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Notes -
A tiny note on the war
In the previous thread, I got some pushback for suggesting that not only did the US strike the Iranian school in Minab, killing 170 children or something like that, but perhaps it did so intentionally (or at least without remorse for the possible consequences of erroneous targeting). I admit that wasn't fully sincere. I realize that, even morals aside, there is no perceived military value in bombing children, at least not for the US (I do think Israelis may target children of IRGC officers out of their usual Bronze Age blood feud sentiment, Oct 7, Gaza and all, seen enough of their remarks to this effect; but then again they don't operate Tomahawks).
Well now the question on it having been an American strike appears settled. As for the intent – it's not so straightforward:
Does it matter if there was no intent if the United States, as of now, also has a revealed preference to not bother with minimizing such risks, in favor of «lethality» and some zany Judeo-Christian nationalism courtesy the power-tripping macho TV host Pete Hegseth? I believe it does, but marginally; about as much as those girls matter to Lethal Pete. I rest my case.
More to the point. It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here. I won't criticize anyone, be the change you want etc.; but what we are seeing is pretty astonishing from the culture war standpoint. Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016? It looks as if the politically dominant culture of the United States changed overnight. Does everyone just like it too much to find the change worth commenting on?
I dislike it too much to comment on it! Listening to Trump or Hegseth discuss the war (and not on clips, many hours of uncut video) should make anyone who listens despair that this is the chain of the command of the US military, the people who controls what some say is the biggest and most beautiful nuclear button anywhere. But Trump Bad is a decade old at this point, and talking about the continuous decline just isn't that interesting, idk. It makes you sound like you have TDS. Like, it really does look to me like he's making all these important geopolitical decisions in the manner of a professional wrestler, if not a teenager who's acting out. But ten million #RESIST liberals have already posted exactly that on facebook or tiktok etc. And what even is there to discuss about it?
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The war is coming home, as people predicted and feared.
The perpetrator of Michigan Temple Israel attack, the winner of Most Ineffective Terrorist of the Week prize (so far), was, unlike perpetrators of Old Dominion University attack and Buford's Backyard Beer Garden attack directly connected to the current war - he was Lebanese whose family was killed in recent Israeli bombing.
Results: one broken door, one injured security guard, thirty law enforcement officers suffering from smoke inhalation and probably marginal tens of million more in cash and weapons going to Israel. One million Lebanese who were expelled from their homes by Israel will still be never let back.
Reminder 1: Highly trained Iranian sleeper cells exist only in Tom Clancy novels.
Reminder 2: Both Epic Goat Beard Man and cutting edge science are right, individual terrorism does not work, even in the rare cases when it works.
Want to change the world? Organize, educate and agitate both elite human capital and the masses, today you can do it from your comfy room. One persistent shitposter can have bigger effect than all lone wolf shooters and bombers combined.
edit: links linked properly
Depends on who the shooter shoots. If Thomas Matthew Crooks had slightly better aim we'd live in a radically different world
Yea, sacrificing your life to change history by *redacting * an irreplaceable person is the steelman argument for individual (or small group) action.
(Boron nitride cutting tool answer to this steelman is: If your enemy cause relies on life of single person, then it is historically doomed anyway. Every great man is mortal and if without him his forces disperse, it is going to happen sooner or later. Just eat popcorn, watch and wait.)
Anyway, truely irreplaceable people are very rare. In the heyday of the propaganda of the deed many royals, presidents and ministers fell with no noticeable effect.
(Was Charles Kirk really one of the rare persons? Too early to say.)
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That shit was so cinematic I am in the pre-I Want To Believe phase, I am ready to alienate all my friends and family by making this one conspiracy my whole identity.
I joke of course, but there is for sure a market position waiting for whoever initiates the zapruder film industrial complex about this one.
Yes, every fan of Donald Trump wants to believe that there was no shoot and no shooter, only body of patsy deposited on the roof and ear scratched by razor shard hidden under orange finger nail. Patriots are in control, all goes according to genius 666D plan, nothing could be derailed by random lone gunman.
BTW, this is one of leading Israeli conspiracy theories regarding death of Yitzhak Rabin.
It was inside job organized by Rabin himself, nothing like failed assassination attempt to prop up your falling poll numbers. Yigal Amir was recruited as patsy and given gun with blank ammo, but outsmarted his handlers and swapped them for real bullets. Oopsie.
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His aim was basically perfect; Trump moved his head.
Obvious divine plan in action. God hates America, wants to destroy it utterly and The Orange Man is His chosen tool of chastisement.
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That's why you don't shoot at the head!
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Just speaking for myself...things are happening, fast. Every day reveals new details. Commenting now would be in ignorance of tomorrow's news. And I can wait for tomorrow.
These things are easier to discuss when nothing ever happens is back in effect.
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Let's review some basic facts.
-The children were being educated in a former military building.
-This building was close to a military installation which would be a likely target in an active war.
-Iran was being actively bombed before this horrible catastrophe occurred. There was every reason to believe the military installation could be a target.
-Despite knowing all of this, the Iranian government chose to continue to have those children attend school nearby, in a former military building, risking their lives to a possible mistake such as this. If there is even a one in a million chance of a mistaken bombing, why the fuck would you continue to place children in that building??? Did the Iranian government have THAT much faith in the precision targeting of the US military?
-The Iranian government quite recently demonstrated a willingness to kill thousands of their own citizens, and also blocked the internet access of Iranians so the atrocities could not be fully documented and shared with the world. They demonstrated that they could accept the deaths of thousands of their own citizens, in order to cling to power.
(None of these facts is in serious dispute, as far as I know. Let me know if I am missing any crucial details.)
Unless my understanding of the facts is wrong in some critical fashion, I think everyone should assign at least 92% of the blame to the Iranian government. The best case scenario is that they practiced extreme negligence with the lives of their own children.
When London was being bombed in World War II, they correctly shipped their children out to the countryside where it was a lot safer. If there's any possibility that your children will be harmed, that's the obvious thing to do!
And the worst case scenario is that the Iranian government knowingly placed children in harm's way, expecting that if they put enough children in harm's way, some of them might get harmed. And in this scenario they knew from watching the Gaza war that when children get harmed, it presents a massive propaganda coup for the side associated with the child victims, no matter how negligent that side has been.
And why is it a propaganda coup? Because almost everyone is either ignorant and doesn't bother to investigate the facts, or else they are eager to blame literally anything on the US government (or Israeli government), even when what occurred has absolutely no positive value for the US government or Israeli government and is clearly a mistake. After all, who wants to blame the side which "lost its children in a horrible way? what good person would ever blame them for the deaths of their own children???".
And yet, the only way to get the Iranian government, and other governments, to stop negligently or deliberately jeopardizing their children, is to harshly punish them every time they risk the lives of their own children.
(And should the US government be more careful? If it's at all practicable, then yes. Not just to protect innocent children (even if the government of the children refuses to protect them), but also partly because most people are either morons that don't bother to assess basic facts, or else to avoid giving the anti-American propagandists- including the ones inside our country- any fresh material.)
Fault isn't zero sum. If a parent negligently ignores their small child and lets them wander out of the house into the middle of the road, and you strike the child with a car and kill them, that parent is is definitely very fault, and yet both in the eyes of the law and common sense you are not particularly much less at fault. I don't really think killing those children is one of the more notable facts about the conflict, it happens in any big enough conflict. But it was not a necessary strike and one that (as far as I know) wouldn't have happened if the US military had lived up to its own values and followed its own policies, so I really don't see the need to defend it.
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when? What was bombed? 8 months ago, two remote nuclear sites with precision bunker busters from B-2s?
Children are educated on military bases throughout the world. Iran was not living in a condition of war before you perfidiously started bombing them. They submitted a pretty good deal to Kushner and Witkoff, who refused, by all accounts because they're at once illiterate and bloodthirsty, as befits the upper caste of the Trumpian society.
This is all pointless mimicry of being a person, going through the motions of an argument. I don't even think you're being disingenuous. That's require more self-awareness.
The first strikes in Iran were more than an hour before the school was struck. Why was there no government plan to evacuate schools near military installations in the event of Iranian targets being bombed? (At least the schools in former military buildings!)
Or, why was such a plan not followed?
It's not like the Iranian government had zero clue that the USA was considering bombing targets in Iran. There was a long buildup to this as you pointed out.
Do you think those children would continue being educated on military bases, when those military bases were at active risk of being bombed? Use some common sense, please.
This comment isn't remotely in good faith on your part.
An hour actually seems like not long at all.
Even if it took them 30 minutes to realize that targets were being bombed, they had plenty of time to leave. A 5 minute walk away and they would probably have been safe.
When I think about my childhood, the schools in my area would all close if there was even a little bit of snow on the ground. (Or even a forecast of some snow.) Snow!
So if American schools can show this level of concern for the safety of children, even when the risks are tiny, why couldn't the Iranian government show concern for their children when the risks were clearly much larger?
Like, unless they were total negligent morons, at some point they must have realized that there was some risk to converting a military building to a school, and they should have a plan to protect children just in case.
For school officials, evacuations without notifying parents, arranging transportation, etc, would be tough to carry out. Honestly, I would kind of imagine the "our country is getting bombed plan" to be closer to shelter-in-place and hope the building/status protects us rather than walk away from the military base. What happens if they leave the building and are hit by shrapnel? Possibly, this will be a Columbine or 9-11 moment for schools next to bases that causes them to completely re-think how to respond to airstrikes.
This was mostly just sloppy intel from the US and a failure of the AI target selection. Possibly, Iran should have evacuated civilians away from all bases as the US forces were mounting in advance of the strikes; I am open to the critique that the school should not have been open at all. But the scale and scope of the strikes was pretty surprising. Also keep in mind the extent to which schools function as childcare.
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Why? Those children serve as the hair trigger for the tripwire force (they've learned well from Hamas), and you don't even have to arm them for them to be effective in that role. Aggressively putting them in danger like that is kind of the point.
At least if they do get killed you don't have to wait very long for their replacements- it takes 14-16 years for a militarily-effective male to grow, but little girls can play the part of "cry for the cameras while being on fire" in as few as 5 or 6. Lightning fast by comparison. (Dead babies aren't quite as photogenic.)
Are you saying that @KlutzyTraining's "worst case" interpretation of the Iranian Regime' motives is accurate?
If so, why are you defending them? Or the media for that matter?
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How long after the recent bombing campaign started did this school incident take place? I honestly don't know.
I'm also interested in the substance and timing of these negotiations as well. What proposal was submitted and when? How did the US respond, if at all? How long afterwards did the hostilities begin?
Keith Woods has a pretty good article on some of the absurdity with linked sources:
Who would have thought that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner representing America's interest could have led to this result?
The Witkoff/Kushner subversion is the "Iraqi WMDs" 2.0.
I make no analysis about the broader situation, but this seems incredibly confused, game-of-telephoned, or taken out of any useful context.
Famously, nuclear reactors were never historically involved in previous weapons projects (yes, not for "enrichment", but for producing plutonium).
Whether or not this specific reactor is well-suited for that purpose is unclear from the context and the quote. IIRC the standard US research reactors were designed to be difficult to use this way. I'd trust the nonproliferation folks to know how all the physics works, but somewhere between them and the journalists the context was lost, possibly deliberately.
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Would it surprise you that non technical people could make such a mistake (that a reactor does not actually do the enriching)?
No, more that it's seems kinda confused for a technical person to make such a claim as if it means something. If by 'enriching' we mean just the whole centrifuge deal, obviously reactors don't do that directly (modulo some liquid sodium-fuel mix stuff not relevant here or anywhere not currently on fire). If we say specifically 'enriching uranium' in the sense of getting weapons-grade uranium from the output, than obviously not, because they burn a fissile fuel from one starting isotope to another, so by definition and by the nature of the uranium fuel cycle a uranium-fueled research reactor doesn't output higher-density U-235 (uh, technically, for times less than 20k years).
But reactors naturally change the isotopic makeup of whatever fuel (and everything else!) that's stuffed into them, that's what 'react' is talking about. The normal fuel cycle doesn't enrich uranium, because they essential convert the majority from U-235... but converting into Pu-239 is one of the main immediate steps. That's the normal next step in the uranium fuel cycle, and it's nuclear bomb material.
Not all plutonium is useful for making bombs, and indeed that's a good part of what makes modern power reactors nonviable for producing weapons: the very rapid cycling and burn rate of fuel that's required to get a high proportion of Pu-239 is intrinsically opposed to running a nuclear power plant, in ways that can be observed from space.
However, research reactors work by cycling input material through a high-intensity bath of neutrons at a controlled rate. Some of those processes are slow, both in time and in neutrons, but others are not. There's some efforts to make it hard to turn a research reactor into a ghetto breeder reactor, and more ways of making it really obvious, but even before considering the age of the reactor here, none of these are impossible or insurmountable tasks.
I'm not a technical expert or professional for this specific field, so I may well be missing some information. Hell, there could be some information I'm not even allowed to know about the statement here. But at least from the publicly available info, this is a definition of 'doesn't enrich uranium' that would exclude a breeder reactor. It's arguably whether it's even technically correct, and it's really hard to believe it's meaningful in the sense it was phrased here.
You can make 239Pu from a LWR but it's horrendously inefficient and requires further processing. The bigger worry on that front was their heavy water reactor at Arak, but that was already shut down (and bombed for good measure). That's why all the talk is about their uranium.
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Do you have answers to my questions? I'm not demanding them, of course. But it seems that your quotes do not answer them.
It seems pretty clear to me that Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapon capability. I guess you dispute this?
I did answer your question- Iran offered to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and maintain enough enrichment for its civilian nuclear facility. It's a rational offer, not one that should have been reacted to with war.
You can read the article I linked, there is in fact no evidence of that and none of the experts cited agreed with that conclusion. Iran offered to hand over all of its enriched material.
The major "ignorance" if it can be called that is Trump seemed to be under the impression that the Iranians negotiating 20% enriched material for their civilian reactor was equivalent to an assertion to be a nuclear power. But the fuel for that civilian reactor was already part of the Obama-era deal and no experts cited believed that fuel for this reactor would have remotely constituted the Iranian demands characterized by Witkoff/Trump:
Nobody has presented any evidence that Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon. None of the international agencies attest to that.
What is absolutely stunning is that 20% enriched material needed for Tehran Research Reactor was already resolved by the Obama-era deal that Trump ripped up. So Trump literally ended the deal that solved the exact controversy Witkoff cited as imminent threat and cause for war. It's really uneblievable.
Not really. Here's what I had asked:
If I understand you correctly, your position is that "Iran offered to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and maintain enough enrichment for its civilian nuclear facility" and that the US (unreasonably) refused this offer. Is that right?
And if so, in your view, what was the timing of these events in relation to the start of hostilities?
Well do you agree that Iran has (or had) underground bunkers in which it produced (or attempted to produce) highly enriched Uranium?
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What other reason would they have for 60% enrichment? As far as I know, there were zero indications they were pursuing naval propulsion, for instance.
Mostly bargaining chip, deterrence, and option to try to create a nuclear weapon in the future. That is not the same as "they are trying to develop a nuclear weapon now" which would constitute "imminent threat." The notion of "imminent threat" that could justifiably bring the world to the brink like it has now is important. There has been no evidence presented to anyone for "imminent threat", which is why the story is so inconsistent and has waffled between "they were going to attack the US" (no evidence) and "they are an imminent nuclear threat" (no evidence).
The Iranians also enriched that material after Trump reneged on the previous Iran deal. So is this responding to an imminent threat, or is this pretext for war on top of a planned controversy over this issue? Who was it again that lobbied most heavily for Trump to exit the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term?
So Trump breaks the deal, Iran starts enriching again, and then Witkoff and Kushner declare "imminent threat" on the mere existence of enriched material that Iran has proposed to hand over to the US as part of an agreement.
The Iranian offer to handover the highly-enriched material threw a wrench into the works, most likely, hence why the 20% enrichment for the Tehran Research Reactor is the "best" Wiktoff/Kushner could come up with to convince Trump of some "imminent threat" to justify another war for Israel.
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For people who do not have a Twitter account, see the word "thread", and immediately manually rewrite the URL from "x.com" (where a thread cannot be read by a non-logged-in person) to "xcancel.com" (where it can), I feel obligated to point out that your link leads, not to a thread, but to an "article" (apparently a new feature), which can be read on x.com by a non-logged-in person but cannot be read at all on xcancel.com (yet).
Also, a non-Twitter version of the same content is available on Substack.
Thanks fixed.
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I'm willing to accept the possibility that this was just a random f*ckup on the part of Iran, but I think what's vital is not to blame this on the United States (absent reasonable evidence of actual culpability of course). Anything else encourages Iran's leadership to start using human shields.
To anyone in this thread who is concerned about incentivizing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, are you also concerned about incentivizing Iran to use human shields?
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My one new thought on the war is that I definitely did not have Donald Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei joining forces to strictly enforce the Kyoto Protocol emissions targets on my 2026 bingo card.
As an eco-whatever-ist first and foremost; my main take as soon as I heard was "Wow, Trump just beat Putin in the fighting climate change power rankings. He totally crushes 12 years of studies and no action Obama and Green new Deal: Drill Baby Drill biden in the charts".
Dude is the first president in any country since yeltsin to take degrowth serioursly.
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This is a truely excellent take.
Up next is China and the US jointly implementing Yud's plan to prevent AI takeover.
That's just common sense though
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Donald Trump passes lots of laws that make it harder to build renewable energy, then does something chaotic that makes the incentive to build more renewable energy much stronger.
It's not far off what happened with the tariffs. He wants to reindustrialise America with tariffs, but instead the tariffs hit intermediate goods that hurt American manufacturers the worst.
He thinks Canada is too woke, so threatens to annex it. Thereby snatching victory from the jaws of the right wing candidate.
The defining characteristic of the regime seems to be chaos, rather than any particular ideology.
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There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"
Christ
Because its in serious. Even vulgar Pete Hegseths critiques of the rules of engagement have not been seriously addressed in public, because everyone knows the dial was turned so far in one direction that, even going 10 steps in the other direction, you'd still be sacrificing combat effectiveness for dubious gains in civilian well being.
In addition, whatever you believe the war's goals are, regime change, fomenting rebellion, simply degrading military capabilities to a little baby turtle, full on ground invasion, etc. For any of those goals, the reality is that many civilians will die. In fact, they must die, we don't have some chemical agent we can sprinkle on Iran that targets only regime members, soldiers, and financial backers. We have actual real life bombs, shells, and bullets. Not magic.
I'll note, the same pearl clutching faced America in Iraq and Afghanistan when Bush was in charge, and recently Israel. Even though all those factions obviously used human shield as SOP. It seems more likely to me ROE objections are meant to prevent victory, rather than protect innocents.
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Because your take is pure Arguments as Soldiers. When I saw the NYT article on the topic, clawing at implication and carefully phrased vagaries to push a narrative as hard as they could with extremely limited facts and knowledge, it just made me recall the old line "They're not anti-war. They're just on the other side." Remember, the only source we even have for the casualty count is the Iranian government. How much do you trust them? The US has hit Iran with thousands of bombs and the general level of precision is terrifying sci-fi absurdity. There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian. Meanwhile, Iran responded by flinging missiles willy-nilly all over the region, including a bunch of civilian targets that no one cares about because it's just brown people failing at killing brown people.
Focusing all your attention on the single incident that might possibly have been the US hitting a civilian target is so obviously bad faith that it requires years of brainwashing and hyper-selective framing to take your performative outrage seriously.
"The US fired 3000 bombs and only a single one was possibly a misidentified target or misfired. That means the US has less shit happen during war than any other army in the combined history of humanity. Maybe that should make them much more comfortable going to war than any other polity that has ever existed on the face of the earth."
Christ.
I think we have some reason to believe we did strike a school and plausibly hit children (who, on priors, spend much of their waking time in schools): https://archive.is/9bWjL
I think this incident is of little overall significance, it's the sort of thing that happens in every war. At the same time, it probably did happen.
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Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
Suddenly they've developed incredible accuracy and precision, in the last couple of years? Under the watch of Hegseth 'slash and burn, oohrah, real manly warfare no legal bullshit', just as they cut the office who's supposed to be preventing this? And they can manage this precision in a country with much more sophisticated air defences than Afghanistan or post-invasion Iraq, where ISR drones can and are being shot down?
How can this be? AI? Israel makes great use of AI and they killed lots of civilians in Gaza in some combination of neglect and malice.
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
It's not going to be just a single incident, come on. Weapons miss, intelligence is faulty, fog of war is fog of war.
The conditions and scrutiny of most recent US military campaigns would be totally insane by any historical metric. 'You must only hit confirmed military targets in a hostile populace who have every incentive to deliberately misreport the status of casualties and have a bunch of weapons that can be profoundly lethal out of nowhere plus you have an aggressive media operation actively jumping on any excuse' is not a proposition that could really exist in any prior period.
I didn't say 'you must only hit confirmed military targets'. I say that this innate risk must be taken into account, wars must not be whitewashed as squeaky-clean 'precision strikes' against just the buddies. There is no 'sci fi precision' killing just combatants, there is no 'literally every single casualty is military' outside a propaganda reel.
I don't think even Hegseth would disagree with me here, if he were being honest.
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It appears the Trump administration has completely surrendered the propaganda war. All the MSM including the Wall Street Journal is assuming the administration doesn't know what they're doing and the war is hopelessly lost, and that everyone at the DoD is murdering war criminals who killed an ever-increasing number of schoolchildren and nothing else while ignoring the Straits of Hormuz because no one even thought of it. Maybe they just figure there's no way to win that one so they're not bothering. Only way out for them is a decisive victory in the real war, and honestly, I can't see one -- there's no Iranian organization able to take advantage and revolt, so without troops on the ground, there's no way to take down the regime or even force them to the table for real.
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I've only seen reporting going the other way, that a significant amount of the casualties are civilian. Presumably the source is also "Iran" and it's being accepted at face value, because what other sources are there at the moment, really?
None. Even "independent" news are required to toe the Iranian party line as a condition on being allowed into the country.
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Not here to argue either point but what’s the source on these precision claims?
Pretty big warfare development if true!
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Ok - what is the acceptable rate of school situated in former military barracks bombings in such a massive campaign. If the answer is zero - you put such burdensome rules of engagement that make US victory impossible. If it is one - we are right at the tolerance border.
Iran hasn't send the US list of civilian object and military objects with coordinates verified by international bodies that they are true. US is forced to operate half blind. Iran itself does way more indiscriminate targeting from what I have observed. It is just that their weapons are shitty.
I'd put it at "zero for the opening salvo", and then increasing over time. There's no excuse to not have a fully up to date target list for the first hour, when everything is choreographed and friction and Murphy haven't yet had a chance to really get to work.
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It depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Look, I thinking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski were justified. It was horrific, but weighed against the alternatives and the enormity the problem, it was probably the least bad option. It is, at the very least, highly arguable. If circumstances were different, however, it might not have been justified. Or, to take another example from the Middle East: there was a US airstrike in 2017 that killed ~200 civilians. Not great, and it is important to (sincerely) investigate why it happened and how it could be avoided in the future (and simply shrug and say 'oops'). But in the context of defeating ISIS, grudgingly tolerable.
What I see in the responses here is people using the mere existence of this problem of tradeoffs as an excuse not to care. If someone, questioned about the atomic bombings (or Tokyo, or Allied strategic bombing more generally), waved off the issue by saying "shit happens in war", I would take that as a very worrying sign regarding their instincts even if I agreed that the actions were ultimately justified. I certainly wouldn't want them making targeting decisions.
True, but also: irrelevant. The moral inadequacy of others is not an excuse for your own behavior.
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For this war zero. Because it's pointless unjust war of aggression started for no reason. At least not one our leaders can articulate.
It's not for no reason, to the degree that the US has ever had a consistent diplomatic position that position has been "don't touch the boats", IE "don't fuck with international trade".
The Iranians weren't blocking the Straits of Hormuz until after the war began.
No, but they were threatening to do so, Which is where a large part of this conversation comes from.
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The lack of articulation is really on the general public though. There is a very long winded explanation involving Iran's ballistic missile production rates and available US/Israel strike capabiltiy that comes down to "either we hit them now, or we will never again have the capability to significantly deter them from developing nuclear weapons without incurring massive civilian casualties as colateral damage". The administration made the (likely correct) decision that such an explanation would only play with the analysis nerds and fall disasterously flat with the general public, and didnt really bother.
As far as the unjust part goes, any government that happily massacres 30,000+ of its own citizens (by its own admission, outside estimates are higher) for the crime of protesting has lost all moral legitimacy, and its removal by outside forces is just. Wise? Dunno. Just? Absolutely. Fuck the mullahs, and fuck anyone who supports them.
I would guess that's the Israeli's reasoning I'd like to here Trump say that as eloquently as you. The administration has offered up half a dozen reasons and win conditions. So I'm not going to read tea leaves to figure it out. If what you said is correct then they should consistently say that.
Yes sure the Iranian regime sucks but it's not they job of the US to overthrow every bad government in the world. The US has explicitly said this war is not for the people of Iran and that we don't care about civilian causalities, also that we won't be doing nation building and that they'd be fine with someone internal taking power. They've said... many other things too. But that is the whole problem there is no consistent communication of reasons and goals. You can certainly derive one from the Jackson Pollak of ideas they've thrown around but I don't have any faith in it when they can't keep their story straight.
You're never going to get eloquent or consistent reasoning from the Trump admin. That's never been their M.O. You will grand unsupportable claims and petty X-fueled posturing. The best you can hope for is that they do something resembling the best reasoning and don't let their attention drift or self-sabotage through incompetence -- which is also unlikely, unfortunately -- and ignore why they say they are doing it. I don't like this, but it's how they operate.
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I suspect part of the problem is that the "shit happens in war" crowd perceive that for the most part, complaints about the school situation are not being made in good faith, but are rather being used as a club to beat up on the out-group. As someone who is pro-Israel, I regularly see the "isolated demand for perfection" game being played, and it's not by people who sincerely care about civilian deaths -- as evidenced by their selectivity.
In any event, I think your questions have pretty much been answered implicitly, but for what it may be worth here are my answers: (1) no, we can't make shit happen less in war; (2) if the war was justified in advance of the school situation, it's still justified now because everyone knows that bombing campaigns inevitably endanger civilians; and (3) no, because we don't want to reward or encourage bullying from behind human shields.
Probably my answers are a little overstated, e.g., there may very well be improvements that can be made to our military to lessen (but not eliminate) the chances of incidents like this. This is a topic which probably should be discussed, but it needs to be approached in such a way as to make clear that it's being raised in good faith and is not about beating up on the out-group.
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Alternately 'you can never do anything potentially mean since there might be unintended targets' doesn't really allow for anything resembling a productive society. Tradeoffs are going to have to be made, this is the logic that leads to massive second-order impacts from things like COVID lockdowns since people just cannot process the scale of any large endeavor
Yes but there is a cost. I don't think anything the US is doing in this war is worth the death of a single child because the whole war is a farce. I think going to war should almost always be defensive after sober deliberation for the cost of taking human life. I don't see that here and the obvious lies by our leaders make it worse. At least own your mistakes with somber dignity instead of blustering about phantom Iranian tomahawks. The whole thing was also a cowardly sneak attack in the vein of pearl harbor.
Then you should be arguing your reasoning that the war is a farce and not picking one aspect of it that, if different, wouldn't change your position.
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You can't use the general existence of unpleasant tradeoffs to justify a particular set of actions; you need to actually articulate a defense of why a particular tradeoff is worth it. Here we have a bunch of people saying "I don't care, shit happens."
This is, at best, callous and least. It very easily turns into self-justifying brutality.
The problem is that this argument is a soldier, and nothing more. The entire point of bringing up the girl's school deaths and pinning them on the US is to say "TRUMP BAD FOR ATTACKING IRAN". It stops there. Both sides know this, so one side tries as hard as it can to pin the deaths on the US (including claiming as proof footage of a missile attack on the base next door) and reports uncritically the ever-increasing death count (including a surprising number of boys, for girl's school) claimed by Iran. The other side denies regardless of the evidence, and reports fishy stories about Iranian missile misfires. If the attack was definitely shown to be an Iranian accident or an intercepted US attack, the first side would switch to instead blaming the US because the incident wouldn't have happened had the US not attacked. If it was definitely shown that it was a mistargeted US attack, the second side would blame Iran for making the war necessary in the first place.
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This feels like a common generalized critique of modern neoliberalism, though: "You can't do [THING], it might cause [UNPLEASANTNESS]", where [THING] ranges from "Invade foreign nation", which has pretty obvious unpleasantness in most cases, to "enforce existing immigration law", all the way down to "build that apartment complex" for values of unpleasantness like "would require destroying a historic, um, laundromat" or "would cast 1% extra shadow on a public park". We've very much used this set of unpleasant tradeoffs to justify privileging inaction in lots of cases, many with pretty clear consequences for the rest of us, although I think there is certainly reasonable ground for not blindly charging ahead with everything.
It's much the same as when it shows up in international politics: "Palestinians are firing weapons (rockets) at Israeli population centers again. But we can't allow them to respond -- someone might get hurt!". I'm not going to claim that any particular action is justifiable, but I've seen a lot of long-term bad consequences enabled by choosing inaction as a response assuming it'll be free in the long-term, just because the short-term "unpleasantness" is pretty clearly defined. And it's clear that some parties take advantage of these stated values to push boundaries and normalize worse outcomes.
I suppose somewhere in here could arise a principled (anti-woke?) political philosophy that prioritizes "we make hard choices, not because we relish them, but because we don't want them badly chosen for us."
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The problem is that evaluating the trade-offs here is very very hard. There are many moving parts and many possible outcomes, and I simply don't know enough and probably can't under the current circumstances. I am highly ambivalent about these current events and don't have much to say other than the obvious, e.g. the inevitability of collateral civilian deaths justifies neither action nor inaction. At this point I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
The reason my priors are strongly against war, even though I am not a pacifist or even against initiating force in principle, is that war is chaotic in the extreme. There is a long, long, long history of foolish and overconfident war planners thinking they're going to get away with a short, victorious war and walking into disaster. Even the best planners make critical mistakes and those mistakes can have enormous human costs.
The US is powerful and secure enough that the consequences overwhelmingly fall on others, but I feel like that should make us more cautious. The lack of skin in the game makes reckless overconfidence easy. There are a lot of cases where the choice between action and inaction is not obvious or should be biased towards action, but war is not one of them.
@VoxelVexillologist
For the record I agree with you here: war is always a terrible choice, although maybe there are times when it's the best available one. I don't know details here, but it feels like there were other, better options here.
My claim in the lateral thread is more observing that, generally, preferencing some definition of "inaction" can lead to worse outcomes, and it feels like this is related to the perceived indecisive malaise of modern neoliberalism.
For a more relevant, concrete example, I've heard at least one or two historians opine that if the Allies had responded more firmly to the German annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, they might not have needed to do so at a much more dramatic scale when it attacked Poland (heck, the immediate response to that was anemic, too, until the Germans had turned around to attack France). Declaring "peace at all costs" is a sucker move from a game theory perspective.
I'm not quite sure I agree with that - I think the preference for inaction results from the combination of prioritizing harm avoidance and a (nearly universal) moral intuition that not doing something implies less culpability than doing something, even if the outcomes are similar in human cost (e.g. very few people think the US withdrawing humanitarian aid, leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, is really equivalent to the US directly killing hundreds of thousands of people).
I confess that I'm also not sure what you mean by neoliberalism here.
I'm trying somewhat (maybe unsuccessfully) to see similarities in patterns that arc from local NIMBYism to limp-wristed international diplomacy in that we often find ourselves biased toward classes of answers that "sound nice", but in practice get taken advantage of by powerful actors (not infrequently masquerading as weak actors for sympathy) leading to worse outcomes for everyone else. Perhaps "neoliberalism" isn't quite the right term for what I'm looking to describe, but it's a related flavor.
I see this pattern all over the place: We can't build affordable market housing in California because it might obstruct rich homeowners' views. We can't build nuclear power plants because other countries have done it poorly in the past a couple times. We can't do anything about illegal immigration because it'd have bad optics. We can't reduce crime because it might require putting people in jail. We can't stop the flow of drugs in small boats because someone might get hurt. We can't automate our major ports and transit systems because unions might lose (economically-not-necessary) jobs. We can't means-test Social Security because (rich!) pensioners will go destitute. We can't do anything about foreign provocation against our friend nations and allies because it might escalate to war.
None of these things have easy answers. I won't even endorse any particular motion on any of them at this moment, but it feels like nobody in politics can: optics seems like all that matters, not outcomes.
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I risk sounding like a broken record here but that old Clemenceau quote is relevant again: "America Is the Only Country That Went from Barbarism to Decadence Without Civilization In Between".
When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly. The Americans as a nation have never been properly civilised, their national myth includes things like the Frontier man and the taming of the wilderness, but in one of those rather all too common twists of irony I'd say the wild has transformed Americans far more than they have ever transformed it.
Once you realize that America as a country has never had civilisation in the sense a European, a Chinese, or even dare I say, a Persian, would understand it, (I mean as a country, many many Americans are perfectly civilised people, the problem is not All Americans, the problem is Enough Americans) everything starts falling into place and making sense.
The way to deal with such a country is to treat it like it is: rather than trying to support the US or help them in their war against Iran out of some misguided gentlemanly obligation, Europe now has an excellent opportunity to twist the knife and extract huge concessions from the US on Ukraine and tariffs in return for them being allowed to use European bases to run their war. And make your demands and the concessions you get public as red meat for your domestic base. It's no different to what the Americans would have done to you had the shoe been on the other foot.
Haha! hahahaha even! Us canny europeans, despite committing demographic and economic suicide for thirty years, finally have these upstart Yanks right where we want them! Huzzah! Now, with just the right finesse of the diplomatic corps, we'll be able to get mild and tightly scoped tariff relief. Just. like. we planned it. And, don't you know, it's all because these colonials lack CULTURE!
The European mind simply cannot comprehend winning in a real sense. I get that World War 2 shattered your brain but it's time to get back in the big leagues of the world.
Keep in mind he's not a European.
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Does it? Lazy justifications (and, indeed, enthusiasm) for brutality seem to be a pervasive disease of human thought. Certainly, 'civilized' cultures have never struggled to commit superlative acts of barbarism.
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That's a nice free-form contentless rant, and like Dase I know you love sneering at Westerners, and Americans especially, as hard as we will allow, under the cope of speaking from a delusional sense of superiority. But do tell me: in what sense are Americans not (or ever) "civilized"? Non-rhetorically. Step up. What do those words mean?
Because under every definition with any non-rhetorical meaning, this is simply nonsense. It's a snarky pseudo-elite bon motte with no significance beyond the performative revulsion, the affected contempt.
What you actually mean by "civilized" is "has a culture I like and behaves in ways I approve of." And sure, everyone is entitled to like their own culture and think it is better than other cultures. You can disapprove of America and wish we were more like you all you want. But if you want to start trading cheap sneers about respective cultures and how "civilized" we are and aren't, you sure would not want us to take the mod guardrails off when talking about Pakistan, or Muslim culture writ large.
Whenever I see you toss these haughty sneers like you're an aristocrat curling your upper lip at the revolting peasants, I am just astounded at the sheer arrogance. Not offended, but genuinely astounded that you can be so lacking in perspective and awareness.
I actually found myself nodding along with him. America has never been fully settled, such that it's occupants are forced to turn viciously on each other in red status games. Americans have always had PVE as an outlet, as a way to foster trust and self-regulation and prosocial behavior. We're built for PVE, and we're so good at it and it's so rewarding that when we try our hand at guild war PVP, we roflstomp.
Compare that to a "late stage" civilization like China or India or Persia where the only way to get ahead is to screw over someone else. There's only so many spots in the civil service, so every Chinese kid who makes the cut necessarily means another doesn't. This creates an environment where being good or competent in an objective sense is less important than outperforming peers. To them, we look like little kids who haven't internalized tiger mom knife-fighting.
To us, they look like savages stabbing themselves for pitiful loot because they don't grok "trust".
Or at least, that's the rough sketch of an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a few weeks.
I've been mulling a very similar idea that I had tentatively framed in terms of "Masculine" vs "Feminine" approaches to conflict. The masculine approach to conflict is active, direct, and open. Ideally there is a clear winner and loser that can be judged by some outside and ostensibly objective metric. The fastest time, the highest score, etc... The popular cliche is two guys get in a fight and then become friends afterwards.
Meanwhile the feminine approach is more subtle and passive aggressive. Direct confrontation is frowned upon as "unintelligent", "uncivilized", or "unrefined". The popular cliche is everyone being outwardly polite and supportive while quietly stabbing thier "friends" in the back, and jockeying for position. I suspect that this is because women are more often competing amongst themselves for relative status rather than against some outside threat.
In short, Mean Girls was supposed to be a satirical comedy, not a how to guide.
Thank you for giving me "proper" justification to continue my teen movie binge.
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Maybe in the Qing dynasty. But now there are huge new centers of entrepreneurship in Shenzhen and Shanghai there's a lot of new wealth and new money. When I walk around Chinese cities thay they seem a lot more prosocial and trusting then Western ones these days.
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It's just a bit that he enjoys doing. And I suspect that he enjoys it because it never fails to get a bunch of responses. He's kind of like Kulak in that way. Kulak used to annoy me until I realized that his tough guy schtick was just a character he played online to get engagement. When you switch to analyzing the performance instead of the (thin) content of the argument, these characters become much more interesting and enjoyable to read. Unlike Ilforte/Dasein, they at least appear to be having fun. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
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You deserve so much more, with your obscene sense of entitlement to boomered-out superficiality.
But for the record, I not only believe that Americans are civilized, but that they're distinct enough to merit classification as a civilization unto itself, separate from the Western one, more dynamic, with greater passionarity. Some don't like it, well too bad for them.
Maybe we can talk of Amero-Israeli civilization, or just Israeli civilization, in the vein of Hebraic Conservatism with offshoots – a very mainstream and respectable idea in America, despite it looking like insane sectarian gibberish to most Westerners! But I'd still say those, for now, constitute two distinct successful non-Western civilizations.
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Replying to both you and @Shakes:
I'm not saying America has no achievements (obviously it does, and listing them like Shakes did doesn't refute the point). Nobody denies America has produced extraordinary things, half the things I use on a daily basis were made by them, and that's probably an underestimate (though I'd add that a lot and an increasing proportion of this is from immigrants who became Americans or their near term descendants, rather than "founding stock"). The telephone, jazz, the moon landing etc. etc. are yes, all real, all impressive. But a catalogue of inventions and monuments is not what civilisation means in the sense I'm using it, and people should get that from my post.
What I mean and what Clemenceau meant (however priggish you may call him) is something closer to what you might call institutional depth and cultural continuity: the slow accumulation of norms, restraints, and social trust that make a society self regulating rather than dependent on raw dynamism (which is something that Americans seem to prize above all else, even when it's the wrong tool for the job, hammer and nail come to mind). Europe didn't get that from being clever. It got it from centuries of catastrophe and making mistakes and importantly learning from them. The point isn't that Europeans are better people (I wouldn't even agree, even though I'd probably choose to spend an evening with a randomly chosen European over a randomly chosen American, never mind that they might not even speak English). The point is that the European political tradition, through sheer painful experience, developed a certain instinct for restraint, compromise, and institutional preservation that the American tradition never prioritised in the same way and is likely to very soon come back and bite it in the ass. America's founding myth is about breaking free of those constraints, not building them. That's not an insult, it's a description.
And the "civilised Americans exist, the problem is't All Americans but Enough Americans" line was doing work you both skipped past. I'm not painting 330 million people with one brush. I'm saying the political culture, the median and especially the current leadership of the country, trends in a direction that makes America an unreliable partner and that Europeans should act accordingly rather than sentimentally. Think Mark Carney, but with more spice.
Which brings me to the part of my post that was actually the point, and which neither of you addressed: the strategic argument. Forget whether Clemenceau was rude. Forget whether I'm being snobbish, I won't try and justify that further as I know it won't work (and no, Spengler didn't put me up to this). The question on the table is simple: should Europe give America unconditional support in its Iran campaign, or should it use its leverage: basing rights, logistics, diplomatic cover, to extract concessions on Ukraine and tariffs? The "American" would say "use the leverage", the European might say "we're all gentlemen here", except that that's no longer true, so might as well give them a taste of their own medicine.
The argument that America "pays for European defence" cuts both ways. If European bases are so essential to American force projection that Spain's wobble caused a crisis within days (which it's still not allowing to my knowledge despite what the Americans are saying), then those bases have price, and Europe is a fool not to name it.
The claim that America could walk away tomorrow and it would be Europe's problem, not the Americans well right there you're making my argument for me. If that's how America sees the relationship, then Europe has no obligation of loyalty either, and should negotiate accordingly. You can't simultaneously say "we do this for you" and "we don't need you." Pick one. The cakeism is very "American".
Well I appreciate you being a good sport about my rant and screed but I don't think any analysis of America that concludes it has no civilization is compelling. I could accept an argument that American civilization is an extension of European civilization, but that's just about the same thing. America has all the hallmarks of high culture and deep habits, except perhaps for a time measured in millennia (but if that's all civilization is then I'm not sure it matters much as a concept, it certainly doesn't explain much about what's in front of us with Iran).
Mostly I didn't address this because I don't think the civilization question has much to do with it.
Insofar as we can discuss this, I think this is a question for Europeans to decide. I'm actually fairly appreciative of Europe in general and I respect their ability to choose. I'm just fairly convinced from everything I know about Europe that they're fairly deluded about the nature of their relationship with America. Europe is not seeing things rationally. Europe fails to understand America at all.
America pays the vast majority of Europe's defense costs. America supplies weapons and planes and intel that are beyond what Europe can produce on its own. America guarantees the supply of oil and natural gas. America provides the security framework that keeps Europe together instead of devolving into the old squabbles and wars. It's not all charity but it does come at some cost to us. Instead of ever appreciating it or trying to honestly assess the trade-offs, America is met with derision, scorn, tariffs, trade barriers, condescension, etc. It is frankly a little deluded of Europe, as see this:
We don't need Spain's bases to project force in the Middle East. We don't need Spain at all. We have bases there, it would be nice and convenient to use them, but American defense does not depend on Spain in this sense. It's laughable. Ok, so Spain wants out? Who keeps the sea lanes safe? Who keeps the oil flowing? Spain doesn't want American bases to be used for icky ugly things like war, ok, does that mean Spain will raise its own navy to protect its ships from pirates? No, because of course America will continue to do that, and Spain will gladly take advantage of it, as long as they don't have to confront the reality of what that means. It's delusional. Spain has no leverage over America. Believe me that this thinking inspires a lot of resentment in America and will probably ultimately kill NATO, unless Donald Trump successfully renegotiates it so that Europe actually starts to pay some of what they were supposed to pay all along.
Yeah that's right Americans like having their cake and eating it there's no denying it. Except in this case it's Europe that gets to have its cake and eat it: we pay for your defense and then you put conditions on how we're allowed to do it. Ok then, walk away. You guys can deal with Russia, you guys can fix the Gulf. Which won't actually happen anyways -- America will find other allies in Europe because we don't really need the present order to survive. You do.
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Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it
Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.
We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.
But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.
I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.
We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.
I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.
There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.
Julius Evola would disagree:
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And as for:
Evola continued with this:
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I, uh, don’t think that’s a very good model.
First: the historical limit on an empire wasn’t ambition. It was logistics. You sprawled out until you hit a natural barrier (steppe, jungle, ocean) that was wider than your baggage trains could handle. Or until you made eye contact with a neighbor strong enough to stake out its own borders. Transport tech changes that first limit; military and economic tech pushes the second.
Second: it’s not like having those phases ever taught any nation anything! Look at 19th century France. Look at the interwar period. Look at today’s Russia. If the logistics and industrial fundamentals aren’t present, the best you’re gonna get is one generation. Then the revanchists will wrangle enough support for another round.
Third: what do you mean, a smaller library of experiences? There’s no Dune-style genetic memory. Institutional inertia is a joke and a political liability. Our President has more information available than anyone in history, and this is what he chose to do with it.
Germany here. The 20th century happened (because of the 19th!). The 21st is still not over it. So long as you keep this stuff warm, it lasts a very long time. It's baked into institutions, in a widespread and very visible manner that is by no means a joke, and continues to decisively shape people to this day and for the forseeable future. People in turn make sure the institutions don't drift away from the program. There's no need for living memory or genetic memory - culture and institutions do the job on their own, where the job is "make sure everyone learns the lesson, no matter how exaggerated or oversimplified or obsolete it is.". The Germany of today is intentionally the near-polar opposite of the Germany of the early 20th century, to a self-destructive degree, but we make very sure to stick to our programming because obedience is the only path to social acceptance.
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I do think historical experiences affect a cultures outlook and subsequently behavior.
Modern Chinese politics is meaningfully affected by the century of humiliation.
The tone of Slavic cultures is shaped by repeated wars, famines, and massacres.
Turkish politics is influenced by memories of the Ottoman Empire.
There’s certainly a forgetting curve. We probably shouldn’t study Charlemagne in order to understand what Emmanuel Macron is likely to do tomorrow.
(Edit: Then again, Charlemagne looked back to Roman emperors, was himself relevant to how Napoleon behaved, the French Revolution drew from ideas from the Roman republic, and modern France has dim recollections of all of this built into its cultural identity as well as experiences from both victory and defeat in the world wars. Part of the founding mythos of being French includes empires and revolutions and it gets reflected in French behavior, such as a penchant for frequently protesting and rioting in the streets. Just as the American frontier is long gone but still affects our culture).
Continuing where I earlier left off…
But I do think there’s some historical continuity that gets built up. Having had all your cities razed, suffering a famine, conquering half the world, having an empire crumble, I think all of these things have influences on a culture that ripple across centuries.
Americans today always talk about how we are so optimistic while Europe is just this museum society. But basically all of those cultures had periods of floridly mad optimism in their history at different points, usually coinciding with when they built those structures.
Maybe we are just a uniquely optimistic and exuberant culture and will remain that way forever. But we haven’t even existed for long enough to know the other side of the coin, we’ve never even had the experience of being bested by a rival for example. And although it’s tempting to believe that we’re uniquely ordained by God or fate to never suffer such a disgrace and will never see the other side of the coin (like from the article, god is an Englishman, we invented the modern world and have its largest ever empire ffs), I’d say our time in the sun has its limits just as it does for all world dominant cultures. (Possibly coming soon if you believe Ray Dalio’s model). And after having experienced both the rise and fall, we’ll end up being a somewhat wiser or at least more mature culture which might naturally temper subsequent bouts of mania.
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No, that's completely wrong. "Raw dynamism" is a very American cultural myth that Americans like to tell themselves, and it's kind of weird to see you repeating it just because it sounds like an "A-hyuck! A-hyuck!" cowboy stereotype.
America has a great deal of institutional depth and continuity. For all that we fancy ourselves to have reinvented ourselves from whole cloth in 1776, the "American project" very obviously was both something unique and designed, and something that drew on the entirety of English Common Law and Western civilization. The Founding Fathers didn't just pull the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution out of their asses; they had as much education and "civilization" as their European contemporaries did. That America was something relatively new and different at the time does not mean it was some strange savage MMORPG environment dropped onto North America.
America has institutional norms, restraints, and social trust. Arguably, those are being hollowed out right now. Arguably, so are Europe's. Arguably, a major reason for that is... well. People who do not share those institutional norms, restraints, and social trust.
This may be true, but it's also both an observation very much of the moment (all governments change, and some governments change radically and catastrophically) and has nothing to do with whether or not America is "civilized."
Sure, that's a question Europe needs to answer, and I would expect Europe to weight European interests above American interests. But Europe has its own dysfunctions (which is a large part of the reason we're here) and is hardly in a position to be sniffing at Americans and how "unreliable" (or "uncivilized" forsooth) they are.
@Shakes is more interested in the "Europe versus America" question. I don't really care about that. I'm peering at your "civilization" quip and still trying to figure out what the hell you think you mean by it. You haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions America is making that you don't like.
You say America has institutional depth and continuity, and that the Founders drew on English Common Law and the whole Western tradition and I agree. I never said otherwise and I'd have been stupid to. The US Constitution is a remarkable document (worth reading even as a non-American), the Federalist Papers are some of the best political thinking ever committed to paper, and the early Republic was built by men who were as educated and sophisticated as anyone in Europe, there's no argument to that.
But I think you're collapsing a distinction that matters: there's a difference between having institutions and having the deep cultural substrate that makes those institutions self repairing. England didn't develop parliamentary norms because someone wrote a brilliant constitution. It developed them over centuries of messy, bloody, often accidental practice until they became so embedded in the culture that violating them felt viscerally wrong to enough people to make it politically suicidal. That's what I mean by institutional depth: not the documents, not the structures, but the thickness of the cultural root system underneath them.
And you've actually conceded the key point yourself when you say they're being hollowed out right now. My reply is simply: how fast and how easily? Because that speed is itself diagnostic. If American institutional culture had the depth it lacks, what's happening right now would be much harder to do. I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level. See how Europe managed to co opt Meloni in Italy into a standard right wing European party from the far right. Orban's getting kicked out very soon as well just to give you another data point. Europe is able to deflect and absorb the attacks to its institutions in a way the US hasn't shown any signs of doing.
Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge. Compare to the UK where we don't even have a written constitution and parliament is technically sovereign and a majority can do anything they want, including reinstating slavery if they so wish and yet our institutions mean that even a government with strong support from its MPs can't do whatever it wants (as Boris Johnson found out with Brexit).
To put it differently: the Constitution told Americans what their institutions should be. What it couldn't do, because no document can, is make Americans feel that violating those norms is unthinkable rather than merely illegal. The "we don't do that" instinct, the one that in a deeply rooted institutional culture makes norm-violation politically radioactive even when it's technically possible, that's the thing I'm saying is thinner in America than Americans believe. And I don't think that's a controversial observation at this point. You yourself seem to agree the hollowing is happening. We're just disagreeing about what it reveals.
So to your final challenge "you haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions you don't like" I would say that I've described exactly the thing America is currently demonstrating it doesn't have enough of. The decisions I don't like are the evidence, not the argument.
And briefly, since I've already made this case and don't want to repeat myself: this is precisely why the leverage question matters. You don't extend unconditional trust to a partner whose institutional immune system is failing this visibly. You negotiate. That's not sneering, it's prudence.
I think a lot of this is compelling, and it's true that Europe has been much more institutionally resilient and stable over recent years than the US has been.
I don't think that civilisational depth and the accumulation of norms is, however, the most parsimonious explanation for why this is the case. Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed. That unified party control across different branches of government would still let each branch effectively check the excesses of the others was a naive theory at best. Instead political will flows through the channels of least resistance and carves them deeper.
One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.
Yeah, Starmer has turned out to be a bit of a dud here, so he's probably out after the May elections and there will be a new Labour PM and a new Labour government and life will continue in much the same way (or perhaps even better) for the 90% of Labour MPs who aren't very closely tied to Starmer. The Labour MPs themselves will be the ones to get rid of him and there's very little Starmer can do to hit back against them; can you imagine the republicans in the US House or Senate voting to get rid of Trump?
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I suspect Australia and Europe are under different pressures though, are they not?
I am inclined both ways on this question. The US' institutions have arguably survived longer than the ones in most of Europe! If you think institutions have a natural lifespan it's logically possible that they are both stronger than most European ones and that they are just now reaching a point of decay after most of Europe's crashed and burned. But I digress: the Constitution as originally written envisioned a very strong Congress. (BurdensomeCount fingers the strong US Supreme Court but that's actually much more debatable an institution, at least when it comes to original intent.)
I'll just incorporate by reference an older comment I made with my thesis that a lot of Trump's supposed puncturing of norms is due to wielding the accumulated powers of the executive (often delegated by Congress) in the one hand and the inherent, original, sometimes neglected powers of the executive on the other. But what I don't really discuss in that comment is why Congress seems so dysfunctional.
There is a simple (although I think incomplete) theory as to why this might be the case: Congress has not grown with the nation. The House has been capped at 435 members for more than 100 years. This has not kept pace with either population growth or the growth of the government. Put it simply, in this theory, Congress is overworked and isolated - they aren't capable of conducting proper oversight of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy, and they are a smaller, more elite portion of the population. The one thing George Washington cared about was that the ratio of representatives to citizens not exceed 1:30,000, and we blew past 1:300,000 around 1940. Today we're at a worse than 1:760,000 ratio.
This seems like an odd thing to finger as a major problem, but network effects are very real. Of course, increasing the size of the House to, say, FOUR THOUSAND would also have implications for network effects: FOUR THOUSAND or FORTY THOUSAND representatives are, perhaps, too unwieldy to come to consensus on anything. So, to add some extra ammo to your argument: however well designed America's institutions were or weren't originally, we should not expect them to function the same, distorted as they are.
Unfortunately, for all of that, it does not seem that a leaner ratio (In Australia that ratio is about 1:125,000, on a quick Google, and something like a blessed 1:75,000 in the UK) is actually effective at getting the cultural or legal outcomes that I prize. A pity!
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I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.
I believe the assumption was that Congress would be jealous of its own power, in the way that the House of Commons was jealous of its own power in comparison to the King and the Lords, but the issue is that the elected Presidency created a countervailing center of political legitimacy, and blame, that’s independent of and largely unaccountable to Congress. The framers thought impeachment would be a sufficient counterweight, but failed to take account of the fact that removing a President would be a traumatic and partisan exercise, more akin to revolution against a king than the removal of a minister.
After centuries of experience with elected assemblies, it’s now clearer that the means of survival for democratic parties is ensuring that blame for anything that goes wrong rests on the opposition, not in delivering results. As a result, all blame and accountability for anything that happens politically rests on the President, who is quite impotent to accomplish reform, while little to no power actually rests in individual Congressmen.
So people who want to wield power don’t go into Congress, and Presidents are eager to expand their power by any means necessary. The checks and balances fail. I suspect the American system is designed almost for an inverted Whig revolution, where the executive has every reason to accumulate power by taking it from the legislature.
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You're contradicting yourself and backtracking on every point that you initially used as evidence that America lacks civilization. I will just repeat: America didn't spring out of a vacuum. We had institutional depth from the beginning (albeit many new institutions had to be invented) because even the earliest colonists were not tribes wandering into the New World across the Bering Sea.
I sincerely doubt this. Maybe not about Europe resisting right-wing Trump-like movements, but that's not the only kind of change we observe.
Trump is not the first, nor the worst, challenge American norms and institutions have faced. The Civil War was not even the first time the government faced a severe challenge to its credibility and stability (nor was it the last). I have argued with other Motters because I think the probability of Trump actually destroying the Republic is low, but non-zero, and my lowball estimate is higher than they think is realistic. But it's not the first time there has been a non-zero chance of the American experiment ending.
Europe has not exactly been a continuous steady state of reliable governance for the past two and half centuries either.
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Not only does this not make sense but it doesn’t explain anything. America has: the telephone, the light bulb, the computer, the airplane, eggs Benedict, jazz, cell phones, hamburgers, the Washington Monument, the skyscraper, speakeasies, brunch, baseball, Constitutional Democracy, mass education, social security, the automobile, Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge, Supreme Courts, southern food, basketball, Detroit, New York, California, Texas, television, the nuclear bomb, the nuclear bomb!
What are we talking about, am I being baited, did Spengler put you up to this? America has no civilization? America invented the modern world! Every country in the world that attempts to look down on us is using criteria America INVENTED. Europeans get more degrees? America invented mass education with the GI bill. Travel and leisure? We invented airlines, the five day work week, paid vacation. Democracy?
We have a beautiful civilization, Times Square, the Chicago World Fair 1893, the National Mall, Route 66, the Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, apple pie. Many things are in decline to the point that we’ve forgotten how the White House was decorated in the Gilded Age and misremembered it as a ranch home aesthetic but America is a beautiful place.
We went to the moon! The moon!
Clemenceau is a priggish French asshole (whose pride at Versailles gave us World War II) of the worst type of French snobbery for which we forgive them anyways because we admire the French and respect their contributions to America. But what do they know! They are sitting in the corner watching while America remakes the world in our own image and the best they have now is to reinvent the definition of civilization with fake word games.
What is the idea that America is destroying Tehran out of some sort of civilizational jealousy? Or that we don’t understand the world so that we lash out at it? No it’s Europe that doesn’t understand it’s Iran that doesn’t understand. There are no concessions for you to extract. America is the world power because we have a spirit that nobody else in the world has even if I prefer French bakeries and Spanish wine. Wha are we talking about? Europe has no concessions to extract because America pays for their defense and in exchange they put tariffs and trade barriers up against us while proclaiming that their civilization is superior. Ok, try it, it will go as well as it went when Spain tried denying us our bases a week ago, what are you have no power to extract anything. This whole military operation is a favor to you because we’re not the ones who get screwed if the straits of Hormuz close, we could close down all our bases tomorrow and it would be your world in chaos, not ours.
What’s the thanks we get? To be lectured on how we don’t understand anything because we don’t have a real civilization and are just barbarians who need red meat? The civilization-wreckers are the barbarians in Tehran who want to bomb everyone and the loafers in Europe who believe in their own superiority but refuse to do anything to maintain it. Decadence? Europeans want to shut down their nuclear reactors, buy all their oil from Putin, then complain that America wrecks everything it touches. That’s decadence!
I didn't knew that Otto Von Bismarck was alive in 1946 ...
Mass higher education.
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America still has some of the residual vitality of Western civilization, and that's just so cringe.
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Europe has fuck all leverage due to lacking the upside of America atleast producing something and being absolutely weighed down by an infinite supply of net-negative foreigners who at absolute best might be able to find some fake zero-sum makework to briefly mask their inability to actually create a productive society on their own terms. The US might be clumsy and lurching but atleast they stand for something at some level.
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The idea of targeted bombings is a lot like the idea of shooting people in the legs, the old canard that emerges after every iffy police shooting.
The reality is that you can't reliably shoot people in the legs and when you do you might kill them anyway, so we wouldn't encourage police officers to think they can shoot people in the legs to disable them because they'll end up killing more people shooting them when they don't want to kill them.
Similarly, innocent people die in bombing campaigns. Pretending they don't encourages us to bomb more people and cause more innocent deaths. We need to stop pretending we can target perfectly.
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This is an unfair portrayal. Significant portions of the left think this is a distraction from Trump violently raping young teenagers.
I'm on the right and I think it relatively likely that Trump did a lot worse than that with Epstein. The idea that Iran was motivated by distracting from this is still inane though.
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A decent chunk of the right at the time thought Clinton was bombing Belgrade (including the presumably-innocent Chinese embassy!) to distract from the scandal of dalliances with (among others) a 22-year-old subordinate in the Oval Office and lying about it to Congress. That accusation at least had specific damning evidence and testimony behind it.
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Yes the average understanding of the Epstein Files from people accusing this war of solely being a distraction from them is essentially Q-Anon levels of delusion about the actual activities of Epstein.
I think it is far more likely that this war is happening as a result of the espionage and blackmail system that Epstein ran rather than as a distraction from it myself.
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You have to admit that "Operation Epstein Fury" does have a certain ring to it.
That's how I refer to it whenever I'm not in a more formal forum like this one where you get banned for referring to it as such.
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Mistakes and civilian casualties will inevitably happen in war, but this case does still highlight some major issues going on right now.
Tradeoffs in pursuit of a goal are more acceptable if there's an actual stated and agreeable goal. The Trump admin is consistently giving the American people the runaround as for why the war started, what they hope to achieve, and what the end conditions are. And they.keep hinting that the tradeoffs will be bigger than they're letting on like Lindsey Graham basically saying that South Carolina citizens can be sent to fight. Vague ever growing tradeoffs for vague goals. Especially when it's clear part of the reason for vagueness is so that they can declare victory and goal achievement whenever they want (regardless of the ground conditions) and to hide how Israel led us into this. After all if they actually gave a clear goal then there would be a metric to judge them by if they fail.
That civilian casualties are going to happen doesn't mean that every case of civilians dying is acceptable. In the same way that just because people crash cars sometimes from basic mistakes doesn't make drunk driving ok. The problem is that there's no public trust that a real serious investigation will take place and accountability would be had under this admin if it was closer to the drunk driving equivalent of a callous and avoidable messup.
The war is already extremely unpopular among citizens. The US military accidently killing a bunch of children for something Americans want is just manifestly different than doing it for something Israel wants. The US and our soldiers don't exist to serve the whims of a foreign country's people more than our own people.
Accident or not, it doesn't excuse the bold faced lying that Trump constantly resorts to. No wonder he worried about if he's getting into heaven when he lies as naturally as he breathes. He'll simultaneously claim that Iran must have done it (including the implication that Iran has to tomohawk missiles but only use them for blowing up their own schools for some reason), and then when pushed back on it say that he, the commander in chief, apparently knows nothing about the war he started.
Edit: Forgot to even cover one of the bigger issues, the hypocrisy and twofacedness of the admin. They're essentially trying to pull a "we've always been at war with Eurasia" without even removing the "no to war in Eurasia" propaganda. One interesting effect of Charlie Kirk dying is that all the old stuff stays up, leaving us with stuff like this
This was the mainstream talking point, all the "no war in Eurasia" posters are still up on display for everyone to see. When everyone knows that it is just bold and unashamed lying to their face about the war now, they're gonna be a lot less willing to accept all the tradeoffs like hundreds of kids dying. It's not just me, here's Joe Rogan talking about the betrayal
I see people making this argument everywhere and I’m baffled. The have made it very clear why the war started and what our war goals are. They’ve been holding press conferences every day where they explain it! Proper press conferences, where they actually take questions! It’s like seeing someone argue that we shouldn’t land on the moon because it’s too purple. It’s…it’s obviously not! The Trump admin has not been shy about this! I mean just two days ago Pete had this to say:
I feel like I’m going crazy. People really do love in different worlds.
It's a list written to sound specific but it's incredibly open ended. "Permanently denying Iran nuclear weapons" sounds like it must entail either regime change or a permabombing campaign that goes on forever. If they do a lot of damage to Iran's military structures but entrench its regime and cement its determination to get nuclear weapons, what's permanent about that?
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Are they? my impression has been that the admin has been clear from the beginning about what their intent is and that it has been been CNN MSNBC the BBC et al who have been trying to muddy the waters by claiming that this is all "coming out of nowhere" rather than Trump and Rubio following through on an ultimatum
Yes, but also Trump has been saying a lot of random stuff, which is just Trump being Trump, and "CNN MSNBC the BBS et al" have been pretending there's no way to sort that out.
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People say it for the simple reason that the stated rationale keeps changing, not just from day to day but even within the same day.
Here's some of the examples:
Iran nuclear and navy capabilities
Regime change and helping protestors
Not a regime change
Oh wait no it is a regime change.
Following up Israel who was gonna do the strikes so we had to help them
Actually not the above despite multiple top Republicans saying it, imminent attack from Iran instead.
Some assassination plot against Trump
Uh actually we've always been at war with Iran
"UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!"
Yeah if you isolate anything you can get a reason, but in the greater context they just keep throwing out claims even if they contradict.
It's not like it's just random people confused here, even right wing aligned media like Joe Rogan can't figure out what the actual reasoning is supposed to be. Heck the admin can't even decide if they should call it a war or not.
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Left leaning detractors left this forum. The moderate ones are emotionally spent. Right leaning posters are keeping quiet because Trump 2 hasn't delivered the outcomes and they know gloating can backfire.
Modern wars are about limited objectives. You either achieve it within days or pack up and leave. Great powers have great egos. They never pack up and leave, so you get ugly protracted struggles. The Iran war has all the characteristics of a quagmire. The objective is unclear. There are no secondary power structures to take over. It's a giant mountainous landmass that can't exactly be invaded. A protracted struggle will be ugly.
And what's the point of this invasion anyway? What's the limited objective ? Earlier strikes to nuclear sites made sense. Limited objective, achieved overnight. You want the Ayatollah gone ? Who's going to replace him. Will it be someone from the highly trained 200k strong IRGC cadre or a disgraced crown Prince who has never lived in the country ? Who will rise up ? You expect urban Iranians to accept kurdish separatists as their saviors ? You think civilians will take kindly to bombing mosques and schools ?
I believe Trump fired everyone with nuanced views of the middle east, and the remaining bunch now pattern match from events in the wider Asian region. "Iran had protests, just like the Arab spring. If we provide outside support like Obama did, then protestors will overthrow the Ayatollah. Nepal and Bangladesh had 'student protests' that morphed into regime change, maybe we can coax Iran into the same. Pitting rival tribes against each other has worked in Iraq, maybe we could pit the Kurds against the Ayatollah and make it work."
No, you idiots! Iran is one of the world's great civilizations. It's a unified ethno-lingustic-religious identity that's stayed independent for 500 years. Very few countries can claim a stronger internal sense of being a people united. I'm projecting, but this administration's 4chan roots are leaking. "Everywhere outside of OECD+China is a shit hole. All browns are Pajeets and all middle easterners are Muhameds." Yes, it's a straw man. But I've tried looking for a steel man. I can't find one.
Personally, I find myself increasingly frustrated at American policy, and emotional responses don't make for good writing or reading. As a result, I've reduced my engagement on this forum.
Trump should have coherently stated we are bombing Iran because they killed 30k protesting civilians.
He still can - but we both know that he won’t.
It’s going to be an Iraq level mess and nothing good will come of it.
As to your point on Iran and its legitimacy or whatever you were going for, Iran is a dangerous oppressive shit hole that has sustained terrorism over the last several decades. It’s literal dirt.
Maybe they have a great history (I have severe doubts on historical accuracy) but they’re frankly animals that need to be brought up into some sort of abject level of humanity. Even Chinese and China are … people. Iranian people seem to be just swell … but Iran isn’t, and hasn’t been.
Having said all that, we still shouldn’t have bombed - let someone else figure it out for fucks sake.
"Iranians are animals, not people" is well beyond any defensible steelman. Do not post like this.
Fine, but ‘ Iranian people seem to be just swell ‘ follows it.
They’re like, seemingly, some of the better people in the Middle East. I meant what I wrote but my brevity made it come off wrong, seemingly.
Iranian culture? Iranian government? Islam?
You take 1000 Iranians who don’t know they’re Iranian and have them grow up in Canada I imagine they’ll be annoyingly Canadian. They grow up in Iran and here we are.
E: also you’re right, sorry
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You are wrong.
There are levels to shit holes. It around the levels of modern day Egypt, and would be doing better if it hadn't been sanctioned into the ground. In the 2010s (well into the Ayatollah's regime), they were around 80th in GDP per capita. That's solidly middle-economy alongside nations like Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa. China only surpassed them in 2012-13.
You can't call every non-OECD nation a shit-hole. Iran still sits above China in the HDI index at a comfortably above average number.
Have you seen photos of their major cities ? They look more developed than many tier-2 American cities. 1 2 3
If I could be a architecture nerd for a second, their modernist brick work is some of the prettiest & most original of the recent past. [4] 5.
As do many of US's allies. UAE is funding genocide in Sudan. The US itself was happy to fund the Mujaheddin as long as they were terrorists allied with the US. Pakistan's entire thing is to fund terrorists, and the US has continued being friendly.
Oh yeah, we're about to start doubting if Persia was ever a great empire.
Yeah Persians are way more organized and productive than the vast majority of the region. Turks might be able to compete, and other groups just can't really do functional society in absence of massive Oil lottery wins.
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I’m not doubting Persia - the last 15 years have made me doubt we know fuck all about the past.
Comparing gdp to Thailand seems a bit much, yea? Thailand isn’t run by religious nutters that fund terrorism. It’s not yelling death to America as a winning political strat. It’s just a lower middle class country.
Iran isn’t.
I am extremely confident that if America had sanctioned Thailand off from the global economy, put out a document titled "Which path to Siam" which explained they needed to wipe out all of Thailand's neighbours before invading them, wiped out all of Thailand's neighbours as they explained in their openly published plan on how to invade Thailand and then blew up 150 Thai schoolgirls that Thailand would actually be yelling "Death to America" at the top of their lungs.
America didn’t make Islam a death cult.
Islam was attacking the American navy almost before America was America.
What does that have to do with the point I was making? I'm very confident that a Christian, Jewish or Taoist nation would engage in violent warfare in response to those provocations.
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Pick one. An Iraq-level mess means a regime change to something considerably better than the current regime, only at much higher cost and taking much longer than expected.
Well wait, who do we thank for saving Iraq from ISIS? You can’t tank America, because we accidentally created ISIS when we purged the Baathists from all governmental roles; they regrouped under ISIS and comprised most of their leadership. We were on the verge of turning Iraq into a literal super villian tier country through our own retardation, and it was Iran-backed Shia rebels that were instrumental in their defeat on the ground, with American strikes in the air. I wonder if Americans even know that the second biggest terrorist attack in history was against Iran-linked Shias fighting ISIS, essentially their 9/11.
So, unironically, it was “Iran” that changed Iraq for the better, whereas our ineptitude almost turned them into a comically evil nation you’d only see in sepia-filtered TV war movies. You can read how stupid and callous our intervention was in the Paul Bremer emails released the other day.
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To a certain degree the Iranians being more civilizationally competent and capable than the vast majority of their regional neighbors (aside from maybe the Turks) is part of why a short, sharp intervention could potentially help fix the course somewhat. Atleast compared to your Afghanistans or whatnot.
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Look, I've been complaining about shit like this for a decade. I've bitched about Trump's strongman act and his allergy to existing policy and all sorts of who-whom. I complained about our little warm-up exercise. At times like these, I'm not sure I've ever convinced a single person. Some might call this "tiresome."
I can check in to the motte, clean out the queue, ban a couple people for failing to maintain the normal level of decorum. Some people still have to follow rules, after all.
Maybe I can add a comment emphasizing my disappointment. Maybe I can snark about how many users were ride-or-die for American exceptionalism (courtesy of El Presidente) until they got the chance to blame Jews.
Or I can go back to my fucking job selling fucking munitions to fuckers who will surely use them wisely. Or at least lethally. Then I can go home, play another round of Slay the Spire, and try not to think about it.
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Story I'm seeing now is that it was outdated intelligence; school was in same area as a naval base, so collateral damage oh dear how unfortunate:
How true that is, ye can argue over it in the comments.
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The Sardaukar flattened a sietch school in the Minab basin. Around 170 children. Fourteen teachers. The Imperial War Minister, a former propaganda broadcaster named Hegseth who was elevated for his enthusiasm rather than his competence, had already dissolved the civilian targeting review offices on the grounds that they impeded "lethality." The teams that once verified whether a strike coordinate was a Fremen armory or a children's learning hall have been cut from ten analysts to one. The War Minister cannot confirm whether Imperial ordnance hit the site. He does not appear troubled by this.
The Great Convention technically still prohibits such things. The Emperor has not repealed it. He has simply made the enforcement apparatus inoperable. The offices exist on paper. The staff are gone. The distinction between policy and practice has collapsed, and what remains is a revealed preference: Fremen casualties are not a cost worth tracking.
Now the spice has stopped flowing.
The Fremen have closed the Gap, the single passage through which all spice must transit to reach the greater Imperium. Traffic through the Gap has dropped from two dozen haulers a day to nearly zero. The few vessels still moving fly Fremen colors, running spice to their sole remaining trade partner. Over two hundred haulers sit stranded outside the passage, their captains unwilling to risk transit. The Emperor told them to "show some guts" and push through. They have not.
The consequences are cascading exactly as the Fremen intended. The great spice processors of the Gulf, the Saudis, Emiratis, Qataris, Kuwaitis, have been forced to cut production because they have nowhere to send it. Their storage is filling. Qatar's processing facilities went offline entirely after Fremen drone strikes, taking a fifth of the Imperium's refined spice-gas off the market in a single day. European and Asian spice-gas prices have surged over sixty percent in a week. The Spacing Guild, which cares about nothing except the flow, is reportedly preparing the largest emergency spice reserve release in its history. This is an implicit admission that the situation is not resolving.
Meanwhile the Fremen themselves continue to export. Their shadow fleet, old tankers running dark through routes the Empire cannot or will not interdict, has pushed nearly twelve million barrels through the Gap since the war began. All of it bound for the one great power willing to buy. China consumes Fremen spice at a discount and asks no questions about provenance. The Emperor's "maximum pressure" campaign to drive Fremen spice exports to zero has achieved the opposite. It has driven everyone else's exports to zero while the Fremen keep shipping.
Here is what the Landsraad does not discuss, though it is the central fact of the conflict: the Harkonnens do not serve the Emperor. The Emperor serves the Harkonnens. This is the inversion that makes the war intelligible. House Harkonnen maintains the siege of the southern sietches with Bronze Age enthusiasm, collective punishment, infrastructure destruction, open talk of blood debts and generational vengeance, and the Imperial court supplies the ordnance and the diplomatic cover and calls this arrangement an alliance. The Harkonnens have learned that the Emperor's domestic politics are such that no request will be refused. Every appropriation is approved. Every escalation is backstopped. Every atrocity is framed as self-defense. The tail has learned to wag the beast, and the beast does not notice because the tail speaks the language of the court. The Harkonnens sit in the Landsraad chamber and receive standing ovations while the southern sietches burn.
The Emperor believes this arrangement serves Imperial interests. The Fremen know otherwise. Every flattened sietch is a recruitment office. Every dead child has a father in the fedaykin or a cousin in the deep desert resistance or a neighbor who was neutral until yesterday. The Fremen do not need to match the Sardaukar in firepower. They need the Empire to keep making their argument for them. The Harkonnens are, in this sense, the Fremen's greatest strategic asset, though neither party would frame it so.
This is strategically suicidal and every student of desert warfare knows it. The Fremen do not need to breach the Shield Wall. They need only to hold the Gap closed and wait. The Empire's dependency does the rest.
This is how empires built on spice dependency collapse. Not from military defeat. From the moment the people sitting on the spice decide the passage is closed. The Emperor can flatten every sietch on Arrakis and it will not reopen the Gap. Only negotiation can do that. Negotiation requires acknowledging that the Fremen have something the Empire cannot take by force.
It is also remarkable how quickly the Imperial court changed, and how few among the Landsraad find it worth commenting upon.
I'd imagine the Fremen made a few enemies with their own even less targeting bombings. This is not a sustainable path to emancipation, just the spread of chaos, a festering wound that longs to kill its host for daring to apply stinging ointment.
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That said, in this analogy arrakis produces only a small fraction of the world’s spice.
That was always the dumbest part of Dune though, wasn't it?
In the later books synthetic spice was also invented.
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Certainly Iran itself only around 4%, but around 20% transits the Strait of Hormuz.
I suspect if you included land part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire you'd get around 25% of production.
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Mistakes happen. A strong, competent leader, secure in his masculinity, owns his mistakes and does so publicly. Learns from them. Expresses regret, if appropriate, and lets people know how and why learning of the mistake will improve his ability to avoid such mistakes going forward. These are the men that other men follow to the gates of hell.
Yes these blustering lies are unbecoming.
Since you would take an admission of a mistake as a weapon to attack the administration with, this is unreasonable coming from you.
I don't think I've actually attacked them over it. Just said that one dead civilian or American is too much because I fundamentally disagree with the war. I'm not saying we should stop because we killed one hundred school girls and I find the people waving them as a bloody flag on other sites distasteful and kind of missing the point. Tragic accidents happen in war but we shouldn't be at war at all. That was one of the selling points of Trump to end this endless adventurism in the Middle East.
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I think its possible that the US did the hit, but we're not certain. By their stalling I think its likely or they would have denied it already. Lets be honest, they have the intelligence and they've had a week.
That said, I've talked to a persian expat friend and he's highlighted Iran's history of false flags going back to the 80's. He isn't upset at the way the narrative is playing out. He thinks if this isn't the toppling of the theocracy, that Iran will suffer as is for another 30 years+
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Frankly this seems like such a non-story.
The only way this is in fact a story is if the U.S. intentionally targeted the school WHILE knowing it was solely a school.
Assuming no one is alleging that, then everything else is window dressing. Mistakes happen all of the time including in war. Having a stupid panel to tut tut post hoc likely has a de minimis impact on an accident (after all why didn’t it prevent the mistake in the Afghan withdrawal). But it is a nice little way for an opponent of the administration to chest thump in a performative way despite the panel almost certainly being useless (bureaucrats love complaining about elimination of useless bureaucracy).
In short, it seems the military is doing just fine under Hegseth. Complaining about one mistake out of hundreds of strikes seems to misunderstand war.
When your alleged strategy is that of regime change with the popular support of the people it seems like a rather big strategic mistake to bomb an elementary school filled with kids.
To that extent the people doggedly doling out wisdom on the cold hard realities of war seem to just be coping. To what end I do not know.
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Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike? War happens. All this struggle session about it is lame.
Let me just get this out there. When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers. If you're very (un)lucky, you'll be facing a world superpower with good enough targeting to keep that ratio low. In a standard conventional military without smart munitions, the civvy/oppo ratio exceeds 5:1 for conventional operations and 10:1 for irregular warfare. Which is why irregular combatants are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.
This is what war is. There are, ultimately, no rules to the war game. Anyone cherry picking the one-off mistakes of any country in an armed conflict is doing so for their own reasons, not some established corpus of imaginary "international law" of which they seem to be the only lawyers.
Yes well that is exactly why we shouldn't have started another pointless war. Accidents happen in war, but that's why it should be a last resort.
Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.
Well this is pretty unpopular according to polls and I don't think they claim that democracies produce wars stands up to scrutiny. Most modern democracies are extremely peaceful. It's mostly the US and France mucking about which suggests that Empire produces wars more than democracy.
Most "modern democracies" are vassal states (allies) of the US, forbidden to fight anyone without our approval, and most of those have divested themselves of any real military capability. This was not done through democratic means. Our forefathers knew democracies had spent the last century invading each other, especially the French. When they set up the postwar system, the EU gave up its essential sovereignty in military terms to the US. So they could all be peaceful "democracies" under the aegis of US military protection. So too with Japan and South Korea. They aren't peaceful, they're disarmed. When they weren't, as in the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, they immediately fell into wars until the US asserted military supremacy over eastern europe.
Yes, being the global military guarantor of the trade routes routinely requires military action in far-flung parts of the world. Especially against regimes that have aligned themselves politically against your hegemony. This is something every superpower has to do, because that's what allows the entire global economy that has lifted our race of humanity from the endemic poverty of 99.999999% of our collective history. Some do better jobs than others. If you want to compare the US empire, compare it to the constellation of other great powers who ran it before us. Is our middle east policy really worse than France, Russia and Britain's? Was theirs worse than Spain and Portugal's? Or the Ottomans?
Actually, the Ottomans might have been the last great empire to have a better middle eastern policy, but nobody's going for the "Use Albanian slaves to crush all resistance" tactic anymore.
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Nobody. If the US hit it through intelligence error, the US is responsible because the standard for intelligence is perfection. If the US hit it through targeting error, the US is responsible because the standard for targeting is perfection. If the US hit it due to a inaccuracy in the missile's guidance, the US is responsible because the standard for guidance is perfection. If the US hit it because Iran attempted to intercept the missile, the US is responsible because the standard for not being intercepted is perfection. If Iran hit it because it fired a missile that the US jammed, the US is responsible because the US jammed it. And if Iran hit it and the missile simply malfunctioned, the US is responsible because the US started this war and we could have simply not done so.
All depends on when you start the clock, I suppose. If you think the war started in 2026 versus 1979 versus 1953 versus 1952 for instance.
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Does not look so clear to me today, wars like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Gaza are not the normal. In Ukraine, well below 25% of the military deaths. In Nagorno-Karabakh, completely marginal. Iraq-Iran, below 1:1. Soviets in Afganistan, Russians in Chechenia, US in Iraq, something between 1:1 and 5:1 looks plausible. In conflicts that are more a civil war, varied and unclear.
Calling it lame is rather shameless. You start a war of aggression, on your own terms and schedule, from a position of strength and near total security, and you immediately fuck up a school then lie until the video surfaces, like some desperate, barely functional shithole. Don't know, maybe you are consistent, but for americans in general, there is a gap between reputation expected and actual conduct (targeting, behaviour afterwards, cynical excuses); very grating considering the advantages the US has.
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Exactly, if the war is worth fighting then it's worth killing some civilians over. If the war isn't worth fighting, than it isn't. Lying about the strike is lame and stupid, but what more do we expect?
I feel the same way about the attitude around the American dead. Trump and Hegseth appear to be accidentally telling the truth here. If this war was just and a good idea, you have to be willing to trade a dozen dead Americans for an Ayatollah, or you're just not serious about it.
Thus the interesting argument, being had below, is: is this war a good idea? Is it just? Is it likely to succeed? Because the answers to those questions answer the question about the civilian and military deaths and costs of the war.
The first casualty of war is truth, they say. War covers a multitude of sins. That's one of the reasons people like them. If you think you're going to get some clear-cut war like the "good ol days", you missed the second half of the twentieth century. War is fought in the media, everyone is lying. Trump is lying about Iran, Clinton was lying about Kosovo, Bush was lying about Iraq, Kennedy was lying about Vietnam.
The convenient thing about Trump is that you know he's lying because he'll say two entirely different things in the same day.
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Yeah I pretty much agree with this and I'm very opposed to the war, but the school doesn't do much for me because if the war was worth fighting it wouldn't be an issue. i'm sure we bombed a school or two when we fough the Nazis.
The bombing of Dresden in WW2 killed about 25k civilians, and the firebombing of Tokyo killed about 100k. And those are just the two most famous ones (outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
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Those now shrugging their shoulders at civilian casualties likely did not do the same when Hamas killed some civilians on October 7th. I do wonder how much selective empathy is going on.
I think this is sophism. And to play nice with the rules here, I’ll elaborate as far as to say that obviously terrorists launching a sneak attack on a civilian festival during a time of peace is different from a missile accidentally hitting a civilian target in the fog of war. Obviously.
Why would it be bad to launch a sneak attack on soldiers at a festival? Remember, you can’t say “because of the civilians present”, because apparently we don’t care about civilians in war. Neither can we use the “fog of war” excuse, because it was our first enty into the war with a target of our choice. And neither can we say “in times of peace”, because we were negotiating with Iran in peace, and were not at war. My point here, of course, is to draw a comparison between the 150 or so we killed (does not deserve empathy?), and whatever happened on October 7th (somehow deserves empathy?).
Is anybody saying the children are totally unworthy of empathy? The argument is more that it's unintentional collateral damage as opposed to an operation solely conducted to kill civilians with no particular greater strategic or tactical significance
@coffee_enjoyer is pointing out that most of the people at the music festival attacked by Hamas were Israeli reservists, and therefore combatants. (It is a truth universally acknowledged by any society which still understands war that combatants don't become civilians just because they aren't currently attacking.) There is a colourable argument that the music festival (or any other gathering of military-age Israelis most of whom will inevitably by IDF reservists) was a legitimate military target - that is the nature of a militarised society. (Even if you accept this argument, it was still a war crime by Hamas because of what they did to the women)
But like every other discussion of ius in bello on the thread, this is quibbling. I think we all agree that this is fundamentally a ius ad bello argument - does the US have a (secret) cause sufficiently compelling that it is worth going to war, with all the horrors that entails for individual human beings on both sides, to achieve it? The US can also be blamed for launching a perfidious surprise attach, but that seems to be SOP nowadays - the last time someone actually bothered to declare war before attacking was WW2.
You mean that in a country with universal conscription, everyone is a combatant until officially discharged in their 60s? Well, that would certainly be convenient for the attacker.
By that standard, are we conceding that Israelis shooting anyone on the Palestinian side of the fence who could possibly hold a rifle or an explosive device is shooting combatants?
Yes - off-duty soldiers are combatants. You have the option of placing part of your population ("civilians") hors de combat in an somewhat permanent way such that they benefit from the principle of distinction, but Israel chooses not to do this because they gain a military advantage from having the whole military-age population (including, unusually, women) available to fight at short notice - particularly as Hamas doesn't abide by the Geneva Conventions anyway. The rules don't exist to make war fair - they exist to prevent acts of wanton destruction with a humanitarian cost that grossly exceeds the military benefit gained. Back when the first ius in bello treaties were being negotiated by people who were comfortable that some wars were morally justified (I am most familiar with the negotiations leading to the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions because Barbara Tuchman writes about them in A Distant Mirror) everyone in the room understood that if you tried to ban sound military tactics the ban wouldn't stick. And attacking enemy soldiers while they are partying would be a sound military tactic, if Hamas was actually trying to win the war in a non-perfidious way.
I would say it is closer to the truth that whenever Israel attacks Palestinians they are in a legal grey area because Hamas perfidiously* mix civilian and military targets in a way which makes it impossible for Israel to comply with the principle of distinction. The bastards hide military targets in hospitals, for crissake. The rules on precisely how you can lawfully attack a perfidious enemy are underspecified for the obvious reasons.
* I am using the term primarily in its technical legal sense as defined by the Geneva Conventions, although I think Hamas are perfidious in the ordinary English sense of the word as well.
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I just think this is sophism. You can break down each event into constituent parts and assert an equivalence but everybody casually understands the difference.
The Palestinians sent war fighters to attack kidnap and rape a civilian festival. They did this proudly.
The US attacked the leaders of a hostile country after negotiations broke down. In the process of striking that country’s military targets a school was bombed, in the fog of war, because it was next to a military target, which both sides are now denying responsibility for.
Not sorry, not the same, not remotely the same. There is no moral equivalence between terrorism and accidents. There is no moral equivalence between evil regimes that want to kill us and the leader of the free world wanting to kill evil regimes.
There is not evidence of rape, though there is evidence that Israelis rape Palestinian prisoners; negotiations had not broken down according to the Omani mediator; Iran was never hostile to us; the school was no closer to the military target than the soldiers were close to the festival-goers
I do believe there is an evil regime trying to get Americans killed, trying to kill civilians, and trying to make the world less safe. IMO that regime is the Israeli regime. They want us dying like we did in Iraq for them.
I just can’t take this credibly, I think you’ve been propagandized honestly, I know that every claim involving Israel is hotly contested but if you think all evidence of rape committed by terrorists who kidnapped civilians is a priori implausible I would at least expect you to admit such an implausible frame.
The Iranian regime was founded on hostility to America. They fund Hamas and Hezbollah, they chant Death to America, they support Russia and China, they are one of our number one enemies. I don’t even know what you could mean
That would make them hostile to Israel, which is not America.
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Israel has not presented one name of a rape victim.
None of the hostages that Hamas kept for years have alleged rape(correcting myself: a few accusations from hostages). None of the women who had Hamas members enter their homes and who interacted with them have alleged rape. When an Israeli journalist called every hotline and every hospital to determine whether rapes happened, not only did no one claim to have met a victim, but no one knew anyone who met a victim.Israelis, in contrast, mass rape Palestinian prisoners. There are actual people coming forward, with documented injuries. The Israeli army’s top lawyer had to leak video evidence of a rape because the Israelis refused to prosecute the Israeli rapists, and for this act she was fired. When they tried to prosecute the Israeli rapists, popular politicians instigated a riot on the prison where the Israeli rapist was kept. The Israelis dropped all the charges against the Israeli rapists just a few hours ago, actually, this despite there being video evidence.
It is insane to me that we are allied with this country.
I'm supposed to believe that an insurgency of third-world Muslims who aren't even accepted as refugees by other third-world Muslims have not raped a single person they captured in a raid - all this coming from the same mouths as the ones who claim Israel deliberately floods Europe with third-world Muslims who do rape people on occasions much less heated than a raid on their eternal enemy.
There are two worlds. In one, Hamas has acted wildly uncharacteristically of either violent guerillas who have a deep-seated hate for their enemy, or third-world Muslims. In another, you lie and/or every single outlet who could report rapes by Hamas is aligned against Israel. Given that it's no secret many third-worldists and thirdworldphiles openly hate Israel, it's not hard to believe the second world is true.
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Nobody thinks the US military was trying to kill Iranian girls on purpose.
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For the folks parroting "why should I give a shit about some girl's school", I wonder how many of them have expressed strong public condemnation of abortion because "think of the children". I can't see how both attitudes could coexist within someone who's being honest about each view. Perhaps there's no such person.
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Hamas raped and killed civilians on purpose. You really see no difference?
Shrugging at this is insane, though. I can understand the reality of war, but hundreds of kids being vaporized on accident is horrific.
Vaporized would be better. This way generated seconds, minutes, hours of hellish last moments.
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There were soldiers throughout the music festival, off-duty Israelis carrying rifles. Why should I care if they miss some soldiers and shoot some civilians? Is that worse than missing a base and hitting a school? Why should an American trust what Israel says about the allegation of rape when (1) they are maximally motivated to exaggerate the event and (2) they have never admitted to killing hundreds of their own civilians in cars with the Hannibal Directive? This is not a trustworthy country.
Are you aware that we don’t have a single name of someone coming forward to allege rape? And that similarly, female hostages have not alleged rape despite being kept among Hamas for years? Or that Israelis rape their Palestinian prisoners?
Sorry - while I don't trust Israel and the IDF may have let it happen, I've seen too many videos of October 7th to take this denial seriously. Hamas loved every second of it, and frankly Palestinians in general were too gleeful for my taste.
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Bucketloads, on all sides. In general the wars of the last decade have really opened my eyes to the fact that most people can't have empathy (even nominally) for the opposing side of a conflict that they actually care about.
(I don't claim immunity to the phenomenon myself, and noticing that has been pretty creepy too. Especially since noticing it doesn't actually change it.)
Most people don't care nearly so much when bad things happen to their outgroup, and indeed they often enjoy it.
Selective empathy is ordinary human psychology. Unselective empathy is a mental disorder.
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As other people have pointed out, these things happen. Making a fuss about this bombing mainly incentivizes Iran's leadership to start using human shields.
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War is hell. Mistakes happen.
It is not America's job to protect civilians.
Only 8 US dead so far. The campaign is not reckless.
At this point I think that the US doctrine should change to using many dumb bombs. And just say - we don't have the capacity to ensure civilian safety in one kilometer away from a military target and let the other government sort it out.
Why not do some victim blaming though - first putting a school next to military base is stupid, operating the school when knowing war is imminent is stupider. Treating it as just another day in paradise is stupider still. Putting a school in former barracks is once again not a smart move. And it is not as if Iran makes sure to give US information where the real juicy targets are.
here are quotes that are from Al Jazeera article (hardly us friendly outlet)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-deny-involvement
At some point the best way to keep civilians from harm is not to entangle civilian and military infrastructure together. And what kind of evacuation is sitting in place waiting for parents to pick kids up. Evacuation is get the fuck out of the building and run away.
There should be investigation, and people should be demoted - but it should be for wasting valuable asset and putting the pilot's life and plane at risk for no good reason.
Smart bombs like JDAMs are so much more effective for hitting most targets that I think it would actually cost us significantly more to do this, or we would have to accept a massive reduction in combat effectiveness.
What I meant is that if the average US missile was not 400kg of tnt, but 4 tons clustered and the smallest impact was flattening quarter square mile, then people would not have to complain about imprecise targeting.
Maybe I am having a moment of idiocy, but I am not quite sure I follow.
The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of a million is statistics.
Small precision weapons lead to PR nightmare when not hitting the target, or hitting something else or any other failure modes. MOABs don't have that problem.
If you are paying the same price no matter the bodycount, why bother reducing it?
Well, I mean, collateral damage isn't ideal and, all things being equal, it's good to kill fewer noncombatants.
But also, it's not equal - smaller precision-guided weapons are much more effective and efficient than large, inaccurate ones.
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This is standard practice, the US has 160 such schools.
Accordingly it is predictable that there are schools on foreign military bases too .
Also Iranians were negotiating in good faith, this happened in the first hours of the war, because you're incapable of good faith, and demands for evacuation are quite disingenuous. How were they to know you're committed to not just attack while negotiating, but to destroying the country and not another Midnight Hammer type surgical strike on nuclear facilities?
All these excuses are slop, as is the tryhard cynicism. I guess the only possible rebuttal you'd be able to recognize is military defeat.
I'm confused. How many people in the US would be actually surprised/outraged if we got into a hot war and someone bombed a military base, which also had a school on it? We'd be upset about getting bombed at all, but I don't think the fact that a school on the base also got hit would add to the upsetness. It seems like a legit strike would also harm people at the school.
Schools on military bases are probably really convenient and the risk is low right now because we are unlikely to have people attacking us on the continental US. But it is a risk that they probably had to assess and accept. If an attack on US soil seemed more likely, the schools would probably be moved.
You don't have to get into a hot war to figure that one out. Just look at Ukraine-Russia war, Ukraine blew up a bridge using an unsuspecting civilian trucker to carry the bomb, killing a random family in the process and public consensus on this (in the west) was 'justified'. Now imagine what type of reaction this would generate if Iran did this to US or any 'bad guys' did it to 'good guys'. You wouldn't stop hearing about it until it's imprinted in your brain.
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Plenty of people. It's just that there's very little overlap with the set of people who are upset about the bombing of this school.
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Looking at what's been happening in Ukraine, Iran and so on, I think that you'd (plural) be incandescent. It would immediately form the basis of huge volumes of war propaganda against the baby-killers for domestic consumption. Diplomats from the UK would be dragged in front of a mike and ask why they aren't doing more to stop innocent American children being slaughtered. Meanwhile any unfortunate civilian casualties abroad would be targeting accidents resulting from the enemy's perfidy in leaving children next to their bases, unlike the US which is (..now) doing everything possible to get them out of harm's way.
That just seems to be how war is.
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With the benefit of hindsight, this seems like a bad idea to me. Even if it's a base that's not in serious danger of being attacked, it strikes me as a bad precedent.
That being said, if the US were at war, and the enemy attacked a military base and destroyed such a school, I do not think the enemy would deserve any special condemnation for having done so.
There needs to be a principle that -- as far as the rules of war go -- there is nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with an attack that destroys a school if the attack was otherwise legitimate. Anything else encourages the use of human shields.
I tend to doubt this. Probably there is no way to know for sure either way, but what's your evidence?
In the case of CONUS/Alaska/Hawaii, the children live on the base, some of which are bigger than our smallest state, so bussing them would be bad for quality of life. Overseas it's so American children can go to American schools.
Yes, as I mentioned in another post it might not be logistically feasible.
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The US military maintains a network of schools for service member’s Children. This is the best public(Catholic schools are better) school system in the country going off test scores and is a regular line item in the budget overseen by the DoD- it’s not ad hoc.
Citation needed? I'd have expected that small school districts would dominate the top (and bottom) of test score rankings, just because smaller sample sizes (some of which are effectively much smaller than N_students because of sociological clustering) give higher variance, and I'd have expected there to be too many military public schools for the system to qualify as "small".
Though, admittedly, my first quick search for a small-sized tightly-clustered student population didn't support my theory. Only 56% of Los Alamos High School seniors took any AP exams, and only 43% passed at least one? What the hell? Do the good nuclear physicists just not have enough kids?
Small schools may not have the resources/critical mass of advanced students to justify offering a lot of AP classes. I remember having to organize a year-long campaign to convince my high school there was enough student demand to allow one of the teachers to offer an AP art history class. Beyond that we just had the bare minimum AP History, English, and Physics courses. Occasionally a handful of particularly advanced students would get together with a teacher after school to prepare for AP exams when there wasn't an AP class for the subject, but they tended not to do well on the actual tests.
I applaud you (I think my only AP credits may have been Calc AB and BC, because IIRC my otherwise-pretty-good high school didn't yet offer anything else, and I wasn't awesome enough to lobby to fix that), and that's a reasonable theory, but I'd doubt it applies to LAHS: 22 AP Classes (or 23 now, since the AP people added Precalculus), offered at a school with only like 1200 students.
Ok that is strange. Maybe Los Alamos just has shit water or something...
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https://www.dodea.edu/news/press-releases/dod-schools-ranked-best-united-states-again-nations-report-card
DOD schools might be outperformed by a small district in the Boston or DC suburbs, but they outperform any state. Yes, including Massachusetts.
That's really impressive; thanks very much for the link!
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Surely there'd be effects like the senior personnel having more resources for boarding school/private education whilst the shitkickers on base are just putting their kids into the local school regardless. Also I'd imagine there are some nearby actual Los Alamosans who'd likely skew redneck/native as hell.
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I don't dispute that at all. I'm just saying it would be nice if the school facilities were located off-base. Even if an attack against a US base is unlikely, I think it sets a good example. That being said, I have no idea if this is logistically feasible.
US bases are basically towns in their own right. In every aspect it would be more difficult to school kids off-base, plus it would create new security risks.
I don't know enough about military matters to comment on this, but I concede that what I am proposing might not be logistically feasible.
That being said, if the Iranians launched a missile at a military base in the US or Israel, and in doing so blew up a school which was located on that base, I do not believe that they should receive any extra condemnation for having blown up a school.
Similarly, if the Iranians were targeting specific buildings on a military base in the US or Israel, and by mistake targeted a school, I do not think they should receive any extra condemnation for having blown up a school.
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US bases include housing for soldiers and their families, like normal cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods. Changing this changes the model of military service.
I don't know enough about the military to comment on this, however I concede what I am proposing might not be logistically feasible.
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Seriously??
What are you expressing surprise about? The slashing? Or the name? If it's the latter, that's extremely common in the DoD. Even my college, a public state school, was designated a Cybersecurity Center of Excellence by the DoD, along with several hundred other schools.
The name.
It sounds like something out of Helldivers.
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"Center of excellence" has been a common naming method for over two decades for all sorts of things in many parts of the western world.
I’ve seen plenty of them, but I don’t actually know how it got started.
IIRC, the university lab I worked at 20 years ago was trying to apply for funding to become one. Yes, they used that exact English language term even though it was in Finland.
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So pompous.
Yeah, I understand your viewpoint. In the military services, though, there's a lot of emphasis and study of excellence in a way that would probably be pretty foreign to a civilian. Since it's such a common topic, a term that means a place where excellence is performed feels not at all out of the ordinary.
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That's modern administration for you.
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Man, how many Japanese kids and teachers were incinerated when we firebombed Tokyo? War is terrible, that's why we shouldn't be overly fond of it.
What's remarkable is less about what happened from 2019 to 2026 and more about what happened in the time prior to that. I'm all for targeted munitions and accurate intelligence and whatnot, but all kinetic action is, frankly, a broadsword. We're lying to ourselves if we imagine otherwise.
I don't even like Hegseth, he's not a particular good Sec
DefWar. But he's right that the military's job is to be lethal. If you want to avoid all that, that's on State.He's not. The military's job is to employ military force effectively in pursuit of state objectives. Given US conventional superiority, lethalitymaxxing is often pointless or counterproductive. Like, the problem of the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan was not that it wasn't lethal enough, and missions that require more sophistication than firepower are not going away.
And the current paradigm is that if your goal is something other than "killing enemies" then you should use a different tool than the "enemy killing organization". Using the Enemy Killing Organization for non-Enemy Killing purposes is often ineffective and inefficient, and degrades the ability of the Enemy Killing Organization to kill enemies.
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Agreed, and I would add that people who make a fuss about this school bombing are, in effect, endangering MORE children. What do you expect Iran's leadership to do if they perceive they can gain an advantage from this situation? The obvious thing is to start mixing military facilities with schools, hospitals, etc.
Don't incentivize Iran to start using human shields.
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something to realize is that modern people have dramatically much less willingness to accept civilian casualties than our great grandparents did. This constraint causes dramatic shifts in how war is fought in strange ways.
I admit that this is mostly secondhand from reading ROEs but like if we fought wars like we did back in the 40s and 50s the outcry's would be insane
The falklands war had the UK basically do everything in a respectable way, and the most controversial incident from my grandfather's perspecictive (RIP) was like "wow this even caused any controversy at all?" When he saw and read about it. To the old people wars are dramatically crazier than modern day wars. Vietnam Veterans I talk to describing the vietnam war show things that I personally consider abhorrent as just "lol that's war".
We (the average american young person) are soft and that's a good thing! (it makes us less willing to accept wars)
I don't think that's necessarily true. If a bad actor knows (or at least perceives) that you are unwilling (or less willing) to go to war, he is more likely to engage in bad behavior against you or your allies.
To be sure, the United States has the luxury of being a large, wealthy country in a very defensible location. But we do (arguably) have interests overseas and there are definitely people who are tempted to interfere with those interests.
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I don't think it's about being old or young. The wars of our great-grandparents' day were existential, at least if you were in Europe. And notably the one party in the Iran conflict for whom this stuff is - rightly or wrongly - somewhat existential is Israel and they are ultimately pretty accepting of casualties. Likewise Ukraine.
If you are American of course it's a bit more complicated, but I still think that WW2 was visibly more urgent from an American POV in ways that created greater tolerance for large-scale casualties. Japan attacked the US; and the Nazi regime were very powerful, very dangerous genuine racial supremacists who had taken over France and Poland, presided over mass bombing and mass executions, and had the explicit goal of ethnic cleansing Eastern Europe for German expansion. Putin just isn't in the same league, and neither is Iran.
The war is obviously more existential for Iran than it is for any of the aggressors. The destruction of the Iranian state is a plausible outcome, indeed it may be Netanyahu's goal. And a million excess deaths (mostly due to starvation and disease) is a reasonable estimate of the likely human cost of a failed state in Iran.
To be clear, Iran IS the aggressor -- certainly with respect to Israel. People seem to forget the facts that (1) for many years, Iran has been relentlessly attacking Israel by means of its proxies; (2) Iran's leadership has openly threatened to wipe Israel off the map; and (3) Iran's leadership has prioritized building a nuclear bomb.
I agree that at the moment, Iran has a lot more to lose than Israel or the United States. Probably Iran's leadership should have thought about that before engaging in its aggressive behavior.
(3) Iran's leadership has prioritized building a nuclear bomb.
Israel has built a nuclear arsenal already, has been relentlessly attacking their neighbours and other countries in the area and openly proclaimed their desire to become a regional and/or global power (see Netanyahu's recent comments) - does this actually justify launching attacks against the Israeli regime?
Agreed.
If by "relentlessly attacking their neighbors" you mean "relentlessly defending themselves," then I agree.
I'll assume for the sake of argument this is true.
No.
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Talking smack about an unfriendly country doesn't constitute waging war against them. Building nukes may justify a pre-emptive war as a matter of sound policy, but it doesn't as a matter of international law, and it certainly doesn't make you the aggressor if someone does wage a pre-emptive war against you - as a matter of ordinary English meanings of words, building nukes does not constitute aggression unless they are used.
You have a better case on point (1) - Iran is indeed supporting proxies which are attacking Israel (and indeed committing war crimes against Israeli civilians). But they are not an aggressor here - they skate on two technicalities.
I wasn't aware that you were using the word "aggressor" as a legal term of art. And assuming that the word is in fact such a term, I am extremely skeptical of your claim that proxy attacks do not count.
Please provide cites and links to support your claim. TIA.
Separately, since you have used the phrase "Palestinian Territories," can you please tell me (1) which land areas constitute "Palestinian Territories" (e.g. do they include Ramallah, Gaza City, Hebron, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, etc.); and (2) how those areas came to be "Palestinian Territories"? TIA
The term "Palestinian Territories" has a widely-understood standard meaning which includes Ramallah, Gaza City, Hebron, may or may not include East Jerusalem, and clearly does not include West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. You know this as well as I do. These territories became "Palestinian Territories" by virtue of being the parts of Mandate Palestine which remained inhabited by Christian and Muslim Arabs who referred to themselves as "Palestinian" after the Israeli War of Independence. I suspect you know that too.
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It seems extraordinarily obvious that proxies do not count, based on common international practice. Russia isn't nuking NATO over Ukraine, and in Vietnam and Korea the US didn't nuke the USSR or China.
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Ultimately wars don't start when the leader of a formerly peaceful nation wakes up and decides to kill some people, they are an escalation of a violent and hostile relationship. If invading Iranian territory and killing its head of state doesn't make A+I the aggressors, probably aggressor/defender is the wrong way to look at this conflict.
For example, if Iran had nuked America six months ago, I think people would call them the aggressor even though America was imposing heavy sanctions i.e. blockades on them, had multiple times threatened/attempted to/historically actually achieved regime change, was attacking them via regional proxies (Israel) and had already bombed them.
Perhaps, but it's pretty clear that if anyone is the "aggressor," it's Iran.
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“The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.“
So Hegseth gutted the unit that would have wound up with the wokest people in the military. This is why I voted for.
I don’t want civilians killed. But firing that group I 100% support.
Uniformed targetters, planners and intelligence analysts, none of whom were assigned those specialties or that job because of their individual politics. Does that change your opinion at all?
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It's "woke" to not want to kill children?
Yes, if "we don't want to kill children" is the motte, but the bailey is something like "the US (or Israeli) military should not engage in otherwise legitimate attacks if children might be endangered."
And in practice, "we don't want children to get harmed" is a motte a very large percentage of the time.
I'm not some bleeding heart. I know that war means dead kids, that's just the nature of things. It's why war is bad and you try to avoid it, but it also means that sometimes some civilians will die in order to end a war quicker.
But surely you can see that the sentiment being expressed here is beyond that of just "it is silly to expect perfection from the US."
I'm not sure I understand your point. What sentiment do you say is being expressed here?
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It's woke to complain whenever the U.S. fails to be absolutely perfect and not complain at all when Russia/Islamic Regimes deliberately murder civilians with specific intention.
I do not see Dase equally criticizing Russian, Iranian, and Palestinian attacks on civilian populations.
In short, isolated demands for rigor on political grounds is a classic woke manifestation.
Because American propaganda and self image is (so far) "we are heroes fighting for truth and justice".
Tell Iranians or Russians "you are not good guys, you are brutish murdering bastards" and they will laugh.
Stings that will hurt would be "You are not world second super power, you are Africa tier rotting shithole living out of real super power dwindling inheritance" or "You are fake Muslims, worse than outright infidels, what is happening to you is divine judgement for your sins, your only future is hell fire".
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Two things: The demand for perfection and Isolated demands for rigor.
When it comes to demands of perfection, it depends on the level of fuckup. The level of fuckup also depends on capabilities. If I blow up a terrorist and some kids also die, there may be some discussion based on capabilities of if I could have targeted him when children weren't around, but otherwise it was an unfortunate necessity. If I aim for the target and miss and kill children, well then there was some level of fuckup. The amount of fuckup varies from "humans are far from perfect, what are you expecting" if my technology is at the level of catapults to "this needs to investigated" if my technology is such that I can precision target a specific mosquito from halfway across the world. In the latter example, even if the answer ends up being that better technology doesn't eliminate the potential for human error, investigating is still important for identifying ways to not make that mistake in the future.
I have no intention of speaking for Dase, but when it comes to Russia and Palestine, there is some of the above - Palestine does not have precision targeting or a monopoly of force necessary to pick and choose targets (even if I give them benefit of the doubt and don't think of them as terrorists). But more importantly, we have already concluded that they are pieces of shit and choose to act immorally. We want them to behave morally, but we have given up expecting it so there is no benefit to spending more time on it than necessary to document their atrocities for posterity. Their sins do not create permission for us to sin.
I actually kind of disagree with this. Here's a hypothetical:
Suppose the Palestinian Arabs put a military base under a hospital; they use that military base to conduct terror campaigns against Israel; and Israel bombs the hospital and takes out the military base but kills some civilians in the process.
Suppose that in such situations, instead of condemning Israel for bombing a hospital, the United Nations; most of the world's political leaders; and most of the world's NGO's publicly blame the entire situation on the Palestinian Arabs.
In that case, I think there's a pretty good chance that the Palestinian Arabs would stop using human shields.
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But we're not (yet) in charge of the Russians, Iranians, or Palestinians. Any complaints we make about them would be outward-facing, not inward-facing, a fundamental difference in character. While I agree that we shouldn't hold our enemies to a lighter moral standard, there is literally less reason to criticize them, because they are already a foreign adversary.
We know that one of the attack vectors used by our geopolitical rivals is to specifically emphasize these points to cause political strife, withdrawal from conflict, and to destabilize the US.
Regardless of underlying virtue associated with these conversations, we should be much more careful and diligent in doing what our enemies want us to do.
I seldom see that happening.
"And have you stopped lynching the black people?" the genocidal tyrant asked smugly, as he washed in his daily bloodbath squeezed from more victims than the entire history of the KKK.
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Does focusing one's campaigning on one's own government, instead of others, really count as an isolated demand for rigour?
Arguing that your side surrender because conflict result in unacceptable outcomes is not good game theory when being attacked by an aggressor.
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Isn't Dase Russian? Here he refers to the Russians as "us" and the Americans as "you".
You can take man out of world second super power, but you cannot take world second super power out of man.
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I don't know, but I am pretty confident that when it comes to Israel, the majority of the demands for perfection are coming from non-Israelis.
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Unfortunately I think there are units with even more woke people in them.
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I guess that's the fitting conclusion to the Culture War MAGA arc. Just like "nazi" became "everyone to the right of my AIDS-positive trans activist HR manager", "woke" now means "anyone with higher moral standards than Genghis Khan – like a small unit in a bloated imperial military that tries to reduce collateral damage by fucking checking whether a building marked 10 years ago as barracks is clearly something else now". I mean, a Tomahawk already costs like $2.5M, how much would this red tape add, given the third worldist level of American corruption? Certainly more than the cumulative utility or net worth of 170 brown children, and it's not like the parents could sue (seeing as they're IRGC, you've killed them earlier). Persians aren't quite brown, but that doesn't matter, American category of race has always been a social construct, after all.
Shoe, foot, who/whom, torturer and tortured, master and nigger, Jew and Amalek – that's all there is to American political discourse, when the disparity of power is sufficiently high. You lot were right about the leftists, and the leftists were… uh, all along correct about the right. I should've been more charitable.
This group probably does not double check targets to make sure they aren’t schools- if I had to guess, their job is to write forms that the people checking targets to make sure they aren’t schools fill out.
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My feelings to both sides here are along the lines of "What did you think war meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?". War is war, and there will be innocent casualties. Either the war is morally justifiable and those are regrettable consequences, or it's not --- frankly, leaning toward "not" personally here on the basis of what information has been shared with the public. Expecting an innocent-bloodless war, even just a precision bombing campaign, seems naive on both sides. Heck, Clinton managed to bomb a Chinese embassy.
I can see the reasons for establishing such a unit, and I think it sounds on paper like something easily justifiable. But if I had a nickel for every veteran account I've read along the lines of "We were under strict rules to not fire unless fired upon. We watched [enemy] truck in a heavy machine gun and ammo all morning, constantly calling our commanders for permission to dissuade them or to leave the area, and were ordered to stay put and hold fire. After they were all in place, they opened fire on us, and two servicemen were injured. We returned small arms fire and vectored in close air support, neutralizing the enemy." I'd have at least a few nickels. I wouldn't exclusively side with either the boots on the ground (plenty of examples of misbehavior in the past), or with the ivory-tower academics arguing ethics of war thousands of miles away with no skin in the game, but I see a reason to listen to both.
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I assume normal military people do these checks. The group labeled “check” this are going to be the pure lefties that get in the way of doing anything.
Don’t waste a tomahawk blowing up a school (or any non-useful thing) is what competent people do. You don’t need a specific group outside the command chain.
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This seems to be a standard job for military recon units, doesn't it? Before you fire on a target, confirm where it is and what it is. Shouldn't that be evident? What's the point in creating a separate unit responsible for reducing collateral damage? And then naming it 'Civilian Protection Center of Excellence' to boot?
This is just insane. "Recon" - a Company-level asset - is going to confirm the validity of strategic-level targets, and be capable of making decisions on target value versus potential drawbacks (legality, political blowback, unit morale, etc.)? Do the lot of you think this is Starcraft, and one general can, with just a scanner sweep, have perfect knowledge of what is in an area, what it's doing, its value to the enemy, and what, if any, issues may be caused by its destruction.
Targets is present in every 2 at the Division level and up, and they are the ones briefing decision-makers on potential targets, which includes not only verifying the validity of a given target, but also its value, what it might take to eliminate it, and what, if any, potential consequences might arise. They are not axiomatically the wokest part of the military, or even woke at all. Whether or not the particular unit Hegseth ostensibly "gutted" is bad or not, I cannot speak to, but the level of profound ignorance of military operations in this thread is truly something to behold.
I’m just a layman regarding these matters. I’m assuming that military command gets recon carried out of targets it is to target with missiles. Satellite photos, maybe aerial recon, SIGINT and so on. I guess that’s supposed to be evident to a layman like me? So if there’s an enemy military base which had its perimeter changed years before, and as a result there is a building that used to be barracks but is now a school, recon should confirm that in time. There’s no need for a separate unit to be set up under a fancy name with the specific task of preventing collateral damage.
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The rot starts from the head. The more orwelian a govt program or sub-unit is named the more I'm inclined to axe it whole. Same reason why the dept of defense should be officially renamed back to the dept of war.
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Easy to understand - the current world historical habbenings are not only hopelessly grim but also hopelessly stupid.
Overall, too much downer for debate. Even most rational (and rational adjacent) folks do not like being reminded that their fate ultimately hangs on fat orange finger messing with buttons.
This culture was always there, now it is fully in the open.
Remember GWOT, remember the sudden jump of official line from "We do not torture, we are good guys" to "Yes we torture, and we are rather good at it. America number one! YEE-HAW!"
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Ideally, this is the sort of mistake someone gargles their SIG over, but the combination of diffusion of responsibility, fog of war, and the possibility of genuinely insurmountable mistake means it's probably going to just end up rhyming with other past errors.
I'm in the pinch point of several business decisions and the FIRST FRC comp season, so for now even my normal targets-of-discussion (subscribestar TOS clench, federal courts behaving badly, gun law) just go into the bullet point file to be filled out later, and I'll admit that foreign policy has long been one of my weak spots. But there's also a lot of FUD going around, here, and while there's some cowardice in not committing too heavily to positions that could be proven wrong, there's something to be said for people not making vastly confident positions first and then just ignoring their mistakes after.
It's... uh, not a position that has had a long and unbroken history of Absolute Winners. The 2021-2024 option might have sounded more professional, at least when he showed up to work, but he didn't exactly cover himself with honor when it comes to not killing civilians and children with misaimed drone strikes. I guess he didn't get a high score?
Well yeah, this is about culture. I am not appalled by the civilian death toll, 170 is rather low for a major operation as far as these things go. Pete offends me aesthetically.
The perfect two-line summary of the entirety of pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump discourse, isn't it?
Hang it in the Louve next to the "pretending not to understand things" tweet.
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Sure. But if he offends you aesthetically and not on the merits, then don't start in on a death toll.
I understand that there was demand for someone to put on a crisp suit and portray an image of careful and meticulous balance. My take that is that aesthetic gloss is, at best, neutral to the actual thing.
It is the merits, or rather the lack thereof. He is much more concerned with aesthetics than me, only his aesthetics is that of a manchild, an inept, swaggering butcher given big toys that go kaboom, who can't think through such contingencies because his balls are too big for sissy things like minimizing civilian deaths. He can't even react to the news adequately.
My issue is not the death toll but the low-IQ fetishization of lethality as such. The purpose of a military force is to achieve the strategic objectives, not kill more people (not even kill more hostiles). Carelessly killing civilian children is not advancing the primary objectives (to the extent that Trump's USA even has coherent objectives in this Special Military Operation after the Plan A failed); it hardens and legitimizes the regime. Sure, you can kill more and more, you've got bombs and air supremacy and shit, and perhaps in some very Israeli mindset this even makes sense because their fanatical resistance gives you an excuse to whittle down Iran's long-term demographic and economic perspectives rather than get their capitulation and maybe deal with revanchism some other way later. But in a normal human war it does not make sense; it's a straightforward, avoidable negative EV event which he made drastically more likely by gutting the relevant department, for AESTHETICS of LETHALITY and being BASED. I don't know how to make this more obvious. Hegseth is low human capital and so is much of the rest of Trump's cabinet.
And if a war with an actual power comes, he'll slaughter you just the same, with the same swagger. Russians have had these psycho tough boy commanders for centuries. It didn't make us better at war, it's third world shithole default. You've had some too, but almost all of your great generals and commanders were nothing like this.
You just said your primary objection to him was aesthetics. Which is it?
Low human capital is unaesthetic. Ethics has an aesthetic dimension as well. What is the point of your tedious nitpicking? Are you too goybrained at this point to get what I call aesthetics here?
Okay, that’s enough name-calling for one day.
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I think you're just completely misreading what's happening. The US touch overseas is lightening, not tightening. Kidnapping heads of state is orders of magnitude more complex, difficult and lower casualty than a bombing campaign. The previous Iran bombing campaign, very targeted, very precise, little in the way of collateral. The current run is certainly higher volume and less precise, as any escalation must necessarily be. But that isn't the tale of a US government obsessed with "lethality", much the opposite. You've got one or two out of thousands upon thousands of missions and millions of bits of ordnance to complain about.
I think you're on to something here. Previous administrations either wouldn't execute operations or do them in a big, dumb way. Even the killing of Osama was delayed across multiple heads of state.
Trump and Hesgeth are taking the approach of actually using our more powerful tools instead of holding them in reserve for a peer conflict. It seems like overkill but you can't get too much more surgical than eviscerating individual speedboats full of drugs.
I'm of two minds about it. First, Russia and China probably already know about most of this so security through obscurity doesn't matter.
But it does feel like playing Poker with an open hand, giving the world a greater opportunity to catch up, prepare, and Monday morning quarterback.
The orwellian hypocrisy is tough to swallow too. Narco Terrorists and Special Excursions my ass.
I actually am skeptical this is entirely true. There are wheels within wheels of military operational security, and while the US military likes to test and refine new weapons in combat, there are ways to do that without disclosing all of their capabilities.
For instance, you can confine your theater ballistic missiles to a lower-than-maximum launch range. Or, for another example, tactical aircraft radars have a "war reserve mode." It's quite plausible to me that, given the low air threat that Iran poses, that all of our latest and greatest aircraft are buzzing around using the exact same radar modes they do routinely overseas. Stuff like this lets you test tactics and operational planning without telling adversaries what precisely you are capable of.
There are advantages to this but I feel like from a personal perspective, Trump enjoys the feeling of using secretive and powerful toys in the open. There is hopefully a bit of long-termism in the people running the show day to day - he's only thinking about the next 2 years and how flashy his presidency ends up being.
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This information improves my opinion of Hegseth.
It’s bad enough that I have to pay (taxes) for firing tomahawks at Iran; it’s insulting that I simultaneously have to pay for people to sit around and finger-wag that those tomahawks might do collateral damage. So I am very glad that I no longer have to pay for 90% of those people.
Previously, the US had a - not stellar, but decent - claim at being the country (one of very few) that would at least try to do the good thing, even if it sometimes went against their interests. Frankly, I think that's a good reputation to have! Both internationally, but also domestically when it comes to trust. And personally, I quite liked being able to tell some of my extremist leftist friends that they were far too over-critical about the US military. It's becoming much more difficult to say that every year, and I might stop saying it soon.
And beyond that, I don't think the people who go "isn't it good that the military is more responsible than before to who won the election" fully realize the extent that certain kinds of actions by the military, even if facially democratic, undermine the very real, quite impressive, and somewhat delicate set of agreements that undermine the uniquely stable US civil-military relationship. See here for the best treatment of this idea I've seen.
We also had a reputation of being a military that couldn’t in the end accomplish the mission.
The two may not be related but they very well may.
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To be fair, a Tomahawk that is mistargeted is a few million we could have spent actually hitting the right target.
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Have Americans lost the ability to envision a positive future for their own country? You lead the most powerful and one of the greatest nations ever to exist on this planet. You proudly proclaim your democratic traditions and the spirit of freedom - yet this? Reflexively choosing between the lesser of two evils, unable to craft a positive vision or imagine a way forward, opting to be maximally cynical and completely unconstructive. What the hell is wrong? Seriously what is wrong?
Is there any "Western" country, other than maybe Denmark, that can envision a positive future for their own country?
The Mayans were right and the world ended in 2012, we're just playing out the consequences. And Fukuyama, and Toynbee, and Nietzsche...
Slightly more seriously, unconstructive cynicism is easy and not too painful. To envision a positive future without an ability to influence it is painful.
It ended in 2016 when Bowie and Lemmy died. Somehow, they were holding reality together.
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I'm American and I thought -- at least in the general directional sense -- we were headed down a fairly good path. At least somewhat better than the one we just got off of. Woke in retreat, plan to reign in immigration, no new wars. These changes were huge. There are other problems that were not going to be addressed. I'd like to see Amazon, as a prime example (no pun), pay more than $0 in taxes per year. But crawl before we walk. Now it doesn't really seem like we were ever really on that path. But because I think most Americans want some or all of the same things I want for the country, I'm still hopeful that positive change can come in time.
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This is the consequence of the Great Awokening. Welcome to the current year.
Hmm. I think it started long before that. Bush winning instead of Gore, 9/11 and the overreaction to it, mass surveillance, Iraq, GFC and not punishing the banksters, then the awokening to keep the plebs divided.
Al "The Day After Tommorrow" Gore had a more positive view of the nation's future than Bush? I.... don't think so.
You think ignoring bad shit is positive?
I'm saying doom isn't a positive vision, and I'm a goddamned expert on visions of doom.
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Was this meant to be in reply to something else? I can't quite see how this fits the above post.
Not seeing the utility in having just enough bureaucratic red tape to ensure swift and lethal force delivery while actually saving a few lives (Iranian lives, a people with an actual civilization, which should have some extra utility), and then lowkey saying “I voted for this” when tragedy strikes. That in my book is being unable to have a positive vision.
You're assuming the red tape was actually both effective and reasonably targeted, which may be true, but you can't just assume that the department of sunshine and rainbows actually produces sunshine and rainbows free of any adverse consequences. Generally speaking, removing bureaucratic red tape makes the government smaller and the people more free, which is practically the most positive of positive visions I can imagine.
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I am not sure how you got from “I am glad that bureaucratic bloat has been reduced” to “Americans cannot envisage a positive future”.
"I voted for this" in response to what just a moment ago would have been almost universally agreed upon as barbaric (state agents killing unarmed Americans in the street regardless of reason, et al), broadly gestures towards a rising nihilism, doesn't it?
"I voted for this" refers to the bureaucratic cuts, not the school bombing itself. Callous? Yes. Nihilistic? No.
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You’re still paying for them, they’re just doing other, presumably even dumber, things.
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I don't like it. People like Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump seem vile to me. And Trump never seemed vile to me until his second term, in fact I was one of those people who quite enjoyed how much he pissed off "the libs". And I'm still glad that the Trump movement stopped woke overreach. But I think that at this point the time has come to stop the Trump movement. It really seems to me to be a very seedy sort of movement full of twisted weirdoes, sadists, sociopaths, and almost comically corrupt people. And when I say this, I should probably mention that yes, I think the libs are corrupt too. But these Trump people are something else.
It's one thing to believe that Iran should be contained using violence or to want stronger border control. It's another to unabashedly revel in causing pain and to constantly indulge in vice signalling, as these people do.. They seem to be profoundly psychologically disturbed wannabe authoritarians. The "libs" are wrong about so many things, but they are right about these people's character. Unfortunately, as the libs tend to do, they cried wolf about so many things ("Putin has tapes of Trump getting peed on by a hooker!", blah blah blah...) that they fucked up their ability to message the things they actually were right about.
Anyway, after a lifetime of having never voted for either a Democrat or a Republican in a national election, I am seriously considering voting for the Democrats later this year and in 2028.
As for the war, it's kind of looking right now like it won't even liberate the anti-government Iranians. Every day that passes gives the Iranian government more time to track down and kill anyone whom they suspect of even having ever looked at a policeman funny. So what's the point? Nothing that I care about as a positive. Basically the result so far is to just, potentially, give the America-Israel partnership more breathing room to do whatever they want in the Middle East without pushback.
It's all performative though. Hating them is like hating a piñata. Much the same as cheering for them is. Their personas don't represent anything real.
For instance, Stephen Miller has been doing his aggressive anti-immigration schtick for over a decade. Through 2 administrations. Where is immigration in the US today? The same place it has been for the last decade.
Hegseth has been representing the tough guy nothing but business soldier in charge. Yet the US starts a war in the middle east at the behest of Israel that is of no discernable benefit to the US.
Trump, the guy who promised to cut down on immigration and not do any wars in the middle east has resided over all of this. And people still boo or cheer this on as if it where a WWE wrestling match.
It's just so overbearing. As if Trump bending the knee to the Heritage Foundation in his first term wasn't enough, he's been talking about how illegals can stay if they are working. ILLEGALS. Has this rhetoric changed the tune of the left at all regarding orange hitler? Not one bit.
And on the flipside, Obama killed plenty of innocent families. I don't think a department of million men could get anyone to care about dead middle easterners past a single news cycle regardless of who the president is. America really does not care.
What is anyone even cheering for or against? On the ground numbers show no relevant change in any relevant aspect. The American machine is chugging along as usual on its slow downward spiral. And getting anyone to care about that reality is like pulling teeth out of a donkey.
Yes, this is it IMO. Very perceptive analysis.
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Literally my 3 favorite people. The guy who gets stuff down at deporting third world immigrants, the dude who suddenly got our military to win again, and the boss of it all.
I could not be happier with what those three are doing for my country.
What do you mean got our military to win again? We always had the power to do this. See Obama and Libya.
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Miller is barely beating Obama's run rate at deporting immigrants. 500K a year instead of Obama's 400K. At this rate he'll be done in (checks notes) 20 years.
Whether it's his fault or he's just outmatched by the liberal barbed wire, he's certainly not "getting things done".
Saying no at the border doesn’t really count as deportation.
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This has long been debunked. It counts turnaways at the border. Trump is deporting people who have been inside the country from the last administration. People don’t even show up to the border now
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From what I heard, the school had previously been part of the military base until it was repurposed, and an AI apparently mistook the old target list for an up-to-date one.
If true, this certainly makes Anthropic seem a lot more justified in their unwillingness to extend carte blanche to the Pentagon....
I don't take the "AI mistook" argument very seriously (although given that they reportedly switched from Claude 4.5/4.6 to GPT 4.1… oh God). The DOW claims they scrutinize targets, there's human in the loop.
The major reason for my suspicion of intentionality was the clause «and the US has demonstrated immense competence in target selection». I actually think highly of the American military, always thought highly of them on priors, and they've been absolutely showboating all over Iranians these last 10 (11?) days. But now that I know Hegseth had gutted the office that's entrusted with avoiding such accidents, it doesn't matter if it originally was AI or human error. There's just not been enough attention to prevent this.
This special office was a vanity one though. There's no incentive to bomb schools. Technology plays a part because pre-set target banks are bigger than ever beforeand thus more difficult to refresh fully. An AI engine may have suggested the target, but humans review them beforehand.
I wish they'd just come out immediately and said "we had bad [old] intel". They, and we, would look so much better if they had. You go to war with the army (and intel) you have, not the one you wish you had. It's an understandable and forgivable error.
Agreed. Trump trying to pin it on Iran first was classic him and also foolish.
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I think it's because there is so much uncertainty and fog of war, none of us want to go full Panican- "US hegemony over, global economic collapse imminent, US military humiliation" and then some ceasefire happens and be told "see it wasn't as bad as you thought." Or the inverse, people don't want to downplay it, say it's imminently over, but then it has a really bad fallout.
Like I alluded to in my previous response, there is essentially no reaction from the ground. Not from MAGA rank-and-file in day-to-day casual talk, and there is even some sympathy from diehard anti-Trump Democrats I know. Literally today I heard an extreme Trump-hater say something along the lines of "well Iran wants to destroy Israel for some reason, so they obviously can't have a nuke so I understand what Trump is doing to an extent."
The issue seems to have remarkably low cultural salience at the moment outside of X, but of course I think there's a reason for that. I remember Operation Iraqi Freedom, the feeling and interest among public in the opening weeks of the war was nothing like that at all in either direction today. There are Panicans on X and some informed anti-Panicans, but the average voter just doesn't seem to care very much at this point. With that said, what's your prediction? Does this blow over without the average voter taking much notice?
The average voter will care if gas prices are a dollar higher for longer than a couple weeks. Evangelicals are happy and river-to-the-sea lefties are sad, but Americans really don't care about foreign policy that much.
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TPTB found out that propagandizing ordinary plebes is unnecessary distraction, that the war machine can work regardless of plebe "support" or "approval".
We will see if they are right.
Unless the situation directly touches average voter's wallet. Then all bets are off.
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Speaking of the school strike, I'll take this opportunity to post a contender for the Hall of Fame of cope tweets.
This guy thinks that a KH-55 (air-launched) cruise missile was fired by Iran, and then got jammed by the US in a way which just so happened to cause it to nosedive straight down into a school that was 100 feet away from an IRGC facility which completely unrelatedly was targeted by real US-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. His evidence? AI analysis of the grainy video of a high-subsonic missile puts the wing fins at 40-45% of the way down the fuselage, whereas a Tomahawk has wing fins 50% of the way down the fuselage.
7.4 million views and 34k likes by the way.
There is a paradoxical sentiment amongst a certain segment of Americans* which simultaneously holds that the US military is a force of warrior-saints who would never commit target civilians (whether by accident or deliberately), but also that a we're too worried about moral and legal niceties.
I supposed the charitable resolution of the paradox is that if the military is staffed by paragons then there's no need for oversight, but this is both observably ridiculous (we have a number of well-documented instances of US military covering up or soft-balling war crimes, as well as many instances of target selection that was either reckless or callous) and belied by the overt appetite for brutality.
*tbf this is not unique to Americans, but given that the US gets stuck in a lot more, it's more salient
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In a somewhat pitiful way, that makes me think better of Americans. They really really don't want to be the kind of people who murder children, and cling to any flimsy "proof" to the contrary.
Russians had similar denialism around Buk vs Boeing, around Bucha, and later in the war when we've destroyed a bunch of grotesquely innocent civilian facilities in Ukraine. Now there's more indifference.
The best moment in this cope story, imo:
Diasporoids are funny, man.
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