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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.
It is a quintessentially tasteless tweet
Posting a message about your enemy living in hell on Easter, the joyful day celebrating Christ rescuing sinners living in hell
Posting it on TruthSocial, which I imagine is only populated by evangelicals who care a lot about the holiday
Threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure, which again, is on Easter morning, and presenting it in the language of an easter basket
Concluding with Praise be to Allah (???????)
Posting no other Easter message the rest of the day
Coming off as desperate, not at all in control
My running hypothesis is that the rescue operation went poorly and handicapped his judgment.
Isn’t the rescue operation being claimed as a victory? What's your theory?
It seems more parsimonious to assume the negotiations are going poorly. That also strikes me as more in-character for Trump (seems himself as a big negotiator, probably doesn't really care about the lost C-130s.)
But we did get a couple of birds stuck over there and had to blow them up, which I imagine being frustrated by in theory (particularly for the people who were really hoping we could avoid anything that remotely resembled Eagle Claw this time lol).
Worth noting that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw wasn't the lost equipment (losing the helicopters was already priced in), but the failure to rescue the hostages.
Here it appears at least possible that they contemplated the possibility that they'd have to ditch the planes.
Yeah I think this is a total, complete W for the US of A and probably demoralizing for the IRGC.
But I do find it kinda funny that we still had a C-130 snafu due to Iranian dirt.
The funnier part is the cope, either by the regime claiming they totally shot down those planes, no for reals, or by the shills claiming that this means that it was at best a pyhrric victory for the US, and wow look at all the equipment they lost what a bunch of losers losing two planes and a bunch of helicopters for one guy!
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