great mothers. Advocating for traditional marriage is still reasonable, perhaps even desirable, but a simple fantasy it is not.

Funny you should say this. Which person in this family at middle age do you think is happiest now:

  1. Female. Probably lowest IQ. Got married to a Heroin addict. Grinded in nursing. Had a couple kids who now have kids in the trades.
  2. Female. Mid-IQ. Went to a regional school. Got into medicine field. Was married and didn’t work out. 40 single. Travels. Owns a home. Decent discretionary income. Kind of cute.
  3. Went to Ivy. Worked on trading desks. Often had whatever he wanted. Some relationships failed. 40 single.

The last one probably figures it out. Something in society hurt number (2) and now it’s probably tough to fix. Probably both jealous of the one who just got pregnant at 19.

Ya that’s my family. And maybe it’s not unique. Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

Trending on twitter San Francisco has a lot of single men so going for success can backfire.

San Francisco has a bad gender ratio for men, like New York has a bad gender ratio for women.

Is that ratio before or after San Francisco's historical reputation that many of its men aren't looking for women? I'm not familiar with the dating market anywhere, just curious.

There is an excess of single men under 40 essentially everywhere in the US, including New York.

A very frustrating point that many online commentators overlook. I wish this guy would update his map with newer data (that one uses 2012). Once you set the limit to under 40-45, basically everywhere is a sausage-fest.

I appreciate this. I was feeling a bit bent out of shape about the "sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went," but not sure what to say about it. Sure. We all want to be surrounded by virtuous people intent on serving us.

Indeed, both sexes are in practice willing to reduce their standard of living for happier family life.

We should stop the propaganda campaign telling young people that's impossible.

You can train boys to possess those masculine strengths just as you can train girls to possess their feminine strengths. This was the norm for a long time. “Gentlemen”, “virtuous”, “holy” depending on the period. There is a lot of time wasted in schools on less valuable materials. (We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?)

The deal for women is that, instead of spending the 18,000 mostly-worthless hours in classrooms before graduating college, and instead of working a stressful occupation, you learn the fun skills that are valuable for happiness and not going extinct. You can probably accomplish this with only 500 hours if you use interesting and memorable material. Then maybe some of the remaining 17,500 hours can be spent on the things that are required for homemaking, like working with calendars and fiscal tables and babies. That leaves 16,000 hours totally free for women. They also don’t have to do the 80,000 hours of stressful work that the average person does. With that amount of time they can learn to promote happiness through their spirit and conduct, which actually comes naturally to women who are outside of the Western media / educational landscape. It is in a woman’s nature to see Punch the Monkey— which is a terrible name for a monkey — dealing with the alienated modern conditions of his enclosure, and feel the harm-reduction empathy response to shower the monkey in nurturing love while feeding him treats. It is not difficult to switch the object of this behavior from monkeys to husbands and children, as they have a number of similarities.

“Many husbands were not honorable or good around the house”, but bosses suck, and teachers suck. Some woman just killed herself through self-immolation after an affair with her boss in Congress. No one has a stronger biological motive to care about a woman than her husband, certainly not her boss or coworkers, and if the woman is pleasant to be around and helpful, then you are maximizing the odds of female felicity.

You had to memorize the periodic table? We had to learn how to use it, what the rows and columns meant(not that I remembered), that sort of stuff. But it was about learning to use a reference and not about memorizing the reference, that would obviate the point of having a reference.

My memory is hazy but I do think we had to memorize at least some of the table.

Was it the part that went, "there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, ..."?

To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General?"

We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?

I think making anyone memorize the periodic table is a bit silly in the age of pocket supercomputersphones, and I'm not at all against the idea of teaching more practical/homemaking skills in schools - but the point of teaching everyone science is not solely to benefit those who will grow up to be scientists. It's not supposed to be "a way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age", so even if I have my own misgivings about the current system, that's not a fair criterion to judge it by.

As I see it, teaching science to everybody including the kids who are not in a million years going to go into science has two main purposes, benefiting both the individuals themselves and society as a whole.

Firstly, it serves to make sure that ~all citizens have a basically sane idea of how the world works - you need laymen to have a layman's understanding of science to develop the intuition that science makes sense even if the specifics go over their heads, lest they think that any nerd spouting sufficiently complex and formal-sounding jargon, whether he's a scientist or an ayatollah, should be listened to just the same. Or indeed, lest they start thinking that both can be safely ignored because it's all Greek to them either way. If you don't teach girls basic science, what you're going to get is a whole lot more superstitious, gullible women who believe in astrology and homeopathy and the most bone-headed religious bullshit you can imagine. (Ditto "low-IQ boys".) The world can barely function with the current levels, the last thing we need is to stop vaccinating idiots against woo.

Secondly, it trains kids to actually use their heads and work. Exercises that involve actual reasoning rather than rote memorization are best, but even with the latter, whether they're memorizing the periodic table or the phonebook, they're at least exercising their long-term memory, attention span, and ability to just sit down with boring unpleasant work for hours and focus. That's not nothing, particularly in the age of ipad babies. And if we're going to give them boring learning exercises for the overall betterment of their intellects, we might as well make them learn boring true things like science rather than go with the phonebook.

It also helps people recognize medical quackery for what it is, so if they have cancer or arthritis they won't waste time and money on ointments that "draw the toxicity out of the body" or whatever.

Uh, does it? Lots of people use woo-woo crap despite being more than scientifically literate enough to know better; I would expect the correlation between alternative medicine and scientific literacy to be near 0(or even, as in the case of creationism, running the opposite way you'd expect).

Yes. And AI makes this only more stark. The reality is, working memory can only work with what's already in the brain as background. Knowing facts as well as frameworks for understanding, especially in science, literally enable higher thinking. There's limits of course, and we can debate what a sensible "baseline" is, but science instruction in basic chemistry, physics, biology, and to some extent math (that's a whole other conversation) is absolutely essential. And similar arguments apply to basic reading, history, geography, and bits and pieces of the humanities. If anything, recent research has actually underscored that especially US education has shied a little too far away from memorizing and internalizing facts, because you do need that baseline as I said to do anything more complex.

Why did you add in 'handsome' when the op said nothing about the woman's looks?

For men it’s usually implied when they talk about women in this way, they’re not envisioning an ugly tradwife.

Fair, but also women care less about men's looks than men do about women's. Might I suggest 'funny' would be a better adjective?

Critically, the vision assumes a society where no prime-age women are overweight, rather than respectable working class communities in 21st century America where they all are. Most white men think the 20th percentile normal weight woman is hotter than the 80th percentile fatty.

As far as I can see, in real patriarchal societies where food is plentiful, most women start gaining weight immediately after the wedding and are blubberbeasts by middle age.

Ozempic?

I think the tradwife vision assumes that one of the skills that would be taught in these "I can't believe it's not finishing school" less-academic women's institutions would be healthy eating. But Ozempic solves the problem withe less effort.

If the problem was a lack of skill to engage in healthy eating, surely the gain of weight would not correlate so neatly with marriage (in plentiful-food patriarchal societies). It's not like being unmarried shields you from weight gain due to unhealthy food all by itself.

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I bet many women would accept a poorer and more boring lifestyle if it meant a handsome, kind-natured and faithful husband who was good around the house and yard, knew how to repair everything (and did it without being asked) and who devoted themselves fully to providing for and looking after their family (and not drinking or being abusive or cheating).

I'd bet against. They'd find the guy boring and want more. You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

You've basically described the stereotypical 1950s situation, which is usually considered to be "stultifying" by women.

Was it actually stultifying by the majority of women who actually lived through it? Or was it considered stultifying at the time by a small minority of the women who get the most press because careerist women are in a better situation to push agendas in the mass media, and then every women growing up since then has been subject to a torrent of propaganda about how unhappy 1950s housewives were and so they believe that it was stultifying.

So a couple of things to bear in mind about the fifties in this discussion:

-Upper class women before the long fifties did not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women after the long fifties do not scrub their own baseboards. Upper class women during the long fifties, scrubbed their own baseboards. The historical aberration of 'everyone except the true societal elites has housewives who do their own housework, including the stuff that really sucks' was a historical aberration, and upper class women were not used to scrubbing toilets and ironing underwear(yes, fifties undies needed to be ironed). Upper class women were also the ones that launched second wave feminism.

-Fifties women were the happiest women, on average, since data became reliable. This isn't all self reports either- everything correlates.

-Women today still choose to cut their standard of living by working less when they are securely and happily married, and this is such a trend that it shows up in national level economic data.

-Sixties/seventies feminists had a number of hard cases that wouldn't happen today to use to make their point. Poor enforcement of domestic violence laws, much higher male alcoholism rates, a generally poorer society, and difficult divorce meant that there were more women trapped in bad situations. And a highly mobile society with shitty communications technology meant that women were also more likely to get into bad situations. Feminism tends to fall back on hard cases to make its point.

Agreed. There's no shortage of men who could have an idyllic trad wife like that at home who would almost certainly still go out to the pub after work and spend 1.1 days worth of wages there.

Seems like a fantasy to believe homes would be so much happier if women stopped being libs.

The stats on the relative happiness of married vs. unmarried women suggest its still a Pareto improvement.

And no, "I'm staying with you for the Pareto benefits" is not how most people want to envision their marriage. Its just, if their alternative is worse you shouldn't discourage the slightly better arrangement if they're otherwise suited for it.

To me, its fair to say "Traditional Marriage, encompassed by a socioeconomic order (likely with religious foundation) that is maximally supportive of marriage happiness and longevity is best suited for human thriving."

It is indeed unfair to say "just get into a trad marriage and you'll be happy," when the the social connective tissue and supporting structures are not present.

Or put a little more broadly, Trad marriage doesn't work as well when society isn't geared towards producing devoted, supportive, loyal men and modest, sweet, submissive women for each other to marry, yes.

But that indicts society, not the institution of marriage.

A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.

You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.

If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.

In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.

You might say that's a choice to live in such an area, and sure, it is. But the idea that you can just get up and move from it to rural Iowa exacerbates other problems: the disintegration of the extended family, the decline of friends, etc.

It's also worth digging into what we mean by "most of the country." If you're weighting by acreage, I agree, most of the country can be lived in on a single half decent job. If you're weighting by population distribution (more appropriate IMO), that shifts the needed income much higher. There are still realistic places to move (e.g. in the Sunbelt), but for those you need a single decent job, not a single half-decent job. Weighting regions by GDP contribution (which has some arguments for it) shifts us solidly into the two income requirement.

In many places

In very few places in which a miniscule portion of the US population lives. I have the misfortune of being one of the rare unlucky few to live in such a place. And even then that's by cutting your $2 million starter home figure to a more realistic ~$1 million. Even in San José a starter home is much closer to 1 than to 2 million. Almost every American has much cheaper housing than in San José.

Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.

Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?

In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.

Many? I live in an expensive area of the country, northern New Jersey. It looks like that's true for Millburn, NJ -- one of the most expensive places in the area. It's not true for a lot of adjacent similar places. You don't have to go to to rural Iowa to get cheaper housing than that.

You could live in a trailer- much cheaper than a single family house. Or you could live in not California or the NYC metro area. Kansas City isn't the end of the world. The majority of the country doesn't have $2 million dollar starter homes by any metric.

You can live in the NYC metro area, just not Short Hills or Essex Fells or Alpine or whatever other hyper-expensive example you can find.

You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.

I wish, but it's not. Just to get the ordinary "get married, buy a house, have kids" life (and not two cars etc.) you need both partners in the couple working fulltime or forget it.

Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.

If you've saved up ahead of time, or don't mind living in a bad part of town with a bad school.

This is what I'm talking about.

Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.

Sure. I just agree the WASP lite take is directionally correct. My mom homeschooled my brother and I, then worked as a public school teacher when I was old enough to leave the house and go to college. It would have been a bit better if she'd gotten a job when I was a teen, but it wasn't disastrous. But, also, she's smart and conscientious. My father is reasonably smart, not as conscientious, but perfectly willing to read books and go to church book club for entertainment instead of more expensive activities. People who are smart, conscientious, not given to envy, and generally somewhat virtuous are still living that lifestyle today. My family is to some extent, but it's not great, we need to get out of it sooner rather than later.

Is this an Irish thing? I think @JTarrou is right about the US. Let's do a back of the envelope calculation for ireland.

  • Median income: ~40k euro. I think the after tax take home would be 38k.
  • Groceries for 4: hard to say. The US government makes a sample thrifty budget, but the Irish one does not. Let's say 125 euro per week.
  • marriage: basically free.
  • house: I tried to find a 25th percentile house price but couldn't easily do so. The median house outside Dublin is something like 300k euro. I don't know how Irish mortgages are structured, but Claude says you can put down 10% and mortgage 90% at around 3.5% (side note: apparently you get better interest rates for better insulated houses? Lmao) which works out to 1212 euros a month for a 30 year loan.
    • property tax: apparently about 400 euro a year
    • home insurance: 650 euro a year
    • call it 1300 euro a month all in

So after those expenses you've got about 1400 euro a month to spend on everything else. Doesn't seem so bad?

I always find these 'we need more women in X' arguments funny. Because the advocates never say which industries we need fewer women in. Their rhetoric seems to imply that women are an infinite resource than haven't been tapped, whereas in reality female labour, like everything in economics, is a scarce resource. More women in construction means fewer women in e.g. healthcare.

But to your point, there's surprisingly little relationship between the female employment rate and the birth rate. The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa, which is also the region with the highest birth rates. The next highest is East Asia, the region with the lowest birth rates.

The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa,

Genuinely shocking result, thanks for that.

Because if you don't work you starve. But the real story is further down the page - with very few exceptions (notably South Africa and Namibia), women in SSA are almost entirely employed in the informal sector. Many countries it's 98 or 99%. Basically, cottage industries, little hustles in the village, the gigs one has to take to survive, are counted as work, but they don't look much like what we would consider a "job", more like what our ancestors did before the modern single-earner family. I'm also fairly suspicious of their data quality in Africa for the Female Employment Rate map, some countries have weird spikes and troughs in overall female employment of the size that could only be methodology changes or war-related (what's going on in Niger?), and many have no recent data.

Sure. But informal employment is just how they do it in Africa. Ugandan overall employment is 90% informal, for example.

Certainly. But it makes the data impossible to compare to more developed countries imo if we're talking about the difference between a "working woman" and a "housewife". What it means to be employed is too different, and many of the things we would still consider "jobs" are recorded as informal sector.

Certainly employment looks different. Not a lot of girlbosses in Uganda. It's nevertheless striking that so many Ugandan women sell goods and services outside of the household.

I mean in a more general sense as well. When we think of a "job", we tend to think regular wage labour for an employer or owning a business that does a dedicated thing. It gets a lot fuzzier there - for instance, pretty much everybody is selling or bartering whatever's on hand to somebody else. It has a very different relationship to the family and household, since it's basically inter-household trade in goods and services rather than structured labour in the sense an American uses the word "job" or "business".

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

Also remember that before the invention of modern appliances, women in paid work was a sign of poverty, not a sign of feminism. 50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping, so women only worked outside the home if they really needed the money (there was so much housework that modern women with full-time jobs do more hands-on childcare than 1950's housewives).

50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping,

Work done in the home and consumed in the home is explicitly excluded from this accounting.

What do you mean?

I mean that if a woman is a housewife and does housework that doesn't count as labor force participation.

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

The denominator is working age women above the age of 15, so it already excludes women of retirement age.

My read was that it defined working age as 15 and over with no upper limit.

female working-age population (ages 15 and over)

Looks to me like the words inside the brackets explain the locally used meaning of the words before them. Given the very wide range of female retirement ages around the world, I think they would say what maximum age they were using if they were using one.

Hmm, this document uses 20 to 64 as working age, which gives us an upper bound but a different lower bound.

This source suggests that labour force is defined crudely (as you suggested) as anyone over the age of 15, but it also says it excludes people who are retired. And since the average life expectancy is only 62 in SSA, I don't know whether that means African women are retiring to be supported by their (large) families or whether they just work until they drop, especially since for subsistence farmers, there's probably always something that can be done around the farm, even if granny isn't really contributing much.

In conclusion, I'm stumped.


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