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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29705 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Ground report from the UAE

TLDR; Passing thougths from a UAE resident amidst the Iran war. Nothing groundbreaking, but you all might appreiate the perspective of someone closer to the action.

Where have you been?

I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.

How are you?

In the midst of the fog of war. I am barely sleeping. Not because I am scared, but because the emergency alerts are really loud. And because my girlfriend is scared and I stay with her on video call for support. I am typign this at 7:18AM GST.

Your experience may vary, but seeing missiles fly over my head and interceptors fire from less than a mile away changed me as a person. I am aware it can be much worse but I wasn't ever expecting to experience this!

To the point I could partion my life into 'before and after the missiles'. I was driving from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah at approximately 7PM on the 28th of February when interceptors started firing from less than a mile from me. I sped upto 120 miles/hour to GTFO of there. An overwhelming majority of the drivers did not speed up, they slowed down. Idiots!

From then on; emrgency alerts, booms and thuds and drones are a daily thing. I'm not really worried about me or my closed ones physical safety per se. But there is this background vibe that something is wrong no matter how much I try to ignore it. It's quite mentally draining, and this is despite me not being scared for my safety or livelihoood at all!

How is everyone else?

Seems to be roughly three camps of people broadly.

  1. Those who drove to Oman immediately and dipped at the first sign of a missile. Those who jump up and flinch at the sound of a door closing or a motorcycle passing by.
  2. Those who don't GAF and are going out and recording the missiles/interceptions/drones. These are also the people passing by on their motorcycles lol.
  3. Those not thinking too much of anything at all. When there's an alert they head home, otherwise its business as usual. A majority are these people. Going out into the streets, you wouldn't be able to guess you are in a war zone. Oh also, a solid chunk of employers did not give WFH.
Business as usual

Unlike the last time something was supposed to last for 2 weeks. The government is encouraging you to carry on as normal, head outside even! For obvious reasons, the UAE's entire selling point is that it's safe, and now "it's safe, even with suice drone flying around". Sucks to see large swathes of people not only buy this shit wholesale but parrot it endlessly.

Social media idiocy is in full swing. The most grating are when someone reports hearing fighter jets in their area, and gets mobbed by the most sanctimonious people on earth "kindly" asking them to not share intel with the enemy. As if a forein adversary is relying on civilian reports from reddit of a jet flying at Mach 2. I can go on all day! To be fair, no one was mentally prepared for this, they are "doing their part", whatever helps them sleep at night.

A sad casuality of said idiocy was the abundance of on the ground footage that was available for the first 2 days. The government sent out warnings against posting said videos backed by heavy fines. Much fewer footage is being posted on social media, but they're circulating widely in whatsapp groups.

So what scares you?

"Things are never so bad they can't get worse"

Cue to the last time something was going to be over in "two weeks". Despite a handful of civilian casualities and a majority of the drones and missiles being intercepted, this is unsustainable. The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!

Oh also, the UAE imports 80% of its food and has vitually no fresh water. The Straight of Hormuz being closed off for long enough and a desalination plant being hit would turn into a nightmare to put it lightly! I would probably regret not evacuating at that point. I give a 20% chance of things getting that bad.

I am also skeptical of the success rate of the interceptions. Iran prety much hit everything they would have hit (This list is not exhaustive):

  • All civilian airports - Hit
  • Dhafra airbase - Hit
  • Minhad airbase - Hit
  • Jebel Ali port - Hit
  • Mina port - Hit
  • Port of Fujairah - Hit
  • US Consulate in Dubai - Hit
  • US Embassy in Abu Dhabi - TBD

The government claims these were hit by debrey after interception. Oh wow, debrey just happend to land on 4/4 active airports!

An overwhelming majority of the drivers did not speed up, they slowed down. Idiots!

Bit of a nitpick, but, this? Honestly? Sensible.

  • Reduce the risks of getting into an accident because you're distracted.
  • Reduce the risks of getting into an accident because others are distraced.
  • Reduce the velocity of any given accident that might happen from distractions, panic or debris.
  • Reducing the risk of accidents reduces the risk of traffic jams, which keeps the road usable for everyone.
  • More time to observe. Honestly, how often do you get to see those kinds of things? Also more time to make better decisions.

I'm not saying you did wrong. Just that there's plenty of good reasons for slowing down.

These are all sensible but the road was mostly empty, they slowed down to 80kmh in a road that has a speed limit of 130km/h.. That seems more dangerous than had they simply maintained 130?

Hm. OTOH slower is always safer, but yes, if they ended up disrupting traffic through slowness, that wouldn't be good either.

The real question is how many missiles Iran actually has.

The Ukraine conflict has different dynamics - Russia proper isn’t being seriously bombed (the occasional Ukrainian gambit in Moscow aside, it’s just the border; it’s not like drone factories in the far east are being hit), and Ukraine is obviously being heavily supplied by the West, and Russia isn’t bombing German munitions factories either, again the occasional bout of sabotage aside.

In Iran, launchers, factories etc are being hit as soon as they’re identified by Israeli and US intelligence. There may be some resupply from Russia, but Russia is also allies with Saudi Arabia and has extensive diplomatic relations with the Gulf, so the extent of Russian munitions support may be limited by both that and the ongoing war in Ukraine taking priority.

How long can Iran’s conventional forces hold out versus how long can Trump hold out rising oil and LNG prices? That is really the question. For the Gulf, it’s better if oil spikes (this is why Qatar’s energy minister is now alluding to $150/barrel costs, which we’re nowhere near right now), so that Trump is forced to sue for peace, so that the attacks on the GCC nations stop. The ‘worst case’ for the GCC is a protracted collapse and IRGC remnant guerilla forces using Houthi strategies on the Hormuz.

The ‘worst case’ for the GCC is a protracted collapse and IRGC remnant guerilla forces using Houthi strategies on the Hormuz.

Who would be supplying the munitions in this case? I don't think anyone except Iran want trouble in the Hormuz?

Russia is the only actor that could conceivably profit but they're both very busy and likely don't want to piss off literally everyone else in the world.

Who would be supplying the munitions in this case? I don't think anyone except Iran want trouble in the Hormuz?

The people with developed world standards of living have extremely high pain aversion. You need one rogue Iranian with an homebrew missile to scare everyone passing trough the Strait. Even if basic arithmetic says that the airforces of the gulf states will make sure that any site will be able to launch only one.

What are you talking about? It's thirdies that are driving the Ships and if the rebels aren't resupplied then having enough interceptors to handle whatever rogue Iranian with a home-brewed missile seems perfectly manageable.

The issues with the various rebel groups around the middle east is that they have been supplied by the Iranians. Who will supply the Iranian rebels?

At risk of revealing a few more details about my life, a lot of the work we do around GPS technology has just been completely screwed over this week in that whole region. Real time location systems, GIS survey work, everything that requires accuracy is just buggered thanks to consistent GPS jamming over the ME.

Import of technology, movement of staff both heavily impacted; we had a couple of people stuck in Dubai and airlifted back to their home countries on emergency basis. At work, there's definitely been some kind of concerted mindset effort to pretend that this is business as normal and we're just modifying timelines with the expectation that we'll have to learn to live with it until the situation resolves itself or calms down.

I would not at all be surprised at Dubai's attitude; they don't want their well-heeled business and tourist clientele to flee the place permanently. Dubai's reputation was built as a safe haven, but for that to hold the haven needs to be, well, safe.

This shows a major weak link in globalization all the foreigners you've imported can just flee if things get bad.

Especially an issue for a place like Dubai with minimal safety nets for foreigners, though I guess the other alternative is 'net drain foreigners cling to the host country whilst reasonably-productive ones go off and try to look for the optimal deal elsewhere' is even worse.

is just buggered thanks to consistent GPS jamming over the ME.

Aren't jammers a big glowing flare saying "bomb here". Why aren't GPS jammers dealt with a swift cruise missile to the face?

GPS is a very weak signal by the time it arrives all the way from a high orbit: not hard to jam or spoof as compared to something like radar. Jammers can be cheap and numerous.

My understanding is that modern jamming techniques are a bit more subtle than those of the last century. Rather than drowning the whole band in white noise they inject spurious and contradictory data into existing signals which then causes the receivers to glitch out.

I noticed something ominous before the news of the first missiles coming in when I noticed Waze wasn't working in certain areas in Abu Dhabi. For context Abu Dhabi has far more "targets" and government institutions and potentially more discrete things than the other Emirates. Waze works in most of the country, stops when near DXB airport. So I'm guessing the jamming/spoofing is concentrated around targets.

Reported as AAQC.

The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!

Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through. The Gulf states are said to have intercepted 521 ballistic missiles out of 538 with an accuracy rate of 97% in the first four days of war; the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate. That's 1042 interceptors burned through on the very generous low end, or 260.5 per day. The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can). In other words, in the first four days they've consumed a year and a half's worth of interceptor production, it's likely the Gulf's stockpiles are running down fast. During the previous 12-day war the US burned through a quarter of its THAAD supply, and that was a relatively short war; interceptors are an extremely scarce resource.

Then again, Iranian missile facilities are also being bombed which limits its ability to wage a war of attrition, so it's going to be interesting to see which side wins the numbers game in the end. You better cross your fingers and hope Iran runs out before you do.

Keep in mind that ~90% of Iranian missile launchers have been destroyed, so most of what they will be launching from now on are drones, which can be intercepted with much cheaper systems than full on Patriots and would never require a THAAD. I think the main interceptor for shaheds is a relatively cheap air to air missile at this point in the war.

Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through.

FWIW, similar speculations have been aired in Finnish newspaper analyses about USA's short term available stockpiles for the war. Fancy defence missiles are expensive and limited while Iran's ballistic missiles and Shaheds are much cheaper. Further, Iran doesn't even have to hit all that regularly and as long as they can keep the threat level up, that's going to have a major effect on the economy of several of the gulf states and shipping (which in turn will have global economic effects). Iran can't win the war but they may be able to prevent USA also from winning.

Fancy defence missiles are expensive and limited while Iran's ballistic missiles and Shaheds are much cheaper.

This has historically been the case, but I have heard rumblings from Ukraine that mass production of drone interceptors for Shaheds has actually pushed the price of those to below that of the attack drones. On one hand, guidance for hitting a moving target is difficult, but the actual interceptors are pretty tiny compared to the bombs attack side, which is also more complex (decoys, maneuvering, hitting moving targets, non-GPS navigation). Modern manufacturing makes lots of small, complex electronics devices pretty cheaply and I can imagine materials cost starts dominating for moving bigger warheads longer distances at some point.

I would also be unsurprised if the quoted prices aren't quite even comparisons: are the attack side prices including R&D overhead, or just unit manufacturing costs? Most Western weapon costs I see quoted include overhead, but compare against per-unit costs. The "price" of interceptors, which we historically haven't bought huge numbers of, might have a lot of room to go down.

Or maybe that's an exercise in wish casting, but I think it's worth considering.

The "price" of interceptors, which we historically haven't bought huge numbers of, might have a lot of room to go down.

I doubt it, at least I certainly doubt it will equalise any time soon.

This source isn't exactly analogous to the situation in Iran and the Gulf since it largely deals with ICBMs in a nuclear-war scenario, but it is a pretty good attempt at assessing the difficulty of defence vs offence especially in a situation requiring moving large warheads long distances, and it turns out the unit cost of an ICBM is $42m if you include maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m after factoring in support and maintenance. The cost differential between offence and defence is massive, and if you want to filter out 90% of warheads shot you have to spend anywhere near 8-70 times as much as your attacker (8 times is a very best case scenario, 70 times is more realistic).

I suspect you're right on the ABM interceptors for now, but I remember people saying similar things about cruise missiles a few decades back. We've been able to intercept incoming mortar fire at least a decade at this point, which was probably incomprehensible back in, say, Vietnam.

This has historically been the case, but I have heard rumblings from Ukraine that mass production of drone interceptors for Shaheds has actually pushed the price of those to below that of the attack drones.

This may have effect on future wars but has no effect on the current war on Iran or even other near term wars the US participates in, particularly given how slow such procedures change in the US military.

For the moment the attack side has significant cost advantage.

Doesn't that heavily incentivise people to go even harder on offense, because the only sustainable defense is actually preventing people from firing the missiles in the first place?

The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can)

Can anyone explain why we live in a world in which we can scale any electronics but the military ones? Seems like no one including Russia can build missiles at scale any more. I am not specialist, but there is nothing in a rocket - tube, sensors array, cpu, explosive and propellant. Nothing of which is that complicated or with right design should require special labor or equipment.

Because you're literally hitting a bullet with a bullet (PAC-3 and THAAD are both hit-to-kill) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase can move at speeds of Mach 8-16? The extraordinary precision required to achieve interception is a pretty big technical feat that requires a lot of cost and time and stress-testing, including some very powerful avionics and computers that need to be not only small but deal with the conditions of being in a missile flying at Mach 8 and still working.

It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.

It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.

I am not sure this will be the case over the medium term. Small laser-guided rockets have already bent the cost curve backwards in certain situations for certain target sets; I think very large lasers might become effective against ballistic missiles as a point-defense weapon over the next decade or so.

The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.

These are, at least in the medium term, mostly point-defense weapons, meaning that if they mature ballistic missiles will likely continue to be effective as terror weapons but their ability to hit specific targets may decrease tremendously if those targets are protected by counter-missile systems.

Now, there are counter-countermeasures - the Oreshnik is probably well-positioned to make it past point-defenses, but there's also certain downsides to using submunitions, and forcing the enemy to rely on missiles that are maneuvering, hardened, or using submunitions will tend to drive the cost per missile up and/or efficiency per missile down compared to a unitary warhead.

The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.

This would be significant if HVP was capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at any meaningful rate by itself. But according to your source it travels at Mach 3, limiting what it can be used for (IRBM terminal velocity can be somewhere in the range of Mach 16).

This study is attempting to assess the feasibility of using HVP as an augment to current ship loadouts instead of used on its own, the model in use here combines HVP as part of a larger defence system alongside "analogues for the SM-6, designated in the simulation as “Taller”, the SM-2/SM-2ER (“Lancer”), Enhanced Sea Sparrow (“Robin”), and the Phalanx Close-In-Weapons-System (CIWS) (“Pillbox”). The ships defend against anti-ship missiles consisting of analogues of four types of sub-sonic and super-sonic enemy weapons".

Note also that the other interceptors it's being paired with are not cheap and ship VLS units utilise many of these, with the Ticonderoga Class Cruiser boasting "12 Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), three Standard Missile-2 Extended Range (SM-2ER), 56 Standard Missile-2 Medium Range (SM-2MR), 12 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), 10 Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), 32 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), six Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Missile (VLA), and eight Harpoon missiles". HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.

In addition, they didn't know what the kill rate for HVP was due to the newness of the technology, so they just made assumptions about its probability of intercepting a target. "With the probability of hit and kill for the HVP unknown, simulation runs were created for an HVP probability of hit of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3." And even using these assumptions, using a three round burst the inclusion of HVP increases salvo destroyed by.... 7.8% (this only applies to salvos of 75 missiles and above; it has a negligible effect on salvos sized 50 and below), using a five round burst it has an effect of 12%.

And as for the savings of HVP? It varies depending on salvo size, size of round and assumed kill rate, but for the most part they're not large, featuring savings in expended munitions like a cost of $284.7m being reduced to $279.7m, and other cost reductions in that ballpark (it bears noting that use of HVP increases costs in some contexts, particularly the ones where they carry the highest benefits wrt salvo destruction). The savings aren't nothing, but I'm unconvinced that they meaningfully alter the defence-offence asymmetry, and I'm very unconvinced it does anything when it comes to ballistic missiles capable of achieving super- or hypersonic speeds.

(IRBM terminal velocity is somewhere in the range of Mach 16)

I don't think this is true, certainly not as a general statement - for instance, the Oreshnik is known for a top speed "above Mach 10" and generally speaking the top speed is not in the terminal phase, but rather in the midcourse where the atmosphere is thinner. CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase. This source gives a terminal velocity under Mach 3 for ballistic missiles generally. These lower speeds are particularly likely if the missiles are maneuvering at all. If the missiles are not maneuvering, the higher speed is offset somewhat by the vulnerability to pretty much anything that can react fast enough and shoot at them.

HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.

Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.

The cost savings detailed here vary depending on salvo size, size of round and probability of hit, but they're not large

That's because in the scenario, the HVP was being used as part of a layered defense against extremely large salvo sizes. Ballistic missiles are rarely if ever fired 25 at a time against single-point surface targets. This is much more relevant for ships, but if you are, say, Ukraine, your tactical question isn't to how to stop 25 ballistic missiles from striking an artillery battery, it's how to stop a single ballistic missile from striking it (or how to stop a salvo from hitting a number of different targets). If "guided flak guns" can do the trick, it makes ballistic missiles less cost effective.

And if you can put that on a mobile system, the effects can be pretty large. Supposing hypothetically that you're a country with partial satellite targeting data, looking to hit 100 semi-mobile targets before they move. Your enemy has four batteries (40x) interceptors. You need to fire 140 missiles to hit 100 target fairly reliably (a few targets might escape by luck). But now supposing hypothetically that your enemy has replaced all of those batteries with forty road-mobile point-defense systems that can intercept a single ballistic missile at a time reliably. Now you need to fire 200 missiles to reliably hit ~all 100 targets, because you are not certain where the point-defense systems are and need to double-tap all targets. Basically you put the two-interceptors-per-incoming shoe back on the other foot.

This isn't exactly a realistic scenario, just an illustration, but I think you see my point.

Now, I don't think there's an easy solution to ballistic missiles. I'm just not convinced that they will be as relatively effective as they are now forever, or that missile defense is a losing proposition. I agree that if you cram enough missiles into a salvo against a single target, "the missile will always get through," but if you're forcing your enemy to shoot salvos of ballistic missiles against tactical targets, you're much more likely to be on the correct size of the cost curve.

CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase.

Speeds can be possibly below Mach 5, yes, it depends on the IRBM in question. If you believe the Ukrainian reports on the Oreshnik, it has a terminal velocity of Mach 11, well within the hypersonic range.

But even if the ballistic missile in question travels at only supersonic speeds in its terminal phase, HVPs still can't hit them. Note that due to the limitations of HVP the study here does not even bother to engage it with weapons that come close to the speed of IRBMs, note in this model the offence is utilising anti-ship missiles that are "subsonic and supersonic", not hypersonic. The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.

Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.

Yes, you're potentially capable of saving large percentages when you're looking at small salvo sizes that the HVP can hit. This is not always the situation you are looking at, and you cannot utilise HVP against supersonic missiles, as admitted by the study itself. It may be able to be used instead of a more expensive missile, but if that salvo size of one is travelling at a high enough speed, using HVP to intercept it is not prudent, and you cannot rely on the assumption that the offence will use a missile the HVP can deal with.

Ultimately, the end effect of utilising HVPs like that is that you are capable of making the enemy waste some resources by forcing greater reliance on supersonic missiles in certain specific contexts where it would not otherwise have been used. It's an interesting technology capable of subtly shifting the balance of power in certain contexts, but I don't find myself particularly convinced that it will revolutionise missile defence wholesale or shift the cost balance anywhere near parity.

I don't think missile defence is intractable, but it is very difficult.

The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.

The study says, on the very first page, "the HVP is capable of supersonic speeds and mid-air course correction to intercept incoming ballistic missiles as well as engaging other targets as an offensive weapon" and BAE's fact sheet, linked to here, says that ballistic missile defense is in the mission set.

The study states that they only modeled using the HVP to engage subsonic targets "[b]ased on sponsor and stakeholder feedback" and as you point out the study did not model ballistic missile targets at all, focusing on more conventional anti-ship missiles. It's possible this means

  • That the ability to engage supersonic targets is not yet mature and the Navy does not expect that in the near future, but it is an area for potential future growth (this track's CRS' suggestion that the HVP "might not" be able to engage ballistic missiles)
  • That the 5-inch gun is not assessed to have the velocity to engage supersonic targets, but other weapons (such as a railgun) would have that ability
  • That BAE is a big fat liar
  • That the HVP has a marginal ability to engage ballistic missiles but it is not anticipated to be employed in this fashion except as a last-ditch measure
  • BAE and/or the Navy assess that there is a certain subset of ballistic missiles that will arrive at subsonic speeds.
  • That ballistic missiles are easier to shoot down (despite their top speed) than the missiles in this simulation because they aren't sea-skimming weapons with terminal maneuvering phases and instead travel in a nice parabolic arc at altitudes that make it easy to detect them for hundreds of miles

Either way, I think you are correct that the capability for the HVP to destroy ballistic missiles is not yet present, and may never be present. But on the flip side, I don't think it's impossible that it is eventually operationalized, or for a similar capability to be developed.

You are explaining me why it will be hard to R&D. Not why once you developed it you can only produce 600 and not 600000 per year.

Because, for the above reasons, it's super costly and the US can't commit infinite money to building and maintaining these. Also, you need to test every very complex component rigorously; quality control is not optional when the alternative is a missile taking out crucial infrastructure or killing hundreds/thousands. A single component failing rounds of testing can sometimes lead to production being halted out of QC concerns.

If we produced more the cost per unit will fall dramatically. If we produced more we wouldn't care that much about quality because we could afford to shoot more of them. If we decided that patriot is the only air defense system we will need - and our allies too - once again we should have produced more interceptors - so once again we get into the economy of scale.

This is what the US is currently trying to do but it's easier said than done, since there are many supply chain bottlenecks; you would need to scale production not only of the interceptors but also of their component parts like solid rocket motors and guidance seekers, which are quite underproduced. You'd need to significantly expand the base of skilled personnel and factory capacity across the supply chain, not only at Lockheed Martin but also at BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop, L3Harris and virtually anyone else involved, and many of these industries are hyperconsolidated as fuck. Many microelectronics, minerals and rare earths used in these interceptors are inherently limited in supply and also heavily leans on foreign sources, particularly China, which is a gigantic dependency of the US. And even then there's a limit to cost reduction through economies of scale.

Also, having quality uncertainties in something as critical as interceptors is a horrible idea even if you can manufacture a lot of them; having a somewhat accurate idea of your capabilities is crucial to war strategy.

If you need skilled workforce for manufacturing you fucked up royally during the design phase. Same for other stuff. And I keep hearing about those mythic rare earths and military and yet no one explains why they are needed in such quantities that to be a bottleneck compared to the obscene amounts we already throw away with the disposable vapes. And the biggest producer of semiconductors on earth will bend over backwards to allow us to produce more of those needed for interceptors if we just promise them to sell them some at any price.

Also, having quality uncertainties in something as critical as interceptors is a horrible idea even if you can manufacture a lot of them; having a somewhat accurate idea of your capabilities is crucial to war strategy.

And this is why any competent design is based on the assumption that everything will break and not work when you need it most, this is why stuff needs to be able to be produced at scale, with untrained personnel, sometimes under terrible conditions. Not treating any such system as a artisanal wunderwaffen.

With modern computers, cad cam, electronics - we should be able to design faster, iterate way faster, and produce more and cheaper. And that is obviously not true, at least until the war hits home - both Ukraine and Russia seems to be able to wage full scale next gen war with what could roughly be describes as US military toilet paper budget.

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If we decided that patriot is the only air defense system we will need

In classic US acquisition fashion, we actually have several systems, with the Navy maintaining Aegis and using different missiles with AFAIK similar capabilities.

There's been discussion about putting Patriot missiles in the Navy VLS cells. Probably won't replace the higher-end Standards for niche rolls but might help spread the cost out for general air defense.

If we produced more the cost per unit will fall dramatically.

Only if everything in the entire supply chain is reshaped with that in mind.

Mil spec anything costs ridiculous amounts because there's loads and loads of red tape, the parts have to be available for many decades, extra QC checks and parts binning, rigorous additional testing and of course because there fundamentally can't be much competition because it's not mass market so manufacturers have little incentive to reduce prices.

Yes, if the interceptors were built from COTS parts and modules with minimal bureaucratic processes, prices would fall dramatically but that's not how the US military does things.

the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate.

My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets, but I don't know that success has trickled down to the Gulf, or if the target set is such that they feel able to do this.

My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets

News to me if so, perhaps true for certain types of targets but I'm not confident that extends to many of the ballistic missiles types being used at the moment (MRBM/IRBM).

Thank you for this. Primary accounts are great.

You say that you have an expectation of psychically dividing your life into “Before Missiles” and “After Missiles”; how do you think your life is going to be different after?

(I ask mostly from the perspective of one of Scott’s old posts, which, to paraphrase, had a thesis of ‘People Who Claim To Have Achieved Enlightenment / Had A Life-Changing Experience Are Actually Indistinguishable From How They Acted Beforehand’)

Sorry for the late reply.

On Scott's perspective, people's claims of psychic change are not material to outsiders. I think it's too early to really tell. I'll report back if/when it's all done.

For one, I feel a lot more tense and a lot calmer simultaneously. "Minor" annoyances like bureaucracy, shitty driving, my girlfriend not picking up my calls, and having to repeat something I said don't seem to bother me as much anymore at all. Ofcourse any rational person would choose those problems over being in a warzone, but I guess that insight transforming from theoretical to experienced is something.

It's rather cliche, but just a very visceral amplified feeling of "oh wow, the problems I had were actually really minor". I emphasize the visceral experience of it being a difference in kind not magnitude to intuiting it intellectually, which just about everyone does.

There's a 100 other mental things I'm experiencing, which amounts to roughly "fog of war". Having to make decisions to preserve and grow life, livelihood, relationships, and happiness amongst all this, with less brainpower behind it.

This feels similar and different to the fog during the peak of covid. That left me permanently less trusting of governments, "2 weeks" timelines, and the decision-making of the masses and our leaders.

I have an effortpost floating around in my head about "Exposure to (the possibility of) death is good for mental health" which I may one day write. I've never been in a warzone, but I took some time off hiking in the backcountry and being close to the possibilities of dying of exposure, or even just running out of food (survivable for ages but unpleasant), sure provided me with a mental cushion against all of modern life's little inconveniences and stresses when I got back. The other unappreciated side effect there (although probably less so in your situation where it's mostly outside of your control) is it felt like, at least while I was out there, the standards for success were both achievable and clear-cut. "Did I die today? No? Fuck yeah, I'm killin' it!" compared to "Where should I be in my career at this point in time? How are my retirement savings? Am I contributing enough back to the community?" and all those other fuzzy, relative metrics that induce anxiety if you think about them too much.

tl;dr: Hock guy was onto something.

Why don't you leave? You say yourself this could get way worse if the interceptors are all used up and the boats stranded. That time you sped up when you saw missiles in the sky, that was literally a sign from heaven, followed by correct instincts kicking in. When you calmed down and drove home, that was the insane reaction. It's not worth it to take a 1% chance of things getting really bad, let alone 20%(!!!!).

When you're on a sinking boat, the last thing you hear is don't panic. But is my duty to inform you that if you die by debris or dehydration, the rest of the world will shrug and say "well, why didn't he leave?".

I'm strongly considering leaving. Initially we thought it would stop within a week or so.

Oh wow, debrey just happend to land on 4/4 active airports!

I mean, airports are pretty big, and debris is a pretty big issue. Wouldn't also surprise me if a few hits got through, but as always, it depends on what gets hit and with what.

Hella glad to hear you're safe, tho.

Normally with airports you want to hit things like the command and control towers etc., but for Dubai airport there might be an exception where hitting the first class lounge leads to more long term damage...

Hitting DXB lounges is very high risk endeavor with limited payoff. If your goal is to get countries that are otherwise neutral, not to be - this is the correct approach.

If UAE lets USA stage attacks from its territory, they are not neutral (unlike Spain which prohibited using its airbases in this war).

You do realize that at any given moment in Dubai's airport first and business class lounges there are couple of thousand of important-ish people from all corners of the world. Killing them for one or other reason will not make friends in their home countries as a rule of thumb.

I thought UAE did prohibit such attacks? Or am I confusing them with a different Gulf nation?

The US isn’t staging attacks from any GCC nation, at least officially. However, the Iranian definition of support seems to include any country with US bases, which is most of them.

Absence of Trump making unhappy noises that UAE aren't letting him suggests they didn't do such a thing

Humanity would enter a new golden age with a strike on the random assemblage of gangsters and money launderers within.

Oh also, a solid chunk of employers did not give WFH.

Possibly sensible. It's always been known in the army that the way to prevent panic / morale issues in times of high stress is to make sure everyone's too busy with work to think. Getting them out of doors and busy in the usual environments might help - from the UAE's perspective of course.

I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.

Mazel Tov!

Mazel Tov!

This means roughly "congratulations!" It's kind of weird to congratulate someone for lurking for 2 years.

I'm congratulating my beloved friend @f3zinker on his the girlfriend and the work, both of which I think he had mentioned struggling with some time ago.

Thanks for the support. I've graduated from struggling with work and relationship to struggling with the prospect of war!

I'm praying things quiet down, and doubting that they will.

It actually means good luck.

Yes, but not in the way the phrase "good luck" is used in English. You would never say "mazel tov" to someone before a sports game to wish them good luck; you say it afterwards to acknowledge they've had good luck (i.e. congratulate them).

It'll be interesting to see what the long lasting impacts are on the gulf states from this war. Missiles are landing in Tel Aviv and they've had years to build proper defenses against precisely this threat, if Iran throws its toys out of the pram there's a decent chance the whole "rich man's playground" trope for these countries permanently ends. Of course they'll still be rich given all their oil, but it would still be a different paradigm for how these countries are seen by the rest of the world.

(Kuwait for one has been declining for the last 20 years in a row, it would be interesting to see if this is the crisis that finally finishes them off and they get swallowed up by the peloton of the rest of the arab states that don't have serious oil money.)

In the end the economic success of the Gulf states is more about relative rather than absolute stability and quality of life. Dubai’s economic prosperity isn’t really reliant on rich people; most people - even in the ‘expat’ rather than indentured servant class - aren’t rich.

Instead, it just has to be nicer and more convenient than Russia or India or much of Africa. The middle class that sustain demand in Dubai don’t have Monaco or Gstaad or often even Singapore as an alternative - the alternative is Mumbai, Moscow, Nairobi, Baghdad, Baku, Tashkent, Dhaka.

Or, worse, Birmingham.

Let's talk about the attack in New York.

Six Arrested After Explosive Devices Tossed Near Mamdani’s Home (Bloomberg)

6 arrested after homemade explosive devices at Gracie Mansion protest send people running for cover (New York Post)

This certainly seems concerning... wait... it looks like I got the news wrong. Let's check in with the newspaper of record:

Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House

One of Mr. Lang’s fellow protesters sprayed mace at a group of counterprotesters, sending some doubling over in tears. Fistfights broke out among the crowd, and raw eggs flew through the air.

Then a counterprotester threw two smoking objects, one of which landed on East 87th Street in flames, prompting protesters to run for cover.

This was no bomb. It was just a smoking jar of metal and fuses. A stunning and brave counterprotestor who just happened to have a smoking jar of metal and fuses took took the righteous and antiracist action of standing up to nazism by throwing that smoking jar of metal and fuses right into the middle of a crowd. This totally clears things up.

Wait... no.. it looks like that's not quite right. It was a bomb.

The NYPD Bomb Squad has conducted a preliminary analysis of a device that was ignited and deployed at a protest yesterday and has determined that it is not a hoax device or a smoke bomb. It is, in fact, an improvised explosive device that could have caused serious injury or death.

I thought the news media couldn't get worse than "firey but mostly peaceful protests." But somehow they've managed to reach a new low. At least with the "mostly peaceful" protests it's technically true. I'm sure >51% of the protests that day were peaceful and a minority set the place ablaze. But this is a clear cut case where a terrorist literally threw a bomb into a crowd, and the NYT rushes to blame the victims for causing unrest and smear them as "vile white supremacists"

Good news, the brave truth tellers at NBC New York ran with the headline: "Multiple arrests made after "suspicious devices" found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest." (https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/suspicious-devices-outside-nyc-mayors-gracie-mansion/6473590/?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_NYBrand) Wow, very sinister of these Anti-Islam ralliers and/or counterprotestors to leave suspicious devices at the Mayor's house. Shame you have to click the link to find out which side actually threw the devices and what made them suspicious! (They were bombs)

And bold new mayor Mamdani said the following in his statement: (https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2030704552765263946)

Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city’s values and the unity that defines who we are.

What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.

Wow, quite disturbing that an unspecified party at a protest used violence. Wonder who though. Given the last party mentioned were the evil white supremacists, I suppose it must have been them!

I really don't know what's more sinister: if there's a slack channel somewhere where lefty journalists and Mamdani staffers are actively coordinating deniably falsely reversing victim and offender on this story, or if all overeducated leftists now learn how to lie and get away with it so well in Journalism School that they did this all independently and naturally with no coordinating required.

or if all overeducated leftists now learn how to lie and get away with it so well in Journalism School that they did this all independently and naturally with no coordinating required.

I tend to go with this choice, at least in this incident. If you were a Leftist journalist and you wanted to spin this story, there's really only one obvious way to do it: (1) emphasize that there was an anti-Islam protest at Mamdani's facility; and (2) be vague about who threw the bomb and who were the targets of the bomb.

That being said, I'm pretty confident that at a minimum, informal coordination takes place regularly -- before reporting and/or making statements, these Leftists likely check to see (and are influenced by) what other Leftist sources are saying.

And I do think that actual behind-the-scenes collusion takes place pretty regularly, at least collusion-lite. Surely there are WhatsApp groups and such for progressive journalists; it must happen now and then that a member of the group posts something like "I'm thinking about reporting on topic X from angle Y. Thoughts?"

And I do think that actual behind-the-scenes collusion takes place pretty regularly, at least collusion-lite. Surely there are WhatsApp groups and such for progressive journalists; it must happen now and then that a member of the group posts something like "I'm thinking about reporting on topic X from angle Y. Thoughts?"

It was ever thus. Before Social Media was a Thing, there was the JournoList email group, which itself a successor to the townhouse email group. I'm sure if you were to search for certain Narratives, you'd be able to find supercuts of various co-ordinated "kill shot" messages being disseminated by various talking heads going back to the earliest days of Youtube, and quite probably before.

Six Arrested After Explosive Devices Tossed Near Mamdani’s Home (Bloomberg)

It's funny how the article is really trying to mislead readers as to who was the target of this device and who was the perpetrator.

Authorities arrested six people connected to unrest during an anti-Muslim protest outside the residence of New York City Mayor

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said two of the individuals arrested were accused of handling and igniting improvised explosives, which appeared to be jars wrapped in black tape with nuts, bolts and screws attached and fitted with hobby fuses. Mamdani is New York’s first Muslim mayor.

Shortly before noon, tensions escalated when a protester affiliated with Lang’s group used pepper spray against the counter-protesters and was later arrested, according to police.

Then an 18-year-old man lit and threw an ignited device toward the protest area, landing in a crosswalk near officers.

Note that the article is careful to identify which group the mace-sprayer belonged to. But the bomb was thrown by "an 18 year old man."

For another 'fun' example:

A Texas GOP candidate has drawn scrutiny after video surfaced of him happily boasting about having a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf...

Herrera has become the district’s de facto GOP nominee in the wake of Gonzales’ departure from the race. A he firearms manufacturer and YouTuber who’s known on the internet at “The AK Guy.” went viral on Friday after a clip surfaced where he is seen boasting about his copy of Mein Kampf.

“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said in the video. In the clip, he appears to pull up a photo of it on his phone to show one of the hosts. “I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you could buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.” (Hitler’s hateful, antisemitic book appears to be available on Amazon).

... Herrera is an extremely well-known guntuber, and, to spoil the punchline, the clip is from an Unsubscribed episode where Herrera spends almost as much time making fun of Hitler as talking guns. The segment is literally titled "Hitler was a bad writer".

There's things you could say here. They're lying, they know they're lying, they know anyone who cares is lying, and they probably don't even think that their audience is this stupid and gullible so much as just to lazy to care about the full text of what they wrote. One could spend a ton of effort to show how that this guy isn't evil, or that this isn't anywhere near the same organization's behavior in an easier case, but that's missing the point: yes, the news media is hilariously biased, where have you been the last few decades. In any reasonable set of laws, this could be defamatory, but the problem isn't the statutes or the line between opinion and slander, when judges can move it back and forth depending on whether they like the victim.

It's that this is what people want. Eat at Arbies!

Gotta love that passive voice "has drawn scrutiny".

My father had a copy of Mein Kampf also. I tried to read it at one point, found it unreadable, didn't get very far. But how could you not mention the headline calling him an "An Apparent Neo-Nazi"?

Fortunately for Herrera, I'd guess approximately zero of his potential voters read "Rolling Stone".

Fake News You Can Trust lives up to its name once again. Their article correctly identifies that Mamdani condemned the right-wing victims, and that the perpetrators were left-aligned (I can't confirm "ISIS-inspired Muslims"). The other 95% is fake, of course, but they got the key points.

That's OK, they did arrest the REAL perpetrator, Ian McGinnis of the right-wing "The Surge", who used pepper spray on some antifa who took violent exception to his filming them. They also confiscated his footage (you'd think he'd know to record live to a remote server by now)

I thought the news media couldn't get worse than "firey but mostly peaceful protests." But somehow they've managed to reach a new low.

Gell-Mann amnesia strikes again!

The updated title as of now is "Homemade Bomb Thrown at Protest Near N.Y.C. Mayor’s House, Police Say" at the NYT and it's obvious within the first paragraph that the bomb thrower and maker were leftists. Grabbing a headline while the story is developing doesn't really show active malice, as far as I can tell. It's tinged by "boo outgroup" unless and until they double down on and refuse to correct their mistaken initial reporting.

As to the optics of showing up to a Muslim's house to protest the existence of Muslims: it's not klan tactics like burning crosses on black people's front lawns, but it's more a matter of difference of degree rather than category. I don't think people that dense or hateful are on "my side", no matter what color their ball caps are.

Grabbing a headline while the story is developing doesn't really show active malice

If it were just this incident, I would agree.

I tried looking up the protest leader mentioned in the article, Jake Lang, to see what he had to say about things, and couldn't find anything other than slurs against him, so it's hard to say. I could have tried harder, but I felt like the Google search engine was doing it on purpose, and I didn't really want to log out of accounts to probe further.

So now we have the classical Bomb-Throwing Anarchists to deal with again?

Earlier this week, the conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg described Mayor Mamdani as a “jihadist” and a “radical Islam cockroach.”

And hundreds of eyes in Little Kigali started twitching....

This was no bomb. It was just a smoking jar of metal and fuses

Simple explanation, initial reports weren't confirmed to be an actual bomb.

As you yourself already quoted

The NYPD Bomb Squad has conducted a preliminary analysis of a device that was ignited and deployed at a protest yesterday and has determined *that it is not a hoax device or a smoke bomb.

Which means beforehand there was a possibility that it wasn't an actual explosive and it can be inappropriate to report a bomb if it ended up not being one.

And we know this because in the NYT article they say

The bomb squad had not yet determined whether they were live explosive devices or dummies, Ms. Tisch said.

Heck bomb hoaxes are probably more common than actual bombings so the caution likely makes statistical sense too. Hindsight is 20/20 and you should look on the past for what was known then, not what is known now.

Entirely possible, but the context is certainly suspicious given the rest of the article taking pains to try to paint it as an attack by white supremacist islamophobes.

Do you know what hoax bombs and smoke bombs are specific instances of? Bombs.

And a number of reputable sources have been willing to call it what it is when reporting the initial story yesterday.

Noncentral fallacy. A hoax bomb or a smoke bomb is a "bomb" just like Martin Luther King is a "criminal".

I mean depends on degree of bombness doesn't it?

If I throw the following objects at you when does it start to become a 'bomb'

  • Suspicious unmarked backpack with no payload or way of actually exploding

  • Conspicuously ticking backpack with no payload

  • A very low-grade firework that will explode but has a negligible chance of harming you unless I happen to hit you directly in the eye

  • A device with a payload that isn't actually primed to detonate

  • A device with a payload that I intended to detonate but simply botched the design of

I feel like you're in good standing to react immediately as if I threw 'a bomb' at you in atleast the last 3 categories

Do you know what hoax bombs and smoke bombs are specific instances of? Bombs.

Hoax bombs aren't bombs, that's basically what "hoax" means as a word. Funny enough despite the name, smoke bombs are also not really seen as traditional bombs (cause ya know, they don't explode). I think that's stupid and I'm a big advocate for accurate naming of things but it's also true.

I mean the "smoking jars" link quite literally says that the PD hadn't yet determined if it was a real bomb or just window dressing. I mean, yeah at some point you have to judge how to present uncertain information, and bias can creep in, but news is hard and often the desire of end-users for news outstrips the pace at which the highest-quality information can come out, much less be processed and contextualized appropriately by journalists.

Again, news is hard. Nothing new here. I don't get why this is suddenly "a new low", this is just ... how news works?? Savvy readers were provided plenty of information in the NYT article itself to make their own judgement.

And it's not like that's the only thing the NYT has produced. 3 minutes ago I see this (I think new, separate article) headline and its "dek" (I learned a new word! the summary thing) saying:

U.S. Authorities Are Investigating Device Thrown Near Gracie Mansion

The device that emitted smoke during a protest near Gracie Mansion Saturday was designed to be deadly, a person with knowledge of the investigation said.

And to be fair, there's a bit of genuine ambiguity here: what do we call it? An IED? A grenade? A bomb? Some of these definitions strongly imply a certain amount of actual explosives, and that seemed to be the main sticking point/source of doubt, yes? You can "design something to be deadly" without, you know, successfully making it deadly. Obviously the device did NOT explode, so on a pedantic level "smoking device" is probably the most technically accurate term even if people with brains (you and I) obviously know that it's probably intended to be something like a grenade. I don't have a sub but I assume there's more, up to date info inside. Or are you bothered by a lack of an update on the OG article? Where it's positioned in relative terms to the other news?

Like sure, you can call it bias. That's fine. But I don't think it's this horror show of propaganda you're imagining.

After the 371st time noticing, it’s a horror show of propaganda, and we’re not imagining it.

After the 371st time noticing, it’s a horror show of propaganda, and we’re not imagining it.

This time, they successfully fooled me. I saw the headline that a suspicious device had been thrown near Mamdani's residence and I assumed it was right-wing activists.

This is the same thing as “if they don’t tell you the race of the murder suspect” then you know a black guy did it. If they don’t explicitly tell you right-wing guy did it then you know a lefty did it. If they tell you right wing you their is a non-zero probability they are misidentifying sometimes on purpose.

This is the same thing as “if they don’t tell you the race of the murder suspect” then you know a black guy did it

For a lot of situations, I would agree. But sometimes they don't tell you the suspect's race because they genuinely don't know. For example, for a few hours after Charlie Kirk was shot, there was no public knowledge about the race of the shooter. Throwing bombs around in NYC is unusual enough that when I first heard about it, I assumed that this was a similar situation.

U.S. Authorities Are Investigating Device Thrown Near Gracie Mansion

It is contemptible primarily because there's more than enough video footage that documented the event. This includes the first bomb that the guy threw, as well as the second bomb which was dropped as he made his attempted escape. A variety of footage with different angles was available on X.com 4 hours before this article was first published.

This fact is not mentioned at all in this article. If I was reading the article I would have no idea that any of these events were recorded by a dozen different cameras. I wouldn't know if NYT reporters saw the footage, ignored it, or why they did so. We know the NYT is aware of X for a few reasons, but chief among them is they relay an FBI statement from the platform at the end of this very article.

According to footage I saw, one device was thrown in the direction towards the protestor group, but fell short landing in a barricade. Individual counter-protestors and media at the scene, confused, immediately can be heard asking things like "What was that?" and "Yo this nigga threw a bomb, bro?" The suspect was seen retreating from the crowd of counter-protestors down the sidewalk while police reacted to a smoking, suspicious device on the ground. Police then pursued the suspect down the sidewalk where a second suspicious device was passed between the suspect and a second individual, now identified as Emir Balat and Ibrahim Nikk, before igniting it and dropping on the ground.

There's a lot of ways NYT journalists could incorporate these apparent facts and others from video footage to better inform the public. They can do this without making dubious claims or reporting solely on the questionable veracity of edited (though not all are) video uploads. Journalists are more capable craftsmen than you give them credit for.

The "suspicious device" doesn't bother me. They did not know if it was a real bomb and neither did anyone else. What they have done is used that one uncertainty to apply more extensive ambiguity to the story than it deserves. They've done this in a way where you, experienced reader, will defend them as they deliberately attempt to mislead you with the bare minimum. Then, next week, we'll get slew of articles on on a story that is based on footage which includes "what appears like police brutality" or "a racist Wendy's employee." All the caution and credibility of the Grey Lady can get thrown to the wind when deliberation ends differently.

The device had the appearance of a real bomb. Police reacted to it as if it was a homemade bomb. Stupid photographers ran up to it to snap cool photos of the suspicious device on the ground like they would an unexploded bomb. The suspect can be heard crying "Allahu Akbar!" before throwing this smoky device over the heads of counter-protestors. He threw it over the heads of counter-protestors towards -- in the direction of -- the anti-Islam protestor guy. That's the guy whose protest had generated all this controversy, but the NYT newsroom has not independently confirmed he was the target of the device. Sources inside the NYPD tell the Times these are important facts.

The fact that few, if any, are reported suggest the NYT failed to inform the public by using its own suspicious devices. I would prefer to conveniently get my news dope from a single, esteemed NYT reporter. It's annoying that I can't do this, because they're bad at reporting events such as this. Yes, this is just how news works, but that's more of a condemnation than anything else.

This might be a bit weak for a top post but I find the idea interesting. Some spoilers for books mentioned within. Let me know if I should delete an repost on Friday fun or something.

So I've been reading /r/printsf a bit lately. I notice that what left wingers there consider to be left wing novels is noticeably different from what I would consider to be left wing novels.

One topic that comes up occasionally is "Can you recommend a left wing sci fi book".

A common recommendation is the Murderbot series. The thing is I don't find the books themselves to be very left wing.

The universe is definitely built on leftish tropes. Many of the characters are from world of libleft hippie scientists who form polycule marriages and the broader universe, or at least the outer rim, is run by evil corporations. I'll use "he" to refer to Murderbot because it flows better and it's fun to be a bit of a jerk.

There's a chunk of the fandom that like to insert gender identity issues that aren't really present in the novels themselves. They post about how Muderbot should be referred to as 'it' and would be very upset if someone thought of his as male.

However my take away was that Murderbot is a fusion of cloned human tissue and cybernetics and has no gender identity whatsoever. He has no sex drive and finds the idea of an organic grinding against him sexually really gross.

In one of the later books when he's forced to check a box about his gender at customs he checks "none".

But at no point is he ever upset about what gender humans try to classify him as, it's just completely meaningless to him. Also they should keep their filthy genitals off of him.

The plots are generally Murderbot trying to survive, to investigate his past, or to save his friends. So those all strike me as politically neutral.

Now there is a book that I'd classify as extremely left wing, to the point that I was kind of offended by it.

It's Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Actually big spoilers for this one.

The message of the book is a very Brockmanish "We should submit to forced modification by our new spider overlords".

The generally plot is that the last group of humans are refugees on a space convoy. Where most of them were cryogenically frozen. Their last hope is to try to set up a colony on a world they run into that was artificially terraformed. The terraforming accidentally created super intelligent spiders who have been living there. The book ends with the spiders forcibly genetically modifying the humans so that the humans won't find them so terrifying.

The humans are presented as terrible in a way that comes of as propagandistic. The spiders are presented in a much more sympathetic fashion.

Now I have issues with spiders and many of my best friends are human, so this bothered me.

A key theme is being forced to overcome disgust, which I'd classify as extremely progressive coded.

If you swapped out some of the actors and phrased it as refugees should be forced to change to be compatible with the current population it would be seen as incredibly racist. So that makes the message sound even more progressively coded to me.

I tried the first Murderbot book and didn't much like it. It was very, uh, without being too uncharitable or invoking a @WhiningCoil rant, "female coded." The whole "found family" thing and the fact that progressives can read whatever gender politics they want into an asexual combat droid who presents as gruff and hard and just cannot with these stupid humans but actually has a soft gooey core is why they consider it leftist.

These people need to read them some Ursula Le Guin.

But Children of Time is one of my favorite modern SF books, so we're gonna fight.

Okay, not really. But - I will concede that Adrian Tchaikovsky is probably left-leaning. He cultivates a fairly inoffensive and apolitical social media presence, though what hints he has dropped indicate that he's generally on the progressive spectrum. His books are mostly not didactic or obvious in their politics, but again, tend to be vaguely progressive in their sentiments.

However, while I agree that the "solution" in Children of Time, forced genetic behavioral modification, was kind of horrific, it also made sense from the spiders' POV, and the humans were mostly villains escaping from an authoritarian system. I didn't read this as Tchaikovsky saying something about humanity's true inherent nature, but rather it was about these particular humans presenting an existential threat to the spiders, and the spiders coming up with a solution that wasn't "One of us must exterminate the other." It was actually a rather clever and very sf-ish solution.

I don't see this as particularly "progressive" coded, unless anything that doesn't end in military conflict is "progressive." I don't see overcoming disgust as inherently progressive coded. Maybe you think becoming comfortable with sentient spiders was supposed to be a metaphor for becoming comfortable with gays and trans, or with Muslim immigrants? I certainly didn't read it that way.

Also, spiders are fucking cool.

The rest of the series is also pretty good, though not as good as the first book.

Of course it makes sense from the spider's POV, but the final part of the conflict is from Holsten's, and his internal monologue is about rejecting his brutish human nature and meekly accepting his new spider overlords instead of going down swinging at a time where they don't know anything about the spider's plans, just that they boarding the ship and injecting everyone with something making people catatonic.

Like, I enjoy his sci-fi worldbuilding and nonhumans, but I would consider his books extremely obvious in their politics, especially because he has real trouble writing compelling villains that don't come across as political pointscoring. Though Chlidren of Time isn't nearly the worst at this, except the embarrassing opening NUN cameo.

But Children of Time is one of my favorite modern SF books, so we're gonna fight.

Have you noticed that Tchaikovsky has kind of collapsed into telling a single story lately? I finished Shroud recently, and it seems like he's using the AND THEN SUDDENLY THERE WAS AN EMERGENT COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS trope more frequently.

Tchaikovsky churns out novels at Brandon Sanderson speed. He's a better writer than Sanderson, but it is starting to show.

YMMV - I am extremely high on the Tyrant Philosophers, though that's fantasy so maybe it doesn't apply.

My biggest criticism of Tchaikovsky is that his narrative voice is kind in a sour spot; it is strong enough that it stands out and overshadows character voice, but it's not really distinctive enough to carry weight (contrast with, idk, Neal Stephenson).

Tyrant Philosophers

It's coming up in my reading backlog, can you elevator pitch it so I can building anticipation?

I've heard good things about it, but the synopses I've seen feel like the target market is atheists who like dungeons and dragons a lot. I only really meet one of those criteria, so I'm a little wary. Is that too uncharitable of a description?

I don't really think that's right. There are militant atheists, but they're the villains. Granted, the dynamics of religious faith are a little different when God turns up for major holidays and performs incontrovertible miracles. The D&D comparison I can see, in that it's got more than a whiff of D&D-style kitchen sink fantasy (each book is set in a different locale with its own idiosyncratic fantasy elements) in the setting.

Red, green and blue mars are pretty lefty and very good. Maybe not modern left enough, but having (at least three) main characters rant uninterrupted about the evils of capitalism for several pages should count.

I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too. I guess it was kind of a reverse Poe's Law situation where I read sincere views that seemed ridiculous to me as a satire of those views.

The universe is definitely built on leftish tropes.

This is just more and more hilarious as I think back on the murderbot novels I read (a total of 5 of them i think).

One of the aspects of the setting is that the leftist little utopia planet gets to exist mostly because a larger capitalist/corportist system allows it to exist, and indirectly supports its existence. It has the same vibes as a small town deciding to be a little communist commune inside America. The town can survive with a totally anemic economy, because the rest of America is producing food and consumer products at such dirt cheap prices. The town only needs to export and trade a little to keep afloat.

The leftist planet utopia in the novels is in a very similar situation. They can't do anything complex without help from the corporate system. They want to explore a planet for a possible colonization effort. But they can't produce the spaceships to get there. They can't produce the surveying and survival equipment they need on the planet. And they can't produce the security they need while on the planet (they are so naive they aren't even aware enough to realize they need security). They are helpless kids being given expensive toys.

They are left alone on their planet not because they are strong enough to deter aggression, but because they are so poor and backwards that they have nothing worth stealing.

You went over some of the relationship stuff that happens in the novel. It has what I feel is an accurate level of interpersonal drama among sexually fluid and diverse crew (aka a lot of drama). And the main narrator of the story, the murderbot, sees all this drama as pointless and stupid, especially in the face of life-or-death stakes.

To me its a story about some incompetent leftists that are overly focused on pointless and stupid interpersonal drama that get saved by a hyper-competent corporate slave (and then in later novels its an ex-slave). If this is what passes for leftist literature, then maybe I need to go back through some of the stuff I've dismissed. Or maybe the lesson is that as long as the author says the correct things in interviews they can absolutely trash leftists with impunity (are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?).

I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too.

It is, but there's noticeable difference between people poking fun at themselves and outsiders mocking them. Murderbot is, IMO, very clearly the former; this is pretty noticeable if you compare how right-wing sci-fi would/has portrayed a similar group of characters.

I'd also note that it paints an extremely rosy picture of the Preservation Alliance society as being a functionally utopian society with complete abundance of core needs and functionally zero crime.

(are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?)

I think it's more that insiders don't realize how ridiculous they look to people who don't share their assumptions and blindspots.

I agree that the books are surely making fun of progressives, though Murderbot also finds the crew members to be cute, and wants to protect their foolish existences. The overall worldview of the books reads to me as sympathetic towards progressives, while also recognising that the capitalists, while unpleasant, better understand the brute realities of the world.

This paradox is what makes the story interesting.

I found the ending of Children of Time unsatisfying, despite liking the book overall, because it was played as a surprise deus ex machina without really grappling with IMO bigger questions about tolerance. It had the chance to philosophically defend Fully Automated Gay Space Communism neoliberal tolerance, but opted instead to choose tolerance-by-force. If I were being uncharitable, I'd compare it to the Bush Administration waltzing into Afghanistan and expecting one weird trick (schools for girls) to trigger a warm embrace of Western values.

Eastern bloc science fiction is worth checking out. Stanislaw Lem is my favorite of these, but there's some cool soviet writers as well.

I'll never turn down an excuse to recommend Roadside Picnic.

Roadside Picnic

I have to wonder how many of the developers of various clones/knockoffs of the Stalker video games are aware of the franchise's origins.

It's an unexpected case of the book being better than the movie, because when that movie is fucking Stalker that's a serious accolade.

If we're going down the Soviet Sci-Fi rabbit hole Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star is an interesting glimpse into the mind of someone who truly believes in the glorious revolution and is extrapolating forward while still being a solid-story teller in his own right.

I've written about the murderbot series before.

Short version, it's pretty straightforward pro-communist/anti-capitalist propaganda, and the author herself makes absolutely no secret of this.

I made a project of reading through some of the classic sci fi I hadn't read before a few years ago and most of it I liked, some I loved, some I thought was meh, but there was only one classic I loathed and that was Childhood's End. It was very pro transhumanism and viewed the entirety of humanity changing to the point they are no longer meaningfully human as a win whereas I see it as mass suicide. The spiders genetically alter the humans plot reminded me of this.

I felt the same about Childhood’s End. Some part of it has got to be down to the two world wars and a visceral sense of ‘anything must be better than this’ but there have always been people who would prefer not-humanity to humanity. More extreme members of the environmental movement for example.

Even anti-humanist treehuggers must be unhappy as the departing children consume/annihilate all of Earth in the end. Whales? Gone. Fellow apes? Gone. Plants? Gone. The simplest earth bacteria? It’s life force sucked away by greedy trance children devoid of any humanity. I found that really depressing as the end of creation. I hate-read the book and I hate that this disgust seared the plot into my brain.

Its only value is as an unintended metaphor for the destruction of the then coming boomer generation.

But, if someone is asking for left wing recommendations, those people probably explained their reasoning to some level. Seems like that would be more interesting than the books themselves

You'd think, but they really didn't so the thread was pretty unsatisfying.

I was afraid to probe exactly what flavour of leftism they were looking for because the sub bans political drama and I'm almost certain to say the wrong thing.

I remember on October 8th the feeling of going online and seeing people celebrating the rape and murder of Israelis. It was a complete shock, I was totally unprepared for the sheer glee in the online progressive spaces, the instantaneous "pray for Palestine" posts combined with "this is what decolonization looks like" posted approvingly under dead bodies.

Two years later I am able to be a good deal more amused than traumatized by the repulsive shenanigans of the bot army. Partly it's because I am now more aware that much of it is a bot army, a carefully coordinated effort not organic sentiment. Partly it's because compared to when our hostages were still in Gaza I can breathe more freely now.

Partly it's because it's funny. /r/worldnews had multiple users posting their analyses about how Iran has these massive stockpiles of 50,000 missiles and 5,000 launchers that they're keeping hidden in reserve, they're just gonna wait until the defense stockpiles disappear and then theyre totally gonna unleash the hell they haven't managed to until now. (It's easy to imagine them gnashing their teeth as they write this.)

Meanwhile metafilter, which is a site that after its leftist death spiral is so tiny and inactive I'm not sure it's worth deploying a bot army to, had an (Australian) user immediately saying Death to America and discourse ensuing between the people who thought that was totally fine and the people who thought that wasn't "helpful" which yielded the following gem

for what it’s worth, “death to X” is an idiomatic phrase in the Arab/Persian world that just means “down with X” or even just casually “frickin’ X,” not a literal call for everyone in a given country to be executed, in much the same way that English-language “sucks” is no longer regarded as having homophobic implications as an idiomatic usage

I know this kind of stuff would have infuriated me two years ago. It would have made me so angry and depressed. And now I can't help it, I laughed out loud reading that comment. Wow, it truly is possible to be this level of distilled stupid.

That doesn't mean I wish well on these people — I don't, I think they're disgusting. I've had a post brewing in me for two years about how I find it so much easier to sympathize with some terrorist in Gaza who is attached to home and his family and hates me, then with some keyboard warrior in the west with a moral compass directed straight up his ass. The terrorist may also be wishing death upon me (and attempting to enact it) but there's something more morally clean about him.

We've had a much quieter week than expected (thanks to all those thousands of launchers the iranians are stockpiling for the right moment). There's at least 1-3 sirens a day but often not more than that, where I live (other areas of the country have much more because they're more in the flight path of debris). The very beginning of the war had the most, up and down and up and down and up and down like I described, by it's tapered off pretty dramatically.

The houthis don't appear to have joined in with their Iranian friends at all this time around. Hezbollah did join in, which has pissed off the non Hezbollah Lebanese enough we might, maybe, perhaps, if I'm being crazily optimistic, actually see some significant meaningful backlash against them there.

I've been working from home. We are hosting my siblings-in-law who don't have access to a bomb shelter near them and have a newborn, which comes with the expected tensions but has been ok overall.

My poor team lead is Muslim so he gets to have the rocket induced sleep deprivation and also fasting for Ramadan. At the beginning of the week he told me between those two things his brain was barely functioning, but as the rocket fire has decreased we've had more peaceful nights and he's been doing better, as have we all.

It's still uncomfortable and hard, my kids still struggle with waking up to sirens, I know people who lost their homes, I've read about the people who died although I don't know any personally. But I go online and read about all the dead my government has been allegedly covering up and it comforts me, I like not living in the alternate reality these people are living in.

Unlike many many people online who seem to know a tremendous amount about all sorts of things (so many bombs have hit us and been covered up so effectively that no one who actually lives here knows about them — but these people magically do) I know almost nothing. Just the daily experience here, and hoping things turn out okay.

Hope everyone here is ok as well.

You might be overestimating how much of that stuff is bots.

I'm someone who was sympathetic to Israel after the 10/7 attacks and defended it against the accusations that it was committing genocide. As I still will, since I believe that those accusations are false.

At this point, though, I'm tired of your country. Tired of its shady connections to many of our highest politicians here in the US. Tired of constantly hearing about it despite its small size. Tired of the sense of self-importance that members of the strongly Zionist subset of Jews tend to have, their belief that they are the main characters of history. Not only tired, but disgusted by having my tax money go to support your country's geopolitical schemes.

Polls show that support for Israel among Americans has actually been dropping. See this for example.

And as the size of the subset of the population in the West that dislikes Israel grows, naturally so also grows the size of that smaller subset of the population which dislikes Israel enough to cheer for Israeli civilian deaths.

Fwiw I don't think comments like yours are signs of bots. To me an obvious sign of bots would be multiple separate accounts repeating a claim that Iran has thousands of launchers waiting to be used. Or one account that's constantly posting comments on this topic and no other topic round the clock and spreading misinfo. It's mostly on reddit or Instagram that I've seen that kind of thing. But I do also believe there's coordinated attempts at pushing narratives on social media that aren't just fog of war misinfo.

I do hope there were very solid strategic reasons for America to join and that they pan out but it's not like the Trump administration is clearly communicating them, hence "hope", that the 4d chess board or whatever becomes obvious in a few weeks. It's really early in the war, but it definitely from my perspective with so little information feels like a big big gamble so I'm really hoping that for the people who have access to way more secret intelligence than I do it's much more of a sure thing.

Israel doesn't have bunker busters, also the US has better Navy and Air capabilities. That's about it. It's also blatantly obvious to outside observers it's Israel calling the shots and Trump/The US playing along. The harder they deny it the more hilarious it becomes. This whole thing is one of the main pillars Trump ran on, promising no more wars in the sandbox. If it were up to Trump himself this wouldn't be happening.

Two years later I am able to be a good deal more amused than traumatized by the repulsive shenanigans of the bot army. Partly it's because I am now more aware that much of it is a bot army, a carefully coordinated effort not organic sentiment.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I think the idea that it is a bot army is a cope (or, more precisely, you taking something that is meant primarily as a propaganda message for a different audience as accurate information). I'm just about old enough to have consciously experienced 9/11 as a European, and the reactions were very similar. Of course back then there was no mass social media, and traditional media was understood to be under the watchful gaze of people who are respectable and have political obligations; but on the ground, already, in my perfectly respectable, mainstream, upper middle class environment, the reaction was almost universally a certain giddiness and excitement, because the underdog managed to land a most spectacular punch straight to the face of the smug snake who had been grating everyone with their smug strutting around. It's not that, individually, people even liked Islam or Islamists, or, imagining an individual American, were happy for them to die a violent death; rather, this did not figure at all, because the American deaths were as much of an abstract statistic to us as the deaths in random US bombings of targets in Sudan. All that mattered is that the Americans had been doing all the hitting, seemed very secure and self-assured in doing so, but finally got hit. People like stories where the plucky underdog embarrasses the Empire.

I don't see the balance or nature of sentiment regarding Oct 7 as significantly different from that at all. The only thing that changed is that now there is an internet where you can share your edgy thoughts with the like-minded, rather than there only being mass media where your edgy thoughts will be judged by schoolmarms with well-paid political consulting gigs. You do also have to understand that, just like 9/11, it is in a way nothing personal; Israelis are simply (1) abstract distant foreigners and (2) the smug overdogs who had been running circles around everyone else with impunity. ((2) might grate when in your internal narrative you see yourself as the underdog.)

I guess I will believe you when you say that Europeans cheering for 9/11 meant nothing personal to Americans, but it certainly felt personal to us. (In fairness, I don't remember a lot of Europeans openly celebrating, but there certainly were a lot of Europeans saying, in so many words, that we had it coming, and the real tragedy would be if we retaliated against poor innocent Muslims in any way.)

If a major terrorist attack happened in your country, and Americans were all "Haha that's what you get for importing infinity Muslims, face meet leopards!" (and I have no doubt you'd see Americans saying that), I suspect you would take it very personally and would not be convinced by arguments that it was an abstraction, that Americans didn't really wish death to Europeans.

There is of course a more sophisticated discussion about empire and "chickens coming home to roost" (another popular phrase of the time), and just as with Hamas and October 7, reasonable people can talk about what led to this without it being black and white and "They just hate us because they are made of pure concentrated evil." But it is kind of unreasonable to say "You had it coming" (and that "Death to you!" doesn't literally mean "Death to you!") and expect people to believe that it's not personal and they should understand it as an abstract political statement because a few deaths are just a statistic, and you're just celebrating the fat kid standing up to the bully.

In fairness, I don't remember a lot of Europeans openly celebrating, but there certainly were a lot of Europeans saying, in so many words, that we had it coming, and the real tragedy would be if we retaliated against poor innocent Muslims in any way.

Were there? Because I don’t recall any of that and I’m European and old enough to have watched the second plane hit WTC live on BBC at work.

What reason would Europeans even have had to dislike US en masse outside the pseudo-communist far left circles back then? Clinton era US was generally liked and GWB was a somewhat bumbling but seemingly largelt irrelevant president until after 9/11.

Maybe you underestimate how many pseudo-comminist leftists there were and are. (Again, to be fair, I heard "chickens coming home to roost" from Anericans.)

(Again, to be fair, I heard "chickens coming home to roost" from Anericans.)

Noem Chomsky would be the type specimen there. There's a substantial group of people, mostly intellectuals or those who would think of themselves as intellectual, who dislike America and consider it always in the wrong.

Yes, this idea of Europeans (in any significant number) cheering on 9/11 seems completely made-up. There was a wave of pro-American goodwill like I can never remember before after 9/11. Lots of European countries participated in invading and occupying Afghanistan.

Iraq, on the other hand, thoroughly reset the counter. But that was after.

As one of those Europeans that cheered up about it - it is not completely made up. Seeing the hegemon humiliated and hurt felt nice after the Serbian bombings.

Eh, what?

The main perceived problem with the Serbian bombings for a layman on the street was that NATO took forever to actually start doing them. Certainly not that NATO bombed Serbia in the first place (outside niche edgelord or old communist far left circles).

In the balkans it was 50/50 aporoval at best.

Is that because it seemed like an arbitrary decision, considering all the shit the Serbs were put through over the last centuries, including genocide in WW2? I don't know much about it, but I've gathered that the genocide of the 8000 Muslims didn't just appear out of nothing?

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It's hardly surprising that countries with significant Serbian minority would have anti-NATO sentiment after NATO struck Serbia. That doesn't reflect the rest of the Europe at all at the time.

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Yeah, my social democrat lower middle class parents were devastated. Even by european leftist standards, /u/4bpp is extreme in his anti-americanism and anti-israelism.

European anti-Americanism works in layers, as in scott's counter-signaling model. The politicians at the top/international elite are atlanticist, the leftist upper middle class is anti, the broad middle class is pro again, the high working class "conspirationist podcast" tranche is against, and real proles/idle poor love American soaps/action movies again.

I was in, essentially, middle school (analogous age bracket) back then. I'm just relaying the general vibes that I perceived around me (from other kids, and by extension presumably their parents because I'm not sure how they would develop those views independently). It might be relevant that this was in East Germany, which by then already had started entering its ongoing phase of Smug Westerner Fatigue.

Plus you're Russian, which have their "Ostalgie" in the 90s. Plus you hold roughly Chomskyite views on the evil of the West, america, israel, and the contrasting fundamental innocence of the Wretched of the world, like the khmer rouge, milosevic putin and hamas.

I don't understand how you leap from "4bpp saw these things around him" to "4bpp personally championed this view". There was, to my best knowledge, only one other kid of Eastern Bloc origin in my entire school at the time, and he was Ukrainian, and I didn't interact with him. Besides, I don't think the attitude had much to do with nostalgia for the East, any more than American "deplorable" Trump voting is due to nostalgia for Jim Crow or whatever its detractors claim, but rather a very similar impulse of defiance against constant moralising by richer, more successful self-proclaimed betters.

Even if you were right and I was just merely secretly reporting on the ostalgic ideations of my pre-teen self rather than a snapshot of what my corner of East Germany believed, the set of beliefs you impute to me is wild (and not very accurate). Innocence of the Wretched? Please! My attitude has long been that the Wretched of the World all deserve each other and utility would increase if they went extinct. I just find those who could not leave their grubby fingers off of them before their self-inflicted demise to be detestable in a different way.

I don't want to sound like a prosecutor, but do you deny your left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine views, and are you now, or have you ever, been a member...?

I'm establishing a bubble here. If those are your opinions, then you will tend to see them in others with greater frequency than you would in the general population.

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Not really an argument that he was in a lizardman-sized bubble. Chomsky was not an insignificant minority figure among the left in Europe, but one of the prominently heard voices, a mainstay of the countercultural bookshops and reading clubs among the left-wing academic class who'd read Le Diplo's praises of ATTAC and sympathize with the Black Bloc.

at work

Sounds like you were a respectable person, the intended audience of the respectable shock in the mainstream media?

I remember the edgy young adult / teenage leftist people I knew not cheering, but being incredibly smug. Vibes of some analyses in leftist newspapers were "akshually, the US foreign policy is at fault here". But I think many people may have their memories confounded by the opposition to Iraq war few years later. Condemnation and anti-American sentiment were much more widespread then. Freedom fries and all that.

GWB was a somewhat bumbling but seemingly largelt irrelevant president until after 9/11

GWB was supposed to be the herald of evil white evangelical regime, controlled by Dick Cheney and/or Skull & Bones, who was opposed to the Science, such as teaching evolution in schools and opposition to stem cell therapies. The Handmaid's tale the tv series was not yet made, so nobody made references to it, but it illustrates the mental space.

And all the above is certainly different than the situation with Israel today. Same leftist not-longer-young adult crowd seriously believes (or act like they believe) that Israel is really equivalent to apartheid era South Africa and moral people should oppose it and support Palestinians with the same enthusiasm and moral force as they supported Nelson Mandela. I don't personally know anyone who cheered on their public real name social media, but their relief was palpable when the war in Gaza began and they could again earnestly concentrate on complaining about the evil crimes of Israel.

I mean Israel in the West Bank is inching pretty close to full apartheid. Keeping people in permanent stateless limbo in a swiss cheese of disconnected towns. And the Gaza treatment is fucked up too in that they and Egypt essentially don't allow freedom of movement out of Gaza.

Were there? Because I don’t recall any of that and I’m European and old enough to have watched the second plane hit WTC live on BBC at work.

So am I, and I kinda remember some of my friend group going "fuck them". Though we were all retarded teenagers at the time, and I don't remember much of what the adults were saying. 4bpp is European too.

This is the same as my experience. The guy who was the most insistent about going "fuck them" was basically just a teenage edgelord, a channer before the chans. He became conspicuously right-wing a few years after the events (conspicuous enough to stand out in the generally apolitical atmosphere). The next day there was a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11 and the one guy known for left-wing activism in the class made a point of saying that he was only doing it to honor the civilian victims.

I do really suspect it depends on where you are; Scandinavia was already much more Philoamerican than the parts of Europe (DE, FR) I was familiar with back then.

Though we were all retarded teenagers at the time

Which is rather different than ”a lot of Europeans”. It’s like trying to seriously claim that ”a lot of people are lizardmen” because a bunch of edgelords put a mark there on a survey.

Well, hold on, teenagers shouldn't be taken seriously, but it's hardly because they express lizardmen opinions.

If a major terrorist attack happened in your country, and Americans were all "Haha that's what you get for importing infinity Muslims, face meet leopards!" (and I have no doubt you'd see Americans saying that), I suspect you would take it very personally and would not be convinced by arguments that it was an abstraction, that Americans didn't really wish death to Europeans.

I see that all the time, but I don't take it personally because it's default-sub Reddit equivalent posters saying it. What I don't see is international student activism chanting "Anglicise the intifada" and wearing Irish tricolour balaclavas as fashion statements, or at least not outside of Kneecap gigs.

The question is how much of it is organic, if it's organic how much is sincere, and if it's sincere how much is truly earnest.

The fact that you can find people supporting Palestine offline and without any effort looking for them indicates that it's at least meaningfully organic and somewhat sincere, even if they wouldn't do more than make cost-less gestures of support. On the other hand it's rare to hear (non-British) people shitting on Britain outside of social media, so what I see online can be chalked up to low effort trolling and banter.

Well, my point isn't about it being good or bad, just about the sentiment existing organically (contra the idea that only bots would hold such views in force). Regarding the reverse situation, I really can't comment on it for myself because I am too rootless to take insult or injury against any country personally (every country I'm somehow associated with has had its share of terrorism and outside gloating, and all of those left me cold), but certainly going by newspaper comment sections people did seem upset about Americans projecting their narratives e.g. on the Breivik event.

Yeah the bot army is always the most insane garbled cope. Especially the whole 'Putin has the world's best digital marketing force that can swing a democratic election by 40% from the CORRECT views that I hold personally' kinda vibe.

That being said I largely find the Israelis better aligned with my interest in functional Middle East civilization and I prefer them to the alternative. It is somewhat funny how badly some people are reacting to Jews going from an essentially unassailable position in polite conversation to being an acceptable target of Left Wingers. These things are cyclical it swings around and maybe don't botch your cultivated position in the first place.

but on the ground, already, in my perfectly respectable, mainstream, upper middle class environment, the reaction was almost universally a certain giddiness and excitement

I was pretty young for 9/11, so my impression was that Europeans had a lot of sympathy and support and only soured on the reaction later. This is a big update for me, so thanks for letting me know. You just converted my contempt for Europeans at your general economic dysfunction, cultural arrogance, churlish ingratitude, and eagerness to commit civilizational suicide into genuine hatred.

Edit: I’m seeing other Europeans in this thread disagreeing with you, so I’m updating back to “leftists are evil everywhere.”

I can't speak to sentiments in Europe post 9/11, but I think this:

You do also have to understand that, just like 9/11, it is in a way nothing personal; Israelis are simply (1) abstract distant foreigners and (2) the smug overdogs who had been running circles around everyone else with impunity.

is wrong. The people celebrating had a problem with very specifically with Israel, and it was absolutely personal. Israel had been bleeding reputation for a while, and 10/7 was a momentary shot in the arm, precisely because you had a very visible group of people openly celebrating it in a way that seemed to validate Zionist critiques of anti-Zionism. They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right), which is when their reputation really started to tank.

They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards

I think this sentiment gives the lie to the idea that there was much goodwill among people on the left and center to begin with (which is the group that dominates traditional media). The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it". The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans and portray them as a particular consequence of Israel's uniquely evil conduct, conveniently forgetting that war always negatively affects civilians, particularly those whose leaders try to maximise their own suffering for PR purposes (using human shields, firing from hospitals, stealing aid etc.)

The messaging from these people basically seems to have been "Yes 10/7 was a terrible thing, but Israel shouldn't actually have done anything about it".

chadyes.jpg

Or, to elaborate and contradict myself: Israel should have done something about it, but not what they did. Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare. The problem is that these positions are incoherent and unjustifiable. Israel occupies a position of near-total superiority over Hamas and other Palestinian militants. Even in the worst case, it does not face anything even remotely approach an existential threat from these groups.

It's been two and a half years of high intensity conflict in an extremely confined geographical space; the victims of 10/7 have been avenged seventyfold, and yet Israel's position is, basically, that they are going to keep bombing Gaza so long as there is evil in the hearts of men (or the President pardons Netanyahu). If they are conducting this war in a good faith effort to end Palestinian militancy (which I question), they should contemplate whether there is some flaw in their strategy.

The whole MSM/NGO machine was primed from the outset to hyper-focus on every negative outcome the war had on Gazans

Was it, though?

There's a lot wrong with this post, but to keep things focussed:

Israeli leadership wants this conflict to have the moral logic of a war for survival rather than a policing action; they simultaneously want to deny the sovereignty of Palestine and deny any responsibility for Palestinian welfare.

Gaza has had complete sovereignty since the mid 2000s. So I don't see any contradiction in Israel treating the conflict as a war.

They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right), which is when their reputation really started to tank.

I think this is just a straight up lie. I honestly can't recall anyone expressing even the slightest amount of sympathy for Israel in the immediate wake of October 7th. The idea that everyone in the West was on their side until they retaliated just seems flatly untrue to me. Even to this day I still encounter pro-Palestine types claiming that October 7th was a false flag, or that Hamas only attacked military targets (and the hundreds of hours of footage of their squaddies murdering civilians at a music festival were created with AI). Even pointing out that Hamas raped women and abducted people is widely seen as tantamount to endorsing Israel's "genocide" (massive enormous scare quotes).

From this comment I feel like you most be an incredible bubble. The MSM media from Fox to MSNBC was incredibly supportive of Israel after the October 7th attacks. The boomercons and boomerlibs started out 100% in lockstep support of Israel along with the entire US political establishment. Except maybe the squad which is 4 out of 435 representatives. Young leftists and groypers were very loud, especially online. And the young leftist were loud in deep blue urban cores and on elite university campuses but were pretty clearly a minority.

Now as the war dragged and increasingly turned into a slaughter with no real military objectives a lot of people turned on Israel. Which is why now the pro-Palestine position is the highest it's ever been. Israel had plenty of goodwill in America but they burned it up by gradually showing their opponents right. And I include myself in this I was very supportive of Israel in their initial fight against Hamas but gradually turned against them over the course of the war. And I know several people in the same boat. I could be in a bubble as well but polling seems to show that there was a real shift in opinion during the war in Gaza.

From this comment I feel like you most be an incredible bubble.

It's called "Europe", and specifically Ireland.

Ireland being aggressively in the tank for Palestine is not exactly new, but it is also an outlier. It certainly does not reflect American sentiment.

Back when the PLO was uncomplicatedly a terrorist organisation, the IRA, ETA and PLO saw each other as ideological allies and almost certainly cooperated operationally.

The dominant strain of Irish nationalism is anti-British first and foremost, and therefore anti-Western Civ by implication, which is why it is so hard to organise a right-populist party in Ireland, despite the obvious unmet demand for anti-immigration politics.

That's quite the bubble, yes.

For what it's worth, post October 7th, I recall a massive amount of support for Isreal from a large number of right-wing coded spaces, though perhaps that's my bubble in action.

...conversely, I'm also seeing a number of that same space react negatively to getting dragged into a war with Iran, while the other half has simply devolved into Holden Bloodfeast.

In Australia it felt like the whole Gaza plight/anti-Israeli thing didn't really spin up till after a couple months of the October 7 attacks

I meant it was not personal in the sense that it was not about the individuals who died. Of course it was indeed about Israel, just like the reaction about 9/11 was about the USA.

They proceeded to burn all that good will and more with their conduct afterwards (not helped by Netanyahu being an extraordinarily repellent figure to all but the far right)

This really cant be true IMO. Unless something like 99.9% of people who have allegedly "soured" on Israel post 10/7 are just too stupid to understand what the response was always going to be. You can't have a neighbor that launches hundred + man raiding bands into your territory where 1000+ of your people are killed, 200+ are taken hostage, and thousands of others injured, maimed, raped, not to mention the property damage. The only reasonable response to that is the maximum response.

If a Mexican cartel did that with the support (even tacit) support of the Mexican government and a hostile foriegn nation there would be no more Mexico. Everyone involved would obviously be killed, the government deposed, a gigantic DMZ imposed on their norther border, the country would be divided up into a bunch of territories administered by our local generals at first, later we'd let some local puppet have some semblance of authority. And the country would simply be broken up as well. Baja would be one protectorate, for maximum humiliation we'd call 3 of the new territories we create, "South New Mexico", "South Arizona", and "South Texas". No amount of civilian casualties would set us off of carrying out our goals, and no amount of dissent to our administration would be tolerated, up to and possibly including forcing them all to switch to English as an official language.

And if you asked any American President or Speaker of the House 1865-2000, "well isn't this proposal by some anon anti_dan a little extreme?" They'd first laugh at you, then tell you the US has a rich history of pseudonymous political writers, then tell you I'm a moderate, and a few would say something like, "thats a good idea, do we have to wait for the Mexicans to attack?"

The only reasonable response to that is the maximum response.

This is demonstrably not true. We know because it has happened. The punitive expedition in Mexico did not involve any such tactics, and the US invasion of Afghanistan was not a brutal scorched earth campaign in the slightest.

And if you asked any American President or Speaker of the House 1865-2000

I'm sure some would agree with you, but most of them would call you an absolute barbarian.

The problem in the US, and Israel, and indeed basically every country, is that there is a significant subset of the population with incorrigibly brutal instincts. It is incumbent on the rest of us not to indulge them, however much they try to promise that their methods are the key to success. Their instincts are terrible, and will constantly lead you to doing appalling things that will make your situation worse in most cases.

The problem is not incorrigibly brutal instincts, but the opposite: Tolerating crybullies who utilize their own citizens as human shields.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for the people who more than anyone else brought this on themselves - or am I misunderstanding your post? Because polls consistently show that Israelis are the only ones who support this war, and also that they dont give a shit about Iranian civilians. The former makes sense, because this war is for Israels benefit only. For 2 years now we have seen videos of Israelis gleefully committing warcrimes, and then, posting them online. We have seen people take their kids to block food from entering into Gaza and arrange conferences about buying and settling in Gaza land. We have seen soldiers mass rape a prisoner, and then seen those same soldiers be paraded around as heroes. The foremost jewish zionist congressman in America wants to nuke Gaza.

There is no group in modern America who has had an easier ride when it comes to PR than Israel. We are talking iron-clad bipartisan support to the point where both parties forced through the sale of TikTok. Nearly every major media was stacked full of zionist who would bend stories to present Israel in the best possible light, and that was before Ellison started buying everything up. And after all this we are still supposed to feel sorry for you? Have anyone in the Israeli side considered asking their countrymen to not behave as out of control violent barbarians in order to get more compassion?

Israel intelligence agencies literally used a sitting US senator as an asset to manipulate the president.

WSJ: To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence agency. “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.

https://x.com/katiadoyl/status/2030126333636809191

This is in the wall street journal, they don't even try to hide it. And why would they? They make it clear they're the king, Israel speaks and the west listens. Many of our politicians are actively training with foreign spies to control American politics and they're flaunting it.

Every once in a while they go oops and say the quiet part out a little too loud (like Rubio and Johnson admitting that Israel pushed us into the war before now trying to claim the opposite) but it's barely disguised. And if this is what they're public about, just imagine all the things happening in the shadows.

It is truly insane. And it still not enough to satisfy the Israelis. After the campaign against Ms Rachel, a bunch of zionist lawyers in UK are now suing Piers Morgan. As long as every single antizionist voice in the worlds is not silences they cant rest it seems.

As long as every single antizionist voice in the worlds is not silences they cant rest it seems.

Certainly one could similarly argue that as long as Israel exists, there is a subset of the population that will not rest, but instead work to undermine, defame, and ultimately destroy Israel if they can. So for example, those of us who are pro-Israel see a guy like David Duke, a white supremacist who couldn't care less about non-whites, suddenly seeming to care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs. Or we see a group called "queers for Palestine" which seems pretty much okay with the fact that in Hamas-ruled Gaza, homosexual activity was a serious offense.

Moreover, the demands made by these people, generally speaking, point to the destruction of Israel. For example, the Israel-haters want a "State of Palestine," but that State of Palestine would not absorb Palestinian Arab "refugees" from places like Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. (Even though Israel has absorbed all bona fide Jewish refugees from anywhere in the world.) Rather, they want Israel to absorb and offer citizenship to all of these persons, even though it would turn Israel into a majority-Arab state, inevitably resulting in a civil war, mass death and destruction, with a real chance of the Jews being slaughtered or chased out.

One thing that gives the game away was the moment, a few years back, when Israel reached a peace agreement with the UAE. Were progressive "peace activists" overjoyed? Of course not, because it was a step forward for Israel.

The upshot of all this is that anyone who is pro-Israel can see what's going on. There is a war being fought to destroy Israel. Not just on the traditional battlefield, but in courtrooms; in the court of public opinion; within school boards; and so on.

Under such circumstances, it's hardly unreasonable to fight back. Of course, any countermeasures, no matter how legitimate, will be spun as unjustified aggression by Zionists and used to further justify the war to destroy Israel. But at the end of the day, it's better to be feared than to be loved.

But at the end of the day, it's better to be feared than to be loved.

So long as you can avoid being hated, if I recall my Machiavelli. Of course, if you expect to be hated regardless, your options do then devolve to "be not feared, dead, and hopefully eulogised pleasantly and to no longer have your corpse be hated" or "be hated, feared, and have a chance at continuing to live", well, the calculus seems clear.

So long as you can avoid being hated, if I recall my Machiavelli.

I was curious, so I looked it up:

These reflections prompt the question: is it better to be loved rather than feared, or vice versa? The answer is that one would prefer to be both but, since they don’t go together easily, if you have to choose, it’s much safer to be feared than loved.

()()(*)

All the same, while a ruler can’t expect to inspire love when making himself feared, he must avoid arousing hatred.

Of course, if you expect to be hated regardless, your options do then devolve to "be not feared, dead, and hopefully eulogised pleasantly and to no longer have your corpse be hated" or "be hated, feared, and have a chance at continuing to live", well, the calculus seems clear.

Agreed.

Which translation of The Prince is this? I want to know so I can [fedpost] the translator.

Which translation of The Prince is this? I want to know so I can [fedpost] the translator.

I am pretty sure that the translator is Tim Parks. More out of curiosity than anything else, what is your objection to the translation?

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How do you think countries normally interact? A US Senator goes on a diplomatic trip and meets with members of the foreign government, who discuss how to talk to the US executive - and this is shocking to you? A foreign intelligence agency shares military intelligence with an allied government to convince them to act, and this is somehow beyond the pale? How dare Israel advocate for a course of action! Absolute monsters!

Sorry, but I find this to be a really thoughtless take. Like, you haven't put an ounce of critical thought into this WSJ article. I feel like you're motivated here either by your armchair objection to the military action itself, and are working backwards to justify why it was a bad idea, or by simple dislike of Israel - or perhaps both!

? A US Senator goes on a diplomatic trip and meets with members of the foreign government, who discuss how to talk to the US executive -

Is it normal to meet with foreign intelligence agencies and work with them in that?

A foreign intelligence agency shares military intelligence with an allied government to convince them to act, and this is somehow beyond the pale?

They didn't share it with the government in general, it is specifically Lindsey Graham being shown information that the US intelligence won't share with him. Or perhaps can't share with him, we're just assuming that Israeli intelligence isn't giving any fake information to Lindsey Graham to manipulate him towards Israeli interests after all. They're not loyal to the US, they're loyal to Israel and the idea that the spies are going to be honest to random gullible senators is a pretty bold one. Even "ally" spy agencies are still constantly at odds and trying to manipulate each other.

Is it normal to meet with foreign intelligence agencies and work with them in that?

Yes. That was my point. The only reason you think it's not normal is because you read a tweet to that effect.

Seems like an even greater issue then if politicians are regularly holding private conversations with foreign spies.

If politicians want to receive intelligence from a foreign intelligence agency, it would be rather unreasonable to expect that intelligence to be broadcasted. "Spy" is not a job description. Intelligence agents spy, diplomats spy, attaches spy. You sound like you'd expect politicians to essentially never talk to any foreign officials in private.

Everyone spies on each other. USA certainly does spy on many countries and attempts to influence their politicians. If your politicians are uniquely susceptible to "NLP", it's a skill issue. Vote for smarter ones.

How do you think countries normally interact? A US Senator goes on a diplomatic trip and meets with members of the foreign government, who discuss how to talk to the US executive - and this is shocking to you? A foreign intelligence agency shares military intelligence with an allied government to convince them to act, and this is somehow beyond the pale? How dare Israel advocate for a course of action! Absolute monsters!

Yeah, I'm getting a similar sense. Other countries lobby the United States all the time in various ways. In fact, it was widely reported that the de facto monarch of Saudi Arabia repeatedly called Trump to push for this Iran attack.

If people have a general objection to foreign countries lobbying the US for military intervention, fine, but it seems like that's not the real objection here.

Me, I do

See my response to your other post.

I think the objection here is to the implications of the phrase "coaching him on how to lobby the president for action", insofar as lobbying implies at best trying to browbeat your target into action by being louder and more persistent than the other lobbyists, and at worst, disingenuous persuasion techniques bordering on deceit. In the strongest sense of the word, "lobbying" the POTUS is not only different from seeking "convince" him, but, arguably, the exact opposite.

Of course, this is making a lot out of a word choice that's not actually a direct quote as far as I can tell.

This is in the wall street journal, they don't even try to hide it. And why would they? They make it clear they're the king, Israel speaks and the west listens. Many of our politicians are actively training with foreign spies to control American politics and they're flaunting it.

What exactly is your objection? That Israel attempts to influence the US government? That it lobbies friendly members of the American legislature to lobby the US president? That it spies on people? That it uses that information to improve its influence efforts?

I really would like to know exactly what you believe Israel is doing wrong here and why.

Certainly one could make the case that countries shouldn't try to lobby or influence the governments of other countries. Do you share that view?

I really would like to know exactly what you believe Israel is doing wrong here and why.

Having any influence at all.

Having any influence at all.

And do you apply this objection just to Israel or to any country which successfully influences the US government?

I would if there were any other countries with that level of control over the US government and media.

I would if there were any other countries with that level of control over the US government and media.

Ok, so for Israel the standard is "any influence at all," but for other countries it's okay to have a little influence. Do I understand you correctly?

Not only should other countries not have the level of control Israel have, but Israel specifically should be punished for previous wrong doings in having less influence than the rest.

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Do you believe it's normal for sitting politicians to collude with foreign spy agencies, including access to classified information that their own domestic intelligence won't share (or maybe can't share, we're just assuming that Israeli intelligence isn't giving any fake information to Lindsey Graham to manipulate him towards Israeli interests after all) in order to manipulate the feds?

I'm not sure I would call that normal lobbying.

Do you believe it's normal for sitting politicians to collude with foreign spy agencies

Not in the US. Here is the definition of "collude"

cooperate in a secret or unlawful way in order to deceive or gain an advantage over others.

Now kindly answer my questions:

  1. What exactly is your objection? That Israel attempts to influence the US government? That it lobbies friendly members of the American legislature to lobby the US president? That it spies on people? That it uses that information to improve its influence efforts?

  2. Certainly one could make the case that countries shouldn't try to lobby or influence the governments of other countries. Do you share that view?

  3. Are you claiming that Israel has done something unlawful? If so, exactly what law was broken? (I won't ask if you believe Israel did something secret, since you said "they don't even try to hide it"

I'm trying to understand your position here, because I strongly suspect that you don't actually have a principled objection to Israel's conduct.

Yes, especially in ways that are obviously detrimental to the citizens of the United States, and beneficial to the citizens of Israel.

Ok, so here's the question. It was reported that Saudia Arabia's senior royalty repeatedly lobbied Donald Trump to attack Iran. How many posts have you made complaining about this?

American politicians should be acting for the American people. Not getting (((influenced))) to help the Israeli people.

So I take you object to Jewish Americans and Christian Zionists lobbying the US government to take pro-Israel action?

No laws have been broken, but that doesn't mean it's okay.

Perhaps not, but the accusation on the table was that Israel engaged in lobbying which was either secret or illegal. It seems that accusation was false.

Do you find drag queen-story hour at the library upsetting? Or 12 year olds being put on puberty blockers against the wishes of one of their parents? Those things aren't specifically illegal, so by this logic you can't have a problem with it lol.

Please show me where I stated or implied that if it's not illegal, then it's okay. Please QUOTE me.

TIA.

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for what it’s worth, “death to X” is an idiomatic phrase in the Arab/Persian world that just means “down with X” or even just casually “frickin’ X,” not a literal call for everyone in a given country to be executed, in much the same way that English-language “sucks” is no longer regarded as having homophobic implications as an idiomatic usage

The thing is, I could believe that (I personally enjoy talking about people being first against the wall when the revolution comes, Sirius Cybernetics Marketing Division style), except that I assume the people excusing your excerpt would also take significant offense at similar (or lesser!) directed from the wrong people at the wrong people.

The thing is, I could believe that (I personally enjoy talking about people being first against the wall when the revolution comes, Sirius Cybernetics Marketing Division style), except that I assume the people excusing your excerpt would also take significant offense at similar (or lesser!) directed from the wrong people at the wrong people.

Yeah, I was thinking something similar. If members of the Beitar Jerusalem football club were to start chanting "death to Arabs," I wonder how this person would react.

Besides, when Arabs or Persians chant "Death to America" and such, they know how it will be interpreted. I'm not big into political correctness, but if you KNOW that something will actually, in good faith, be interpreted in a certain way, and the listener is not performatively getting offended, well, then people don't really owe it to you to search for a charitable interpretation of what you have said.

  1. Regardless of whether some people saying Death to America only mean it idiomatically, we know not all of them only mean it idiomatically since they have proven, through action, their non-idiomatic desire for Americans to die.
  2. Even if the original Persian has a more idiomatic meaning, the entire discussion was about Western English speakers saying the phrase in English. They (probably) don't mean it literally, of course, they're just using it to signal how they're the good kind of kafir you definitely shouldn't stab or bomb or shoot while you're idiomatically deathing to X.
  3. Of course the same people saying this is fine would have a total meltdown over something similar or lesser reversed. I think it's even funnier if you have more context about the metafilter purity death spiral as they've progressively purged their ranks of anyone guilty of wrongthink.

Regardless of whether some people saying Death to America only mean it idiomatically, we know not all of them only mean it idiomatically since they have proven, through action, their non-idiomatic desire for Americans to die.

Agreed, and I would also ask the following: Of the people who say "death to America," but really only mean "down with America," what percentage would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Americans? What percentage would genuinely feel bad if such an attack took place and succeeded?

Agreed, and I would also ask the following: Of the people who say "death to America," but really only mean "down with America," what percentage would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Americans?

That actually seems like a surprisingly high standard. What percentage of Americans do you think would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians? We mostly don't even hate Canada, and I don't think you'd get more than, say, 30% of Americans actually willing to materially inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians.

I guess it matters how much of an inconvenience we're talking about here, though. If it was something like, "would you be willing to spend $1 more in taxes to prevent terrorist attacks on Canadians", I suppose I could believe that possibly a majority of Americans would be willing to make that sacrifice. But if you turn it around and ask about a rival nation like Russia and China, I'm not sure how many Americans you could get to voluntarily pay $1 more in taxes to prevent a terrorist attack against Russian or Chinese citizens, and I don't think the prevailing sentiment is exactly "Death to Russia" or "Death to China."

Most Americans would highly inconvenience themselves to prevent a serious terrorist attack on themselves. I’d be willing to spend 10% of my savings to prevent a 30+ person terrorist attack in Canada. I still think most American would agree

Thanks! Personally, I'd reciprocate but sadly I doubt Canadians as a whole would, at least not these days.

I guess some of the question is: is 10% of your savings enough to materially impact your standard of living much? If you scaled your income to "average American" levels, is that a candy bar or a car for you?

Do you think the 30% of Americans who have their health care costs paid for by Medicaid would be willing to give 10% of their savings to prevent a 30+ person terrorist attack in Canada?

If I'm wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadian point specifically, then fair enough. But I still maintain that regardless of the Canada angle, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't even slightly inconvenience themselves to save Russians or Chinese people from terrorist attacks. Am I supposed to think worse of Iranians when they have the same hang up about saving Americans?

10% would be enough to hurt but I could plan around.

Canadians use to be our mothers. I guess I’ve become tribal but even my willingness to give would depend on whether it’s Euro-Canadians or all the imported citizens they have today.

I would give very little money to save Russians or Chinese.

For the sake of argument, let's say a one-hour talk with 911 and police, after observing some strongly-suspected imminent terrorist preparations. That's about as small as you can go and still have it be a genuine inconvenience.

I think plain civic duty would get you to 75% (EDIT: among Western allies), with most of the remainder being indecision and passivity, not active hostility.

I think by changing it to a 911 call you warp the question being asked.

I doubt that most Iranians are ever in a position that a 1 hour phone call could guarantee the safety of Americans from a would-be terrorist attack. My personal guess is that if an Iranian became aware of a terrorist attack against Americans, and wanted to prevent it, it would take a lot more personal effort and research than a mere hour-long phone call, and they might not even succeed at preventing it.

Just turning the question around. If the information about a terrorist attack in Russia next week fell into your lap, how much time would you estimate it would take you to ensure that the right people got that that information, and how sure are you that your effort would actually prevent the terrorist attack? Do you think the vast majority of Americans would be willing to expend that effort for the citizenry of our geopolitical rivals?

I doubt that most Iranians are ever in a position that a 1 hour phone call could guarantee the safety of Americans from a would-be terrorist attack.

I think it's a more accurate measurement of sentiment, even if it isn't practically useful.

Just turning the question around. If the information about a terrorist attack in Russia next week fell into your lap, how much time would you estimate it would take you to ensure that the right people got that that information, and how sure are you that your effort would actually prevent the terrorist attack?

Informing the Canadian authorities would probably take a couple hours up front, then a day or two in followups. I don't think they would be very invested in stopping it nowadays, so it probably wouldn't be prevented. Regardless, I did my duty.

Similarly, I'd hope that an American (even one who chants bad slogans) would inform the American authorities, and an Iranian would inform the Iranian authorities (assuming they suspect rogue actions instead of government ones). Those reports would have very different results, of course.

That actually seems like a surprisingly high standard. What percentage of Americans do you think would inconvenience themselves to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadians?

Well it depends what the inconvenience is, which admittedly I did not spell out in my post. But let's do this:

All you have to do is pick up the phone and make an anonymous phone call. That's it, nothing more.

Ok, with that in mind, and assuming that there were a brutal 10/7 style terrorist attack planned for Canada, what percentage of Americans would lift a finger to stop it? I'm pretty confident that the majority would. Ok, now suppose there were a similar attack planned for the United States. Among Iranians (or people in general) who say "Death to America" but really mean "Down with America" what percentage would make the phone call? I'm pretty confident that few, if any, would do so.

Ok, with that in mind, and assuming that there were a brutal 10/7 style terrorist attack planned for Canada, what percentage of Americans would lift a finger to stop it?

Elsewhere in this thread, I already conceded I may be wrong on the Americans-saving-Canadians question, depending on the level of inconvenience involved.

But we shouldn't just judge ourselves or others purely on on how we treat our friends or allies.

I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that Iranians wouldn't make a phone call to prevent American deaths in a terrorist attack. But I would again ask how many Americans would make such a call for terrorist attacks against Russian or Chinese citizens? I don't believe that the general sentiment here in the US is "Death to China" or "Death to Russia", and yet I think even our more tempered animosity towards these geopolitical rivals is enough that I have serious doubts about how many Americans would make a phone call to try and save Russian and Chinese lives.

Don't get me wrong. I actually think the bigger the consequences, the more do-gooder Americans would try to stick their necks out for Russian and Chinese civilian lives. That is, if it were 30 lives at stake, I think there's a reasonable chance a majority of Americans wouldn't make the call. But if it were 3000 lives or 30,000 lives of innocent Russian or Chinese civilians, I think Americans would be more likely to make the call despite our animosity.

But I actually would guess that that is also the case for Iranians to some degree. Don't get me wrong, I am far from believing I have a good read on their general mindset, but I suspect that as the potential death toll in a terrorist attack rises, so too would the odds of an Iranian citizen making the call to try and save American civilian lives rise. Though I have no idea if it would be anywhere close to the rate of American do-gooders in similar circumstances. We could be talking moving from a lizardman's constant of 7% of Iranians for 30 American civilian deaths, to 8% of Iranians for 3000 American deaths.

But I actually would guess that that is also the case for Iranians to some degree.

To be clear, I am talking only about Iranians who say "Death to America" but who actually mean "Down with America." I'm not talking about Iranians in general.

But I would again ask how many Americans would make such a call for terrorist attacks against Russian or Chinese citizens?

Let's put it this way: If there were some American who said "Death to Russia!" but actually meant "Down with Russia!!," I would be pretty surprised if that person did anything whatsoever to prevent a brutal terrorist attack against Russia, even if it were a matter of just picking up a telephone.

That is, if it were 30 lives at stake, I think there's a reasonable chance a majority of Americans wouldn't make the call. But if it were 3000 lives or 30,000 lives of innocent Russian or Chinese civilians, I think Americans would be more likely to make the call despite our animosity.

That's an interesting question, but I think it's beside the point. The point is this:

  1. Over the years, Iran's leadership has repeatedly said things along the lines of "Death to America!," "Death to Israel!," and "Israel will be wiped off the map!"

  2. Many people reasonably interpret this as evidence that Iran's leadership has major animosity towards the United States and Israel; that when these statements are combined with Iran's violent and hostile conduct towards Israel and/or the US, it is reasonable to engage in our own countermeasures, such as sanctions, bombing nuclear sites, etc.

  3. Iran's defenders have tried to dispute this evidence. Among other things, they claim that "Death to America" actually means "Down with America," and that "Israel will be wiped off the map" actually means there should be a change in government in Israel.

  4. It appears these arguments do not stand up to scrutiny.

The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn. Given the context of not just the phrase but these politics surrounding it, I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue, since 'death to America' isn't necessarily proof of what they claim or justification for their own destructive desires/rationale.

Basically it comes across as disingenuous to use the phrase as a basis for wanting to destroy Iran, when idiomatically it's supposedly weaker than it's presented as being. But then again this whole affair is hopelessly mired in bad faith.

The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn.

I'm sure hardly anyone in Iran actually believes they are going to be able to literally destroy America (except in the sense that God will eventually do that for them, which no doubt a few true believers do sincerely believe). That they don't literally mean "We will kill 300 million Americans bwahahaha!" does not mean their sentiment is not very real, and sincerely intended against whatever Americans or American proxies they can get their hands on.

Likewise, we are not going to "destroy Iran." We might destroy their government. We are not going to nuke their cities and raze their crops and exterminate civilians wholesale (which their government would certainly do to us if they had the capability).

I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue

Reality check: Iranians say مرگ بر آمریک. The literal translation is "Death to America." The Arabic الموت لأمريكا likewise translates literally as "Death to America." There is no "translation issue" and while yes, it might have some more general "You suck!" meaning in the minds of some of the chanters who arguably don't literally want every last American dead, it's still pretty unambiguous in its meaning. There is no idomatic usage in either Persian or Arabic where you say "Death to you" and aren't literally (if not sincerely) wishing death upon you.

Also, the argument is weakened significantly because the phrase has a subject. If I say that sucks, sure it's fine. If I say "you suck", that's a little worse but not bad. But if I said "Dave sucks Bob off" then... yeah, it's the original meaning. If I say "damn", that's whatever. If I say "damn you" that's worse and more vitriolic. If I say "damn you to hell" then, yeah, that's like the original meaning again. As far as I can tell, this is a pretty universal rule.

I'm willing to buy that it's softer than US media presents it as, but it's total bullshit that it's lost all connotation. It's still quite hostile. Just like "fuck all republicans" is like, never going to be clean and always going to be something full of animus even if people drop a "fuck" all over the place in regular conversations.

Just like "fuck all republicans" is like, never going to be clean and always going to be something full of animus even if people drop a "fuck" all over the place in regular conversations.

"Peg the Patriarchy" may not be calling for the specific sex act, but the sentiment is correctly understood to be very negative all the same.

Without taking a stance on what the Iranians actually mean when they say Death to America, I was just thinking a few days back how there exists an American relative equivalent in phrases that demonstrate ambiguity of rhetoric and the need to take cultural context into account in translation: the constant calls for "revolution" and uses of the word "revolution" as a description in politics (Ron Paul Revolution! The Reagan Revolution! Bernie's "Our Revolution!") with "revolution" basically just meaning electing a candidate within the existing system instead of its general historical meaning of a complete societal upheaval from the bottom to the top, often/usually through the force of arms (or at least an implication of the same).

You don't see the word "revolution" used the same way in Finland, for example, a country with negative experience of actual attempts at revolution (the left used the word when it was communist but basically doesn't any more, the right has approximately never used it in any sort of a positive sense).

Without taking a stance on what the Iranians actually mean when they say Death to America, I was just thinking a few days back how there exists an American relative equivalent in phrases that demonstrate ambiguity of rhetoric and the need to take cultural context into account in translation: the constant calls for "revolution" and uses of the word "revolution" as a description in politics (Ron Paul Revolution! The Reagan Revolution! Bernie's "Our Revolution!") with "revolution" basically just meaning electing a candidate within the existing system instead of its general historical meaning of a complete societal upheaval from the bottom to the top, often/usually through the force of arms (or at least an implication of the same).

You don't see the word "revolution" used the same way in Finland, for example, a country with negative experience of actual attempts at revolution (the left used the word when it was communist but basically doesn't any more, the right has approximately never used it in any sort of a positive sense).

Out of curiosity, I asked Google to translate "Industrial Revolution" from English to Finnish and got this: "teollinen vallankumous" Then I asked for just the word "revolution" and got this: "vallankumous" So I think that if there were Americans calling for a "MAGA-style revolution in Finland," I think it would be correctly understood.

Perhaps a better example is the word "kill" which, in English, has both a literal and a figurative meaning. (e.g. "last week the Yankees got KILLED by the Red Sox") Ok, so let's suppose that Benjamin Netanyahu announced - in English -- that Israel is going to KILL the Iranians. Under such circumstances, it would be reasonable to take this as evidence of genocidal intent. Even if Israel's defenders argued that the word "kill" doesn't necessarily mean to literally "kill." That what Netanyahu actually meant was that they would defeat Iran.

In fact, if Netanyahu actually were to say something like this, he surely would have known in advance how it would be interpreted. So if he did say it, it's pretty likely that he would have wanted -- to some extent -- for people to interpret it this way.

So too with "Death to America"

Yeah, should probably specify that I was talking about strictly the use of the word "revolution" in politics, it is used in social trends like "industrial revolution", "sexual revolution" and so on. But yeah, "kill" in this sense is probably a better example, and there's a lot of other violent-style rhetoric like that - "crush X", "kick X's ass" and so on.

Reality check: Iranians say مرگ بر آمریک. The literal translation is "Death to America." The Arabic الموت لأمريكا likewise translates literally as "Death to America." There is no "translation issue"

Reality check: That's not how translation works.

Counter-reality check: I speak Arabic (poorly) and listen to what they actually say and mean.

The Russian translator from the linked example could speak English and listen to what English speakers say and mean.

There have been cases of the chant being used about potatoes and traffic. After 9/11, when Khamenei condemned the terror attacks, large crowds of Iranians held vigils, and some chanted “death to terrorism”. This is not the behavior of a nation that actually wants death inflicted upon a country.

We are not going to nuke their cities and raze their crops and exterminate civilians wholesale (which their government would certainly do to us if they had the capability).

Well, by the same token, Netanyahu calls Iran “Amalek”, which in the traditional telling, must be fully destroyed along with “all that they have […] both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”. Do Israelis take this commandment literally? No; every Israeli cleric will explain that Amalek is a symbolic representation of evil. But if you’re Iran, you know what they’ve done to Gaza, and Iraq, and Syria, and Libya… so even a symbolic transliteration is not reassuring.

I'm sure Iranians (and everyone else) have said "Death to Pikachu" or "Death to my mother-in-law" at some point.

This argument is disingenuous and seems a lot like the whole "River to the Sea" debate, where whether it's actually an expression of violent intent depends on whether you hate Jews or not. As I already pointed out, not every single person who chants "Death to " literally wants to see an entire country exterminated, but you are well aware that Iranians chanting "Death to " in the streets mean what they say, even if they think it's figurative because they aren't actually in a position to inflict death.

Netanyahu's "Amalek" reference is in fact pretty loaded and I'm sure he knew what he was saying (and that he could waffle on whether he really has genocidal intent). That said, a politician using loaded rhetoric isn't the same as thousands of people chanting something in unison. If thousands of Israelis start chanting "Iran is Amalek," yes, I would assume that the general sentiment is that they would like to see Iran literally wiped off the map and that a not-insignificant fraction of them really and truly want and expect to do that. There are no doubt a non-zero number of Israelis who really mean it literally, and if I were Iranian, I probably would not be very charitable about interpreting an Israeli's use of that word.

Libya

I was unaware that Israel was a big player in the NATO intervention there.

For what it's worth, I recall reading an article once that described a taxicab driver on a congested road somewhere in Iran shouting "Death to this traffic!".

The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn. Given the context of not just the phrase but these politics surrounding it, I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue, since 'death to America' isn't necessarily proof of what they claim or justification for their own destructive desires/rationale.

I dunno man, if it came out that a common phrase translated really catastrophically aggressively into the language of a generational rival such that it means "we want to eradicate you" then I think it probably shouldn't be like, your country's slogan. If you decide to keep saying it anyways I think you are actually communicating very clearly. Like I had heard the phrase "nigger rigged" growing up a bit as a basic equivalent to "jerry rigged" but I'd have to be hopelessly naive to start a nigger rigging club and expect that not to be interpreted poorly by many people, if I did it anyways it'd only be possible with extreme contempt for the offended people, possibly rising to the level of just meaning what it sounds like it means.

"we want to eradicate you"

Khrushchev's "we will bury you" line to the West might be a relevant example here: there are alternate readings from the literal -- "we buried my grandmother" doesn't suggest a murder -- but the English default is pretty aggressive. Perhaps some of our Russian speakers can vouch for the idiom.

The usual excuse for "we will bury you" is that Khruschev mean the Communist system was so great that the Soviet Union would move ahead by leaps and bounds. That's a plausible interpretation of the English also, especially preceded with "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side."

It's still bombastic and hostile, but not a threat of nuclear attack.

Language Log's take

The CIA's

The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn

Well do you agree that over the last 20 years, Iran has had a lot of official events which included treading on and burning American and Israeli flags?

highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn

Can we agree that the most effective way to destroy Iran would be to take out their food and water infrastructure so that the population dies of hunger and thirst?

Hope everyone here is ok as well.

I think most people here are lucky enough to live outside of active war zones. Stay safe!

Doing my best to!

I don't have much to comment, except that I hope you and your loved ones stay okay.

Thank you


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