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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
I kind of have the sense that Trump is actually going insane, or at least his emotional control over himself is slipping. It's not that he is bombing Iran - that isn't very different from normal US foreign policy. And it's not that he is being bombastic - he has always been bombastic. But his pronouncements lately have had a very deranged and openly sadistic frothing-at-the-mouth quality that is noticeably different from his usual previous posting style.
I don't think that he is just talking like this for strategic purposes. His base likes the bombast but would probably prefer a kind of bombast that seemed more composed and less emotional. They like the idea of "Trump the strong man", not "Trump the ranting lunatic". As for Iran, after having experienced assassinations and bombings for weeks, there is no reason why they would not believe a threat that was worded more calmly. If anything, I think a calm-worded threat would probably seem more plausible to them. I can't think of any way in which frothing at the mouth would help manipulate the stock market any more than a calmer tone would, either.
When I read comments like this, I feel like I'm going insane. Trump has been openly bonkers for at least ten years, and the real TDS has always been people insisting that he's not. He has always been emotionally incontinent and narcissistic. He's always been a blustering bully with cruel instincts. He re-entered the political arena as the champion of the most laughable conspiracy theory in history. Hell, 75% of his appeal is that he's an uninhibited, incurious asshole. "He says it like it is" which is, as always, code for "repeats my bigotries aloud." (It's certainly not a statement on his commitment to epistemic courage).
Insofar as there has been downward spiral from his first administration, it is down to his advisors going from relatively normal Republicans who sought to moderate his impulses to weird, evil sycophants who seek to amplify and exploit them. Compare Hegseth to Mattis or even Esper. Esper wasn't much of anything, but he at least wasn't a gleeful psychopath like Hegseth.
To me Trump definitely seems more unhinged and less grounded now than he did during his first term or even the start of this term, and I've never particularly been a fan of him.
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A lot of his base has always said that they don't like his more extreme rhetoric. 'I like what he does but why does he have to talk that way?'. They're kidding themselves of course. They enjoy having a dog that they've let off the leash, and they enjoy pitting his aggression against people who've committed themselves to some level of public decorum.
I don't know if the escalation in frothiness is just insanity, or more of Trump's gut instinct and bone-deep understanding of madman theory. I don't think he's necessarily wrong in his approach, given he is now in this mess. By doubling down on incoherence and anger, he makes himself somewhat invulnerable to critique for e.g. not actually following through on his deadlines and ultimatums. If the guy is a divinely appointed gut, he can do exactly as his gut chooses at any given moment, making Trump(now) much freer to ignore things that Trump(then) said. If he went about his threats in a calm way, his failure to follow through on a given occasion would be informational for his enemies. As it stands it is easy enough to believe he really meant each and every ultimatum in the moment he said it, whether or not he did.
Nonetheless a certain amount of rhetorical escalation is necessary to maintain this effect, hence his decision to use the f word.
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"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man." -- Patrick Rothfuss
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I think this communication strategy makes sense in the context of the Middle East and Iran in particular. The region is pretty well known for its bombast. The videos of political rhetoric I’ve seen from that region sound pretty bombastic as they chant for the deaths of their enemies. There are videos of toddlers chanting for the death of Assad, feel good news stories about a kid healing from the death of his father by playing video games (in which he pretends the enemies he’s killing are Jews). You can’t convince those people you’re serious if you’re not over the top bombastic and ready to kill them and destroy their country. This isn’t Sweden, and you can’t talk to an Iranian Shia Muslim like he’s a Swedish Lutheran.
Depends what you watch. It'd be easy for visiting aliens to see the Iranians as the more composed and understated party in this war. Their latest statement was to call for a ceasefire, arguing that it would "give the US and Israel a short pause to regroup and commit new crimes", which is straight up funny vs Trump's unhinged anger.
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Personally, this image of "Iranian Shia Muslims" being insane brown terrorists has been one of the casualties of the war for me. Was it always just Israeli-American propaganda, MemriTV cherry-picking, or merely a product of general American ignorance about the broader world, "everyone in the ME is Arab, except Jews who are white"? They don't really look the part. They don't do suicide bombings like Sunnis, they don't deal in over-the-top theatrics, they state conditions and try to execute on those. Throughout the war, Iranians have communicated much more similarly to how I'd expect a European nation – say, Sweden, or Denmark (we've just had a dry run with Denmark, come to think of it) – under attack to communicate, compared to the coalition of Moral Clarity. "This is the Middle East" is a bad excuse for the American side, so bad in fact that it vindicates their desire to have nuclear deterrent. Same logic as Israel uses. You can't expect to be left alone by such people without WMDs on the table.
They don't seem as religiously unhinged, too. Very little talk of Apocalypse.
No, they get others (including Hezbollah) to do them for them.
Like Death to America Day
I presume you mean Beirut in the 1980s. Wow, you sure have been around for a long time.
That one was the first, but it's not the only suicide bombing by Iranian proxies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Buenos_Aires_Israeli_embassy_bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing
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Not to mention their Israel Doomsday Clock.
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I can't disagree more. The Iranian leaders have all got philosophy degrees, study Kant, etc - and their messages are substantially more cultured than the hot air coming out of Trump and Hegseth. I can understand a lot of the chants for the death of their enemies, too - if America blew up a primary school in my country I'd start chanting Death to the Great Satan as well.
My ex-girlfriend who was a convert to Islam years ago, used to take me to a local mosque in the area that was a well known Shia mosque. I used to have dialogues and debate with the Imam who would lead these massive groups in prayer and they knew I was a Catholic, but were very welcoming and always looking to talk to me when I went, but I was a very irregular attendee. They gave me English-Arabic supplication and prayer books and all kinds of other stuff. Was very interesting to read. He was from Iran and at least some of the regulars of the mosque had family back in the Middle East.
On the other hand, I've had lifelong friends who are more or less secular but culturally Muslim/Assyrian, and would go back and visit their families in Amman Jordan and elsewhere. They'd always tell me, "... you ain't shit in the Muslim world until you've threatened death to Israel and had at least half a dozen of your cousins killed..." One of them in particular who is half Arab half Italian and was from al-Sajariyah in Anbar Province in Iraq originally, has relatives who were active ISIS fighters who fought in the siege of Deir ez-Zor and battle of Kobane. Some of them were killed in American airstrikes. You never bring up the American military in conversation with them here when talking to them; it’s a very sore thumb that raises the anger levels.
For what it's worth, "death to Israel" is about as uncontroversial a sentiment in the Arab world as "chocolate is nice" is in the Western world. There is room for discussion about how literally it should be taken, because most of the time what "death to Israel" means is "Israel is bad" without any specific policy action attached to it, but it is completely universal that Israel is a bad thing that we hate. Even when Arab countries try to normalise relations with Israel, that usually provokes significant popular outcry.
So I wouldn't read that much into any specific person saying that. If you're with a group of Arab Muslims and people say "death to Israel" and you disagree, you are the one being anti-social. It's the equivalent of, say, being a Westerner who is vocally pro-North-Korea. If I were having a conversation with a bunch of Westerners, someone casually said that such-and-such is a horror show like North Korea, and I interrupted to say that actually North Korea is a victim of Western propaganda and it's actually a workers' paradise, everyone would stare at me like I'm a crazy person. That is what would happen if you were hanging out with a bunch of Arab Muslims, they said death to Israel, and you interrupted to disagree.
Anecdotally, all my experiences with Muslims in the West have been positive - Egyptian, Afghan, Syrian, Indonesian, Turkish, they've all been lovely. They have in my experience been patient, polite, and happy to respectfully talk about the differences and the common ground between our traditions. I just carefully steer away from anything involving Israel or Palestine. The ones living in Western countries do not say "death to Israel", but they are all passionately pro-Palestinian. Compare how pretty much all my experiences with religious Jews in the West have been positive, and they also have been lovely, polite, generous, and willing to have wonderful conversations; but they are all passionately pro-Israel (even the super-liberal ones), and it is not worth trying to engage on that. At this point my position is just that I like the Muslims, I like the Jews, and I never talk about Israel/Palestine with them because that makes brains switch off and people get angry.
The same approach works with pro-Israel American normies and pro-Palestine British lefties.
If there was a law against talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict unless you had lived in Israel or Palestine for at least ten years, the world would be a better place.
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Timeline is kind of backwards there, no? Unless you're talking about America blowing up a school several decades ago...
I'm referring to how the American strikes on that primary school for girls shored up support for the regime and helped destroy the enthusiasm that the earlier efforts to spur an uprising created. That said, those death to America chants started happening for a reason back then too.
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They've been chanting that particular line for decades now though
I'm sure that Primary School missile struck got a bunch of new ones to start chanting it - after all, the Official Story was that the Iranians hate their government and were just waiting to rise up against it, which very much has not happened. But even beyond that, do you think that they just started chanting Death to America for no reason, completely unprovoked? There's a long history of nasty US behavior in the region that does stretch back decades.
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But the hit of the primary school retroactively justifies and explains all the bad things the Iranian regime has ever said or done to the US.
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Honestly, the 4d chess argument I can come up with for this is that Trump is actively trying to make sure the war does not come to a diplomatic conclusion, and as such is utilizing a mix of insults and obvious bluffs to convince the Iranians to stay in it.
Related to my conspiracy theory that this entire adventure is designed to let some air out of the stock market bubble, on the theory that the AI investment process needs to continue in order to achieve AGI, but that a catastrophic sudden bubble pop would torpedo the whole industry, so they needed to do something to bring down the stock market slightly prior to the bubble.
Agreed, but I don't think it's really 4d chess; it's not a really sophisticated strategy. He doesn't want them to make an offer that sounds reasonable.
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