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A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.
The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.
But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.
The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.
Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.
Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?
One benefit of an anonymous ballot is that the gang can never be sure that the voters are holding up their end of the bargain.
Admittedly, mail-in ballots do complicate this; perhaps it would be wise to consider alternate methods of accommodation for those citizens unable to attend polling places in their area of residence.
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Sounds like there's plenty of election fraud to go around, the fact that both parties have not colluded yet to make ID mandatory for voting and outlawed mail-in-ballots tells you everything you need to know.
Also there exist unfalsifiable yet anonymous algorithms for digital vote counting where you could be sure your vote was part of the count via a hash, but your own vote preference can't be revealed. The fact these "democratic" systems are still relying on pen and paper and corruptible people counting ballots by hand tells you everything you need to know about "democracy", it's a scam.
I don't think any of these systems have solved the last-mile "assigning digital IDs to people" in a practical way. We've had enough trouble getting RealID drivers licenses for things like flying that I doubt we could enforce smart cards for voting any time soon, and I bet both sides would oppose it today for different reasons.
ETA: and that's all before you get the fun chance to explain the cryptography to the median voter.
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Unfalsifiable in theory, but with the tech illiterate masses, incompetent state officials, and messy reality, my understanding is that in-person voting, paper ballots, and manual counting with lots of redundancy is still the most reliable method. Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.
If mail-in ballots are outlawed, there should be an alternative for sick citizens, and citizens abroad like soldiers.
I see no issues with free and easy-to-get mandatory ID. I believe it's common in Europe and almost nobody complains.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be able to use the mathematics to make it easily verifiable without a computer somehow. Even if it takes you a day of filling up some puzzle paperwork.
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I will note that although the parties nationally can't get their shit together well enough to pass voter ID laws, states with strict voter ID and no mail in ballots are all red.
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What’s the case here? I don’t see any source in the entire article. And “massive”? I’m seeing 5k prison votes total which apparently the margin was 30k votes?
The drugs are probably just an easier case.
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Trump honestly believing in clean elections and that he won in 2020, and being willing to enforce it even against his own party also fits your facts. I don't think Puerto Rico is a central example of "MAGA", and if it is, that's a whole separate interesting thing.
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My cynical take on this is (1) in agreement that I don't believe anything in the popular press until solid facts are produced (2) but I was assured, firmly and frequently assured, that voter fraud never happened in any election ever and that it was depriving felons of their natural human rights to strip them of the right to vote while incarcerated!
If there is any truth in this story, it's probably somewhere between (a) yeah, drugs get smuggled into prison, this is a problem everywhere (except maybe Singapore, I couldn't tell you about that) (b) gosh, gangs on the outside have contact with their members inside? you startle me gravely with this information! (c) corruption in Puerto Rican politics? again, I don't know anything so I can't comment there.
It will be funny to watch all the "no corruption nowhere, safest ever elections" set scrambling to prove that this is indeed a case of electoral fraud and the "stolen elections" set claiming it's a nothingburger.
This isn't really the principal argument why felons should have the vote. It's a pragmatic one about perverse incentive. If the government can deprive people of the vote by convicting them of a particular crime, oopsie, you've created an incentive for the government to drum up those exact kinds of charges against political opponents.
I think if we're getting into taking out political opponents, drumming up charges is already well established. Think of all the TRUMP IS A FELON! 39 FELONIES! stuff and tell me at least some of those weren't politically motivated? And I'm sure there are cases for Democrats getting stalked as well.
Gosh, we're going to let the prisoners vote, we're sure a bunch of druggies, thieves, and gangsters will respect the electoral process and nobody will be motivated to intervene, bribe, buy or sell votes, etc. Yeah, unless you let them all out of jail for the day to visit the polling booths, I don't see how you can guarantee the integrity of the voting process. And letting a bunch of convicts out on day release to vote is likely to end up with "scarpered" rather than "placed my ballot in the box".
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Sure but there is also the pragmatic argument of “criminals have proven themselves to be asocial and thus shouldn’t vote.”
We have very little evidence the government is trying to put people in jail for your concern. We have a lot of evidence the vast majority of criminals are in fact asocial scum. So this is a slope I’m not particularly worried about being slippery.
Yeah, I almost added a parenthetical about how it obviously wasn't a live concern in today's America, particularly. But I think it's one of those things where the government ought to avoid the appearance of a perverse incentive, as one of the many nested redundancies keeping us from a slide into tyranny. Caesar's wife must be above approach, etc. etc. (Indeed, this is especially persuasive to me on this issue because convicted felons represent a largely symbolic percentage of the vote in any case, so it can't do much harm to go the extra mile to prove the government's commitment to democracy.)
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I think the far more important part of imprisoning political opponents would be removing them from the political battlefield rather than get rid of their 1 vote among millions. In order to get an appreciable effect on the vote counts, you'd have to imprison so many opposition members there's no one left to vote for anyway.
As I said in another prong of this thread, I do agree that this is mostly symbolic in either direction - but I care about the government going the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety w. regards to the franchise. In any case I didn't necessarily mean to die on the hill of this particular argument, merely to point out that in my experience that is the principal argument in favor of letting felons have the vote, as opposed to concern about their inalienable human rights yada yada.
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That's a pretty bold claim. The evidence is common enough that it has its own Wikipedia page, organized by decade.
Ok fair, bad phrasing. I meant it that little has shown up for his specific claims about 2020 and 2024.
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Puerto Rico is corrupt, news at 11. That's why nobody cares about this story. Not because of the partisan valences, because 'Bribes paid in Puerto Rico' is a page five story, and this one didn't even manage to actually swing the election.
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ProPublica has zero credibility, and I will bang this drum every time someone cites them favorably. They damaged my faith in journalism more than anything else has or will. Also a perfect example of what we discussed last week: They are members in good standing of the Journalism Club, which tells me what their standards are and how they deal with deceptive and manipulative content. It's even "notable reporting".
1, 2, 3 are my posts I could find easily, but there are more out there.
With that out of the way, let's look at the article.
Alright, cool.
"Just days after Trump won the election" is well before any real actions were taken to transition power from the Biden administration to Trump. Why did W. Stephen Muldrow (appointed under Trump I, dropped and immediately reappointed under Biden, and maintained in Trump II) do that? It's possible that Biden appointed someone disloyal, but it's also possible that it's completely mundane.
That's it?? I know that the election fraud offenders don't have to be a subset of the drug offenders, but it certainly suggests that it's a smalltime operation.
"Involving" and "Of" are two different words.
Wow. Such news.
Raquel Rutledge (the author) has not been charged in the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan. This is 100% factual and you can check the public records if you doubt me.
How is that even tangentially connected to this scheme? All a voting machine can do is properly and accurately (or improperly and inaccurately) record what is entered into it. The machines don't have mind-reading equipment that can distinguish a coerced vote from a free one.
I couldn't find any evidence that Los Tiburones "evolved", as it appears to have always been a criminal group. The Netas started as a legit advocacy group, and still use it as propaganda.
No evidence of what the within-party split was in the primary: Extrapolating to 6000 prisoners total, 5000 support the Progressives, and of those 5000 an unknown number supported Colon with the remainder supporting her opponent(s) within the party primary.
(Fake edit: Later in the article has "...being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi.". Why wasn't that in the Primary section of the article? Oh wait, they moved from "Colon is benefiting" to "Prisoners are compelled" and expected that you couldn't cast this point back in time to where it would undermine their argument.)
...of something else, not what was mentioned in the previous paragraph. They're just "deep into investigating a potential..." for that part of it.
God fucking damn it. There's a second breach of election security happening? Fix that, and vote buying becomes a pure game of trust. Given how trustworthy I find the prison population, I'd guess it would immediately kneecap any election influence operation.
Or both admins just appointed a careerist, like most US lawyers tend to be. Finding people who are competent and willing to give their careers so they can rock the boat is really hard. It got dropped because the careerist lawyers (rightfully!) predicted that the Trump admin upon assuming power would have no interest in further investigation here, and they being careerists don't want to bite the hands that feed them.
They aren't about loyalty either way. We know that, because the admin can't get the US attorneys to sign onto most of their blatant political prosecutions either.
Correct but also wrong! Relatively it's huge, electoral fraud schemes are incredibly rare and way smaller than this. Election fraud of course is just so much not an issue that even the big cases look smalltime.
Well yes, you don't typically charge people who haven't done anything. It seems to have been done in favor of the governor by gang leaders with connections to her, but it doesn't seem to have been orchestrated by her. Presumably the gang leaders just wanted her to win for their own personal gain.
If you're finding foul play, it is reasonable to suspect other forms might be taking place too and you would double check everything.
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Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.
It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.
Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.
Conservatives and conservative aligned people control the biggest media in the country! If there's a major story of Dem favored election fraud, even if the left wanted to cover it up it'd be on Fox News and CBS, very mainstream outlets. It wouldn't be censored on X.
If you have the largest and most viewed messaging apparatus and you can't get them to communicate a story then either you're idiots who fail at using the tools provided or it's so false that even your own partisans won't put their name to it.
The point is just to tip the scales in their favor. The gang leaders have connections to the governor and stood to benefit from her winning, thus they used the power they had to tilt things more in her favor.
Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters. He is a more principled conservative with strong Christian values, instead of appealing to populist victimhood fantasies.
Clearly and visibly not true, given that the GOP can not get the congressional votes to make it happen. If they had the mandate they would have done it. They don't have the votes.
And given how the midterms are looking, doesn't seem like "popular" applies as well anymore. Maybe if the Trump admin bothered to appeal to what the American people wanted instead of starting a war, driving up prices, harassing legal immigrant workers, and stalling business investment with tariffs, they could have kept the good faith that voters had going into 2025. No, instead they did all that, made independent and swing voters upset to the point some even admit regret and decided it must be because they, the most powerful people in the world, are just poor victims instead.
Maybe when voters say they want a good economy with low prices, you should do that instead of making everything more expensive and scarce. And maybe when they turn on you for it, it's your fault for not listening. That is how we went from the Senate being basically unwinnable for Dems to now being favored towards them.
We are ten years into the Trump era now, which was inaugurated in 2015 with a primary waged on dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. That the base has been dissatisfied with Republican leadership is one of the central facts of American politics. It's why we have Trump. It's why half a dozen Indiana state senators got primaried yesterday after they refused to redistrict. It's why Erick Erickson got pushed out of mainstream Republican politics. It's why the Republican Party was happy to dump Trump throughout the 2020 election crisis. It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it. I don't know what else to add here. I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.
Erick Erickson is an extremely stupid man filling out the D Tier of conservative talking head punditry whose big claim to fame is saying stupid things on the radio while having a funny name. One day he calls Trump a fascist and says he'll never vote for him, the next day he's endorsing him for President, one day he's calling Supreme Court Justices "goat fuckers" and debating whether Michelle will cut off Barack's penis, the next day he's policing Trump's tone. No consistent principles. Erick Erickson is not smarter than the grifters, he is a grifter. Please, please spare me this delusional fat imbecile's self-serving fantasies about his high-minded Christian principles. (It must be nice to be principled when you can make a lot of money advertising how principled you are. I'm pretty sure Jesus says not to do this somewhere. Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time contemplating the Christian principle of fasting and lose some weight?)
I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms. Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished. Seems simple. Republicans nationalize the Puerto Rico model and Democrats can't do anything about it because they don't know how to commit election fraud.
Maybe I'm getting too snarky. But I don't really understand why I'm being treated as the stupid one when your position seems to be that Republicans are too moral for politics.
Perhaps part of it is that married women who changed their name want to vote too.
One of the actual basic facts of American politics is that voters views will change. Trump had a moment of popularity, absolutely. He lost it by destroying everyone's wallets and starting wars. That there is a base who will always suck him off is irrelevant if you can't get the moderates and swing voters to stay on board.
This is the exact same mistake that Biden did. He won 2020 and they took it as a mandate to do everything they wanted, instead of trying to aim for the moderate centrist voters who decide elections.
Win the argument in your mind if you want, you clearly aren't winning the swing voters and moderates right now so you'll need something to claim as victory.
Holy strawman batman. A small time election fraud with inmates (massive relative to the basically nonexistent amounts of election fraud that otherwise occurs) is not something they can widen.
Biden did not do this. His admin was full of radicals who believed in arc of history triumphalist nonsense thought themselves to have a mandate to do whatever current progressive doctrine wanted, sure, but they believed this regardless of election results and also this wasn't sleepy Joe himself, it was staffers.
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As someone whose wife came from a foreign location where women don't tend to change their names, and can thus attest to a significantly higher-than-normal level of grief over the wife changing her name, getting US documentation that would be sufficient for voting is probably the easiest part of a married woman changing her name.
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The company that just produced a 60 Minutes special about how eeeevil white supremacists helped rebuild and brought food and supplies to the area after Hurricane Helene, and that's terrible? That CBS?
I get Bari Weiss is theoretically in charge over there now but evidence is pretty thin on the ground that it has changed their reporting or the insane bias.
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The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.
But that's a pretty limited example.
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MASSIVE. You know what else is massive?
Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.
Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.
Seems worth mentioning that the election being referenced was a primary. She went on to win the general by 130k votes, with a 10% lead in the popular.
And they were being bribed to vote for the same party that always wins the prisoner vote?
Wow, that is a lot of effort to daisy-chain tie this to Trump, in spite of not having any evidence.
Fun fact: the walking stereotype author of this piece was a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating child care scams in Wisconsin, but all of the wiki citations about it go to dead pages.
Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
Careerists not wanting to upset their upcoming boss spike indictments that they worry would upset him. And accordingly they were right, when the Trump admin took place they did exactly that and forced the story down.
The average government worker cares for their job first and foremost obviously. It's the same way that the Trump admin can't get many of the careerist lawyers to sign onto political prosecutions, because they care about their future careers. They're perfectly happy to sit back and do nothing.
Taking a group that votes you and bribing even more people in the group to.vote for you is actually still bad.
Considering the careerist lawyers rightfully predicted the investigation would be stalled and decided to drop the case early to prevent further backlash, it doesn't seem like Trump is excited to latch onto this example of election fraud.
Damn she's got a really experienced career exposing all sorts of corruption and issues! Lead battery factories in Africa, tabocca industry influence in South America, benefit fraud, fuck ups during undercover law stings, a wet wipe company in Wisconsin selling tainted products, tainted alcohol products in Mexico.
Quite an impressive resume.
It’s possible all the “anonymous” sources are being done in good faith……..but it’s also how we spent 10 years in the Iraq War. It was the exact strategy he would do go on the MSM selling the WMD for war. It’s still essentially toilet paper because liers user this tactic too.
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No, that's the story journalists tell about themselves. More commonly, it's the method used to launder libel so as to protect the journalist from lawsuits.
This is pure speculation.
This is the sort of weasel-wording you have to learn to parse when reading the news. Was told by "a supervisor" (Why not name the supervisor?). "To take the case no further". Further than what? The vote fraud stuff had already been dropped. A normal phrasing there would have been to "not go back to the old stuff" or something. And why? There's no discussion of the actual evidence that the vote buying even happened. Choosing to prioritize resources on easily provable drug offenses is very common. That's the case for most people in federal prison for "drug" charges.
Also worth noting, because it's much more pertinent, but this was soon after González-Colón took office, and she has much more direct relevant and influence over an unimportant province like PR. But "territorial governor possibly implicated in vote buying scheme" wouldn't have this article doing rounds like tying it to Trump does.
This is unbearably naive, and just embarrassing to say about PR.
Sure. But right off the bat, it seems more probable that it would have been an inducement to vote in the first place, again, if indeed this even happened.
Again, this is pure speculation. Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump is particularly invested in the local primary politics of a territory? I know the guy gets autistically fixated on random shit, but I can't recall him ever caring much about PR. And while the governor loves him, the article itself mentions it's a very one-sided obsession.
There are much simpler explanations for this, again, assuming it even happened. I suppose we'll see if he says anything about it. I give high odds that if he does, it's something bombastic and vague in support of the governor just because she says nice things about him.
Ok this alone makes me think you're disconnected from the world. The average government worker, like the average worker, doesn't give a shit about "the mission". They want to go in, do their job, get paid, go home. They aren't there for pleasure and passion, they're there to make money. Some people may find joy in their job, but it is a job at the end of the day
Most people will not rock the boat in order to "do what is right".
Trump seems to care a lot about election integrity! He's constantly talking about fraud, and yes while it is Puerto Rico this would be one of the largest cases of election fraud in the US in modern times. This would be a great way for him to push for his SAVE act and try to limit mail in voting.
Well like yeah, let's be honest. Everyone knows, even many of his strongest conservative supporters like EW Erickson, that Trump is just salty over losing. He doesn't care about election fraud, he probably doesn't even truly believe it that much. He would use this case as a tool if it benefited him, but acknowledging that election fraud is being used for Republicans doesn't.
I'd broadly agree, but I would also say it applies to the post-2024 Democrat voters who couldn't believe Harris lost and spun up their own stolen election conspiracy theories, complete with "voting machines hacked" (after years post-2020 declaring the machines were super-secure and couldn't be hacked) and the same general run of complaints Trump had used. So Trump saying 2020 was stolen because (A, B, C) was all lies, but 2024 being stolen because (A, B, C) was the solid truth. These and these aren't even the true nutjobs holding that view.
Everyone is salty about losing. Even the 'official' explanation that Hillary and Kamala lost because Sexism Misogyny Racism White Supremacy Christian Nationalism is being salty that "no, your candidate there wasn't good enough" is the real explanation.
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I think I may have completely misinterpreted you there as "care first and foremost about the ostensible purpose of their jobs". My bad.
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There was that entire arc involving a branded garbage truck, but I'm not sure that is indicative of deep political ties to the local leadership, or just riffing on the news cycle.
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On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
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Granted, it's a Wikipedia article so probably needs a hell of a lot more depth to the bare statement, but the Mexican alcohol one made me laugh. Good God, young adult goes on sun holiday and overdoes it on the boozing and happy fun times, leading to tragic death? I mean, it is sad, but it happens all the time (even without tainted alcohol). We'll be coming up to summer sun foreign holidays time soon over here and in a few more months post-exam time (in Ireland), and I guarantee you there will be stories in the media about 18-20s year olds dying or getting into serious accidents in mass-market holiday resorts abroad, often involving drink (over-consumption of). Sadly, there is little or nothing "mysterious" about that death.
If there is a need to write a story about "clubs trying to entice you in with 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence' promotions can afford this because they sell paint stripper as alcohol" then it's a public service, but it's hardly Watergate-level investigative journalism.
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So this author is an even worse person than I first imagined. Vapes are banned in a lot of places because of a morally panic on popcorn lung. Twitter is telling me they are banned in 60 countries. Let’s just say she contributed a part to causing a ton of lung cancer deaths.
Also a lot of people generally still believe vaping is bad for lung health. It might be worse than no smoker but it’s almost certainly less than 10% as bad as cigarettes.
I would also be curious what gets journalist to write things like these articles. You can read the article and by her own language realize she is writing in a specific style that she knows she doesn’t have the goods. But still rights the article anyway. Is it just needing a paycheck?
I don't accept this reasoning. It implies that every imperfect politician with any authority beyond a city, and certainly every politician with policies you don't like, is the equivalent of a mass murderer.
Normally, doing things which lead to unnecessary loss of life is bad because that's only possible through malice or negligence. If you're dealing with millions of people, though, that's no longer true and everything you do contributes to deaths. Our intuitions don't scale up to situations where ordinary decisions cause loss of life.
She wrote an article that vaping is poison. If she wrote the article with the same journalistic integrity as this article then I believe it’s fair some of the deaths fall on her.
If you shit on the commons then when the commons are bad you have some responsibility for the commons being bad. Her culpability though would depend in my view significantly on her intent. Did she write the article wanting click-baity outrage porn that was poorly sourced or did she write the article believing she was informing the public.
I would put writing an article that has direct correlation to people smoking more cigarettes as a very shitty thing to do if the article on vaping was poorly sourced. It would have a very logical path to people die more of lung cancer.
Writing an anti-vaping article only leads to lots of people dying because the article is seen by lots of people and the small chance of each one dying adds up. Adding this sort of thing up is exactly the problem--it turns a minor issue into a major one simply because it is being done on a large scale. And if we allow that into our morals, it becomes impossible for any human to do things on a large scale because everything has a tiny chance of death that can add up.
(Also, I am skeptical that she's causing many deaths anyway. People would decide to stop vaping not by reading one article, but by a cumulative set of experiences of which the article is a tiny part, and her contribution to those deaths has to be divided by the total number of anti-vaping things the person saw, weighted by their influence.)
In this case Vaping is illegal in a lot of places. Chicago they are fairly hard to buy and when I’ve bought one I believe it was illegally.
I have no problem with people doing things in good faith but being wrong. That will happen. Judging by the article shared today I do not believe she is a good faith writer.
Small things definitely need to count for morality. The commons depend on a lot of people doing small things morally. Like not littering. Not stealing $5 items at Whole Foods. Small theft adds up to a percentage of shrinkage which then makes everyone else pay more.
The issue is small things that have huge effects because a lot of people are involved. A $5 theft is small. A $1000 theft is a lot bigger. A "$1000 theft" which causes 100000 people to lose 1 cent worth of their time each should not be counted the same as stealing $1000 in a lump sum.
On a normal scale, "I did something which cost a thousand lives, but it was a mistake made in good faith" is not considered to be a valid excuse (especially if you knew in advance that a mistake would be lethal, and especially if you've made such mistakes often). If you really think that causing a loss of a statistical thousand lives is like causing that loss directly, you can't justify adding an exception for good faith.
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My take is that they get the idea for an article, research it, then write out their idea (regardless of their findings). That's very different from finding an interesting topic, researching it, then writing out their findings (regardless of their initial idea).
For example, Machine Bias could've come about like:
I am more referencing how do they sleep at night. To write an article that misinforms to this extent (unless she really does have quality off-record research).
This article on Puerto Rico seemed written by a lawyer to say bad things about Trump without crossing a line that would be defamation
No bad tactics, only bad targets, maybe? That's pretty much #2
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I want to talk about Ressentiment, specifically the intro to a book I read of the same name by Max Schaler. I'm surprised the motte/rationalist circles haven't discussed it more, because it seems extremely relevant to the culture war. Here's the definition given in the book:
The reason I bring it up is that I see this emotional pattern as the driving force behind modern politics. More on the populist right surely, but the left also has a weird sort of ressentiment in which they kind of hate their own culture, see whiteness / western civ as a stain that they can never get rid of.
Importantly though I think the right falls into the definition of being 'impotent' FAR more than the left, which as this quote explains is crucial to the whole process of ressentiment:
Ultimately I know a ton has been written about this topic, but curious what folks here think of the idea?
I think this has less explanatory power than a combined evolutionary and psychological model of politics. Both the Left and Right have always needed propaganda to recruit believers. Evolutionarily, humans hate the idea of someone having more than them if it seems excessive or unjustly begotten, and even primates form coalitions to overthrow the social order to more equitably distribute goods. Regarding this latter point, Abrahamic theism used to divert this instinct by extolling poverty, shaming the rich, and promising delayed treasure for the poor and delayed recompense against the rich (plus a plethora of other social technologies which prevented unrest — that God has established the social order and fighting it was a sin, that there were more awe-inspiring things to focus on, that you didn’t fight in wars if you were a peasant and had many paid feasts, etc). To me, this seems to perfectly explain the current political landscape and the trajectory of history. The Left hates the rich because it’s in their blood to hate them, not because they are Left or inferior mutants because they are humans and have an ingrained instinct to feel equality. The Right aims to sublimate this instinct through religion or through the Neoconic employing of economics as a quasi-religion. The populist right wants fascism to satisfy the former while turning the state quasi-religious. The Soviets went pure equality and totally ignored religion. So we can make a lot of sense with this model.
"In their blood to hate" sounds like a thought-terminating cliche. It seems to me just as correct to say the Left has an ingrained instinct to feel equality (=sameness). I think your model of the Right is right though.
What I mean is only that “I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct, which is exacerbated when there’s a question about the tactics used to acquire wealth, and which was historically answered by religious dogma in the West (preventing unrest) and is today answered by a mixture of religious and economic dogma (the latter being: if we take anything from him, everything will collapse). I don’t have the evidence I would like for this claim, but it does explain why the West became focused on wealth redistribution immediately after it became less religious, and why we see egalitarianism in a lot of primitive societies, and why the very wealthy and powerful in antiquity often justified their gains through divine descent. All humans would have this instinct but not all humans would answer it in the same fashion. But I find this more satisfying than “these people are inferior and lash out at their superiors”; this doesn’t explain why the pedigreed NYC liberal actually wants redistribution despite it hurting their own pocket.
And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!
Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.
But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.
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Is ressentiment a good model here? As I understand it, the basic idea of ressentiment is, essentially, moral cope. Being unable to live up to your society's virtues, you redefine virtue to reflect the traits you already have (or are at least reasonably capable of attaining). I'm not going to say it describes nobody, but I don't think it describes the prevailing splits in American politics. Those are, I think, mostly about substantive and long-running values disagreements, and those disagreements are not explained by ressentiment.
Right-wing populists aren't abandoning left-wing values they cannot attain; they are rejecting standards they never supported. There's definitely a powerful element of resentment - a feeling that they are denied the status and respect to which they are properly entitled - but that is not the same thing. Not dissimilarly, I think the upswing in left-wing populism is directly traceable to anger over perceived moral hypocrisy and systemic economic failures rather than some tension between their understanding of conventional virtues and what they themselves can achieve.
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I'm not sure what "Ressentiment" adds to the discussion, or why it looks like a fake French version of resentment, which is similar and widely understood. If someone is resentful about their impotency, like some of the characters in JD Vance's book, how is it helpful to add "ressentiment" on top of that?
It lets you know that his came from the Ressentiment region of France, while you get by with mere sparkling resentment.
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I first came across the idea of ressentiment in this 2009 blog post, which in hindsight feels quite prescient - the right-wing inferiority complex, Palin as proto-Trump, and so on. As it says, you can't provide a political solution to a psychological problem, though I would probably reframe that as you can't force a political solution to a cultural or social problem, much the same way that Donald Trump could ascend to the most powerful office in the world but he could not make New York elites stop feeling contempt for him.
The word doesn't appear in the Sanchez piece, or in your top level post, but I think one of the key issues here is envy. Ressentiment is hatred combined with envy - it is the despising of people for being in the place that you feel you ought to be, it is simultaneously craving their validation and seeking to destroy them. If you ask any right-winger, "Do you want New York Times readers to like you?", they'll answer "No, of course not!", and on the surface level that's probably correct, but in the big picture I think they want the sort of validation or felt authority or elite status that one associates with the New York Times.
If you've read Screwtape Proposes a Toast, I think there's something here of the "I'm as good as you" attitude. I sometimes run into works by culturally conservative writers that express, as Lewis puts it, "the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept".
This does not have anything to do with actual inferiority - just the perception thereof. It is entirely possible for people to feel this kind of hateful envy toward their own intellectual inferiors, if those inferiors have the professorships and go on the television and in general enjoy an entitlement to respect that the resentful person does not.
I've singled out the right here, but let's be fair - what about the left? Almost no pathology, in politics, is restricted to a single tribe.
I have perhaps less to say here, because there is already a great deal of writing about the left and envy that is obvious enough. The socialist left feel ressentiment and envy toward the mainstream left. Many on the socialist or extreme left manage the impressive feat of feeling simultaneously that they are the true rebels and radicals speaking truth to power and that they are entitled to good jobs and comfortable offices and big incomes. But even within the hallowed halls of media and academia, I think there is a kind of ressentiment that goes something like, "I'm smarter than them, I'm morally better than them, I'm more compassionate than them, I have better taste than them, so why do they have all the money?" It's hardly the most original observation in the world to say that plenty of lefty commentators have this kind of envy-hatred of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Just as the conservative ressentiment is feeling that cultural elites occupy a status or command a respect that they do not deserve, the progressive ressentiment is the same feeling about economic elites.
In both cases I notice, within the tribe, a kind of endless group therapy that consists of people reassuring each other, "Yes, you are better than them". Be it Fox News or Bluesky, affirmation or validation has become one of the core activities of politics.
Thus, from both the left and the right perspective, what you get is a kind of performative attempt to offend the other side, to prove how little you care about what they think. From the right, this is Palin and Trump and triggering the libs; from the left I think it's more to do with luxury beliefs. Drag queens doing blasphemous tableaux before the Olympics, to pick a recent example. From either direction, you publicly show how little you care for the sensibilities or the sacred values of the other side, even if, underneath, it's not hard to see the desire for validation.
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The populist right? Which populist right?
Maybe if you mean the groypers and GOPe. I don't expect the Motte to like my answer here, but I only find these feelings of ressentiment among the Panicans. Trump himself is maybe the most agentic man in the world, even when he's complaining about unfair treatment on twitter. I don't see impotence fantasies from the people behind Iran and Venezuela, or Trump's Ballroom and Victory Arch, or the MAGA loyal faithful who think we could pull out a victory in the midterms. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from the anti-Israel crowd and the neo-Tucker / Kent / MTG / Candace Owens people who say MAGA was betrayed and everything was lost. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from Hill Staffers and Congressmen who all of them, to a man, no matter what they say in public, believe that the midterms are 100% a guaranteed Republican loss so anything Trump tries to do about it is actually cope and therefore illegitimate. (They not only believe that we deserve to lose the redistricting wars for this reason, but that Trump squandered his 2024 mandate because of stuff like ICE protests in Minneapolis, oh well, we tried nothing and ran out of ideas, we deserve to lose, maybe we can try again next time in 3028.)
I suspect I will be accused of gross partisanship or bias but when I scan the landscape it's the faction that believes we can Make America Great Again that is the most ruthlessly optimistic about the future of America. Who is more excited about the state of the future today? The tech people? The peptide biohackers? I don't see a wellspring of optimism about the future coming from many other places.
More than that though:
Does this not actually describe, to a T, the modern leftist emotional bent? It's the left subsumed in infinite impotence fantasies about how invisible ineradicable all-powerful forces permeate society at every level. They believe, for example, that White Supremacy is woven into the fabric of American life, it explains everything bad that happens to a minority anywhere, you can't log off and ignore it, you can't hard work your way out of it, you can't argue with it. A black man who fails failed because of White Supremacy. A black man who succeeds succeeded despite White Supremacy. We have to have massive, world-spanning DEI infrastructure to even begin to address the imbalance, it's never enough, we need police reform, we need reparations for Haiti, we need gun control. We can't even begin to address everything wrong with the world until we address capitalism, and to do that we have to fight the billionaires.
Is it not a movement premised around an extremely negative emotional outlook?
Climate change is going to destroy the world and as individuals we're powerless to do anything about it.
Sexism and racism are vast systemic forces and as individuals we're powerless to address them.
Technology and capitalism are destroying the world and as individuals we're powerless to change things.
Leftists often believe in all these powerlessness fantasies even as they do exercise real power. Climate change is the perfect example, real environmental problems that could be solved are subsumed into the ultimate global problem. Instead of getting people to go into the forest and pick up trash out of the river, you get them to protest for regulations that could curb 1% of a country's Co2 emissions over a 15-year period so that 0.02% of the global climate problem can be alleviated. It's actually extremely consistent, a lot of leftism is a machine for transmuting its followers real problems into vast impersonal forces that we are all powerless to do anything about (until the final defeat of capitalism i.e. Alex Jones and Donald Trump).
I mean, "personal responsibility" is an idea so obviously coded one way that it's at this point a bad cliche.
There is something very admirable about the seemingly boundless faith some grassroots MAGA supporters have for Trump. It's a pure loyalty exercise for them. To a point where reality itself is just a test to be overcome. But that's also a flaw. Ruthless optimism that parts the sea of information and fact to lead us all to the promise land of hope through loyalty is only good insofar as the promise land is actually there and the parted sea doesn't collapse back in on everyone on the way there. J6 does come to mind.
To springboard off your example on lefties and white supremacy. The sociology theories lefties come up with to explain the racial gaps are obviously insane and untrue. But at the same time it's not possible to falsify them without actually explaining why the big gaps exist.
Now how does one explain that as a race blind MAGA supporter in Trump's America? Do some similarly half baked sociology based on the Moynihan Report? Do we just advocate for the implementation of a genuine white supremacy to mend the black nuclear family back together through force? Or do we just not talk about it?
Not talking about things seems to be the preferred option for dealing with most things that are unpleasant to think about for the MAGA optimists. We instead trust our leaders and don't think too much about things. Just listen to cope merchants on Fox and friends tell us about how everything is under control. No need to deal with hard reality. And that's where things stop feeling admirable.
When people start recognizing that this loyalty exists and start to pander to it for their own gain, then you're left with a snake swallowing its own tail. With hucksters abusing this captive audience that has nowhere else to go. It's very sad to watch.
Well I don't know I feel pretty confident that it's my view that matches reality and everyone else is just too jaded to believe in anything because they're cynical and old and mad at God. It's as if you described Christianity in very clinical terms and said, "There's something pure about belief in Christ even though these Christians have to put fact aside." Well, no, Christians believe (I believe) that Christianity is based in fact, just like I believe my support for Trump is based in fact.
But I understand that my perspective is rare so I get what you're trying to say etc. etc.
Sorry, it's not clear to me contextually what specifically is being hypothetically explained here, the existence of the racial gap as such? I think the mainstream conservative position is that blacks and whites behave differently, and then you fill that difference with some ratio of "culture" and "race" depending on how racist you are. And this more or less explains everything, without having to reach into every social institution and change every facet of society. I like the take of a friend of mine who described DC's local government as having "an abusive relationship" with respect to local voters.
This is a fierce, omnipresent debate within MAGA and I really only ever hear this line from people who don't like my explanation for why I trust Trump. It can't be that I've thought things through and reached a different conclusion from them (from you), it's that I haven't thought it through.
I guess, to add some specificity here instead of just talking on the meta level: I trust Trump because he's smarter than me, has better information than I have, and has better instincts than I have. People look at me like I have two heads when I say this, but if you were learning physics and your teacher demonstrated obvious learning you wouldn't say, "I trust my teacher and don't think too much about things." No, he clearly knows more than me, in this situation it's correct to be a little humble and learn something. I mean that with zero sycophancy.
To take an even more specific example, let's take immigration. I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. After ten years of Trumpian politics, I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. Now, in the day-to-day, there are all sorts of stories, why isn't Trump deporting more people, is this a broken campaign promise, or why hasn't Trump tried this strategy instead of that strategy, or what's he doing in Minnesota, or maybe he should defy judges, or this or that. There's a lot we could sit and debate I guess. But ultimately what reason do I have for actually supposing that Trump is wrong? He's much more agentic than I am, he's much more successful than I am, he has much better political instincts than I do, he has much more information than I do, he has much better judgment than I do. So take Minnesota. Maybe he could have done what twitter is saying and doubled down and called it an insurrection and declared martial law and forced an even bigger crisis. I'm sure that was presented to him as an option. But he didn't take it. Why would I assume that my judgment is better than his? Because I scroll twitter?
Note that this logic is not a blank check for trusting all leaders blindly. When leadership of the Republican Party passes to Marco Rubio or JD Vance I don't suppose that they will replicate Trump's skill in every domain. (Although they probably deserve more deference than random posters on twitter.) Likewise Obama and Biden don't deserve this kind of deference just by virtue of being the president. (Actually if there was one Democratic leader I would defer to it would be Nancy Pelosi: if you were a Democrat it would be entirely reasonable to take cues from her about what is politically possible, you wouldn't be very credible if you claimed to know better than her. That's because she earned it after a very long career of very highly-demonstrated competence.) Anyways, Trump has obviously performed at the highest levels for a generation now and succeeded in situations everyone else thought impossible. That actually obviously, trivially merits a pretty high level of trust. Backseat driving every decision Trump makes is about as compelling to me as a fat washed-up beer-belly in a sports jersey complaining that he can tell every time Lebron James makes a mistake.
I'm trying to lay this out very neutrally although reading back I think this conversation is not quite the right jumping-off point and I'll have to try again in the future. But I'm bored at work and I have time at my desk and so why not. I get why this sounds so irrational and strange to people. I also believe that Donald Trump dodged a bullet in an obvious miracle and is clearly chosen by God and clearly represents the deep spirit of America, U-S-A, U-S-A, and we're all too cynical so we need a reason why we should listen when Mom tells us not to touch the hot stove. But putting that aside I think loyalty can be extremely rational, which is what I'm trying to enunciate.
As an aside, Fox has always been relatively critical of Trump and is definitely not where you go to hear happy stories about how everything is fine. Fox is where you go to hear about how woke transgender dog clinics are ruining San Francisco with vegan homeless shelters. If I was woke I would watch Fox News because it would make me feel powerful.
Many MAGA optimists don't gauge things by what is happening around them. It's exactly like you say. Their barometer is what Trump does. If he does X, then X was the best thing to do because they trust Trump. Their gas prices going up or their jobs moving away or their farms going bankrupt is just not accounted for as a counterfactual.
HBD has no place in mainstream conservative politics. The functional reason for the existence of the dissident right is to be a right winger that can acknowledge HBD. The mainstream conservatives have no explanation or the gaps between the races beyond what I described before, if they even acknowledge them at all, which is rare. The conservative position is that maladaptive black behavior is driven by culture. Primarily the welfare state making them dependent and ghetto culture that glorifies violence. They never explain why blacks move towards this sort of thing, nor how they are going to fix it. It's an excuse that is just as loony and baseless as any lefty cultural excuse about historical oppression and omnipresent ethereal white supremacy.
Those in power being the most competent is only true insofar as they are competent in staying in power. I'm not sold on how that naturally translates to functional governance. From what I can tell the Trump we have now is so far removed from the 2016 Trump it's not comparable. If one wants to say that every decision that he has made that has removed him from his original brand has been the best course of action, then I'd ask, best course towards what? Draining the swamp, building a border wall and kicking all the foreigners out and give jobs to Americans? Or the best course of action for Trump to stay in power? If it's the latter, why is it good that he is staying in power if those same actions are removing him from the original promises?
I'm not a routine Fox viewer but as far as I can gleam from the Youtube clips, they are pretty much on the Trump train. Especially with regards to Iran. It's been a fair while since I saw any rhetoric comparable to the #NeverTrump of 2016, when Fox, outside of Tucker Carlson and similar, was anti-Trump.
You answered your own question here!
The welfare state and ghetto culture are the mechanism. That doesn't explain why blacks are drawn to it more so than other races.
If race is skin deep and the sociological theory being presented is true then it should apply equally regardless of race. But instead we see very disparate results along racial lines. It's the same problem lefty sociological theories have. As soon as you treat them as serious theories and not convenient verbal political excuses that have no substance and only exist to help us turn our brain off, they fall apart.
The origin of the American federal welfare state traces its way back to the Freedman's Bureau, established during the Civil War. As you might guess from the name, blacks were "drawn to it" because the Bureau was specifically established for them.
A sociological theory that hangs it all on "IQ" and doesn't account for the facts of the historical case is less fixing the problems with lefty sociological theories and more embracing them, just swapping out "IQ" for "racism" as the Great Monocausal Foe.
I think some people assume that accomplishing this swap will lead to closing the welfare state tap off, perhaps unaware or forgetting that the tap was turned on at a time when (functionally) that very belief was widespread.
To take your narrative seriously one would have to imagine that a post-war government program that lasted 9 years in the 1860's which gave resources and education to a group of people was always going to lead to that people being welfare dependent. If that's not the argument, then we're just finding historical a-ha! moments that might feel satisfying to our brains but are of no real consequence or value beyond that.
Both the left and the conservatives assert that the gaps exist because of historical circumstance and/or oppression. They both assert historical just so stories without ever applying them seriously as sociological theories about the nature of man. Instead treating it like a verbal game, not a look at reality. They walk through the steps of history and pontificate on each as a cause for behavior, but not a consequence of it.
The 'monocausal' foe is the nature of human beings, the differences between them, the widely divergent population groups humanity is composed of and the wide variety of circumstance they find themselves in.
If history was causal in the way you describe and not consequential, one would see a vast difference between ancestrally similar population groups that had divergent historical paths. We have this case.
Iceland was the poorest country in Europe for centuries. Yet with the Marshall Aid program post-WW2, they went from being the poorest to being one of the most prosperous nations on the planet in the span of 50 years. The lesson is simple. Give high quality people technology and resources and they will prosper. Being colonized doesn't matter. Being poor doesn't matter.
Becoming a criminal or welfare dependent is not a consequence of history. It's the path of least resistance for a certain type of person. Most people find it easier to learn how to read than to have 5 children with 5 different men, collect child support, become obese and claim medical benefits on top of that. Most people find it easier to go to work rather than rob a liquor store and sell drugs. Most. But not all. The difference is the people.
The circumstance that make those anti-social actions possible are a consequence of the kind of people that would take advantage of those circumstances existing. On top of that, welfare programs existing doesn't cause, for example, Norwegians in Norway to abuse the programs at nearly the same rates as other groups do. In short, these history specific explanations fail to explain anything in a broader context. They're not applicable to the real world. These things happen in different context and the obvious determining factor is the humans, not their historical circumstance.
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I'm not sure what you're intending. Most people don't reason in the sense you're describing. There is no mass reserve of people who "gauge things by what is happening around them". Most people get their opinions from life experience, and most life experience is consuming media. There's nothing novel about MAGA here except that we broadly trust Trump's judgment. So that, if gas prices go up, I assume this was judged relative to other options and found to be the best course of action. It's not even that mysterious. It's not hard for me to make a case for why Trump went to war with Iran or how this is potentially a good thing. I don't have to appeal to mysterious subrational forces.
Respectfully, conservative politics has moved way far beyond whether conservatives can talk about race.
Well we are building a border wall and this is the first administration in generations that has seen more foreigners leaving America than coming in. As for draining the swamp, Trump has politically defeated a lot of powerful people in his attempt to reform the American government. To me this reads like making the perfect the enemy of the good, and declaring that, since Trump hasn't accomplished everything he must have moderated. But I don't know anyone, not a single person, who has ever accomplished everything they intended.
You describe the exact process I'm talking about. We both agree that MAGA optimists judge things by whether or not Trump did the thing or not. We both agree that this is novel.
Where we seemingly don't agree is whether or not a relevant amount of people care about 'things', like gas or housing prices, or something similar. I think a lot of people see or feel something that personally affects them like that and therefor want to vote for those things in specific. Expecting a solution and positive change. Using those things as the barometer. I think you understand and agree with this dynamic insofar as you understand that it's important to maintain that Trump is keeping his promises, like you do below.
I guess my point comes down to the question of how you determine values. It feels like we are doing a lot of outsourcing to Trump. My perspective is that MAGA optimists are going the way of the Dodo. They are politically a minority, their children will be a racial minority. I feel like I'm watching the sky fall and then I see them happy as clams because Trump is in charge.
But you are appealing to a very limited force. Mainly just yourself and your faith in Trump. You making a case and then asserting that the course of action being taken is the best because Trump took it isn't particularly rational. Apologies if this sounds too dismissive but I'm starting to feel like you're just constructing a rhetorical fun house of sorts, where you can make assumptions and assertions yourself but preclude others from doing so at any time if they disagree with Trump. Since Trump is smarter and has more information and such. Like, not to rehash things but what is the current state of the Iran war? At what point can we state that the war has been a failure and that Trump made a bad choice? Or is that even possible?
Not really. The small contingent that was bullied into white advocacy, like Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, talked some about whites as a group. But they all defaulted back on individualism, culture and values when push came to shove. Which is the same song and dance they've been doing since they ostracized Peter Brimelow and similar voices from the mainstream.
Yeah, that sounds more true than not. So what is perfect?
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If he's so agentic why doesn't he focus on getting rid of Somali scammers in Minnesota and passing the Save act? Why doesn't he focus on cost of living and securing institutions in the US to crush the left, rather than Middle East wars? Desert Storm was a smashing success and yet H. W. Bush still lost re-election... The track record of Middle East wars is terrible, as Trump himself pointed out.
Even focusing on self-preservation alone (nevermind national interest or ideology) it makes no sense to wage these wars, it's pure slavish devotion to the neocon/Israeli faction. Does he think that if the Dems win he'll escape prison again?
He's a mindbroken husk of Trump the candidate. He's very old and reduced to boomerposting long walls of text on social media while advisers and officials run rings around him.
It’s clear you and Donald Trump have different priorities. We shall have to fine some way of judging whose are more successful.
Why is it so hard to conclude that Trump has made a mistake?
Look at tariffs. Chaos, then backpeddling, the origin of the TACO idea (extremely damaging for any leader), then courts ruling them illegal and mandating refunds. The opposite of creating a stable business environment for US industry.
Yeah Trump makes mistakes too what does that have to do with whether he's agentic or not? In the sense of the discussion about ressentiment and whether the populist right is the political faction that casts itself as powerless and mad.
When you're actually "in the arena" the amount of criticism you face is infinite and I don't consider the fact that it exists to prove much of anything. One tweak in the algorithm and the viral meme would be "Trump Always Overdoes It" or whatever.
Trump the Agent: crushes the left with mass deportations and voter ID to advance MAGA ideology and safeguard own personal position. Political capital is solely wielded for the sake of strengthening the Trump faction. Critically, fuel prices are kept low and promises are not broken unless absolutely unavoidable.
Trump the Puppet: trusts Lutnick on imposing a retarded tariff policy (while Lutnick's son makes hundreds of millions buying tariff refund options), trusts the wisdom of neocon bunglers and Israeli intelligence and starts a war with Iran (completely against promises of no Middle East wars) that was predictably going to fail and embarrass any Republican successors, who are critical for keeping Trump out of prison.
The former judiciously navigates competing interests and pursues own agenda without getting derailed, the latter eats up whatever slop Mark Levin's show serves up, like this deranged idea that Iran's oil production was all going to explode or something after a few days of (leaky) naval blockade.
You've again just defined "agentic" to mean "Trump does what I want". Maybe Trump has different priorities from you.
For instance, fuel prices. Trump decided to go to war with Iran, which is currently causing fuel prices to go up. Trump decided that the risk was worth it. Ok, you can argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that it shows that Trump is agentic?
For instance, voter ID. Trump cannot pass voter ID unilaterally, because of Congress. So he writes executive orders on mail-in ballots and cuts backroom deals to try to get votes for the SAVE act. Maybe President RandomRanger would say screw that and send in the troops. Ok, you could argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that this shows that Trump is not agentic?
The actions Trump has taken are so stupid and self-destructive to all realistic or reasonable Trump goals (contrary even to his own statements, ideology and promises), the most reasonable conclusion is that he's under the control of other parties. Object, not subject.
Someone persuaded him that mass deportations are unpopular and should be toned down but Middle East wars, wow, that's catnip for voters! He's left reality behind, some neocon idiot would've told him something like 'no worries about fuel, the Iranians will be dealt with in one swift stroke' and he'll have accepted that because he's a credulous 80 year old.
In what universe would a man dependent on future Republican administrations to escape more aggressive prosecutions invest his political capital in 'predictably disastrous Middle East War' over 'structural Republican electoral advantage'? No rational actor would do that, only a controlled/misinformed actor.
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I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.
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Relevant Prior post, which in turn links back to my first AAQC
My problem with ressentiment is that I so rarely run into someone talking about it as something they are suffering, rather than a double-reverse-uno in which they are obsessed with how someone else is suffering from ressentiment, and as such their politics should be dismissed as the politics of envy.
Historically this is the province of the left, but it is better understood as the virus of identity politics in general.
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According to Nietzsche's interpretation, ressentiment was derived from a "slave revolt" against Master Morality- flipping the concept of good/bad and making the weak "good" and the strong "evil." That's a cultural phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly more of a left-wing cultural phenomenon- the mentally disturbed transgender obese Reddit mod becomes the "good" against the White Frat Chad driving the cool car and getting all the chicks, who is "evil." The socially incompetent, weak, ugly nerd is the good and the charismatic, popular, attractive, strong Jock is the bad guy. That is the sort of moral inversion that strikes at the heart of ressentiment.
Ressentiment frames weakness, ugliness, slave morality as a moral superiority over noble values, strength, and beauty.
Ultimately ressentiment is not about being powerless it's about asserting that state of powerlessness as constituting moral superiority over those who have an exercise power. "I am morally superior because I am weak and oppressed" is the cornerstone of ressentiment and it's a phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly derived from left-wing cultural criticisms of traditional morality in the 20th century.
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Yes, when I first learned about Slave Morality 10 years ago, I immediately thought "wait this is just social justice." However, the modern culture war isn't primarily focused on impotent weakness. It is more correct to say social justice is just Feminine Norms. This explains sympathy for the weak while also explaining why certain Ressentiments are not left-coded (e.g. Incels).
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Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?
Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.
impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?
You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."
But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?
That was my read on this excerpt from Schaler too, but it just seems to be describing resentment. If you want to realize your positive values, but can't, that can lead to resentment but ressentiment is something different. Ressentiment is- you can't realize your positive values so you just define your positive values as being the opposite of the Masters.
You can't join that exclusive WASPy frat, play sports, get the chicks, so you frame all of those things as bad and being a weak, loner, nerd as being the good.
Sounds like a difference with very little distinction. Is it any different to Nietzche's slave morality?
Resentment is bitterness towards someone or something, ressentiment is formulating your values to be the antithesis of your target of resentment.
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No, because Nietzsche popularized it to describe the psychology of slave morality.
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Personally I resonate with the concept and feel it quite often. So does the friend who recommended the book to me.
I think it helps illuminate a specific pattern of emotion.
Is it what the main character in Notes from Underground is suffering from?
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Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent? I definitely get that feeling based on my observations of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, combined with my observations of Leftist organizations. So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior. (Ok, I admit that this is just a little boo-outgroup. I hate Leftists with a passion and I like the idea that there is something inherent in their thinking which leads to repression.)
That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.
I'm spitballing a bit here, but my guess is that to some extent it's a matter of valuing individualism versus valuing collectivism. Perhaps people, institutions, and governments who value collectivism are more comfortable with the idea of suppressing dissent just as they are more comfortable with the idea of forcibly transferring wealth for some perceived greater good.
Why is it surprising that people who believe they are better and smarter than the market and deserve to control the economy also tend to believe they should command power elsewhere? Socialism without authoritarianism is in theory possible, but the same thought pattern leads to both.
The same way that would be authoritarians inevitably go down the path of socialism and try to boss around the economy. If you think you're smarter and should be in control of everything, why shouldn't that include telling big businesses what they can and can't do, implementing price controls, stealing from them with illegal taxations, and using government to seize stake in private corporations? Socialism and big government is a means to boss around people who would otherwise tell you to fuck off. It should say something that even the right wing dictators (and wannabe dictators) seem to never end up being economically libertarian.
The economy is one of the biggest ways that people make personal choices in their life. What do you trade for, who do you trade it with, what sort of job do you work, how long do you work it, how much can you trade? What sorts of things can you use in your day to day life and who can provide it? It's control over the food you eat and the homes you can live in. You can not have power if you do not exert control over the economy.
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"Democratic"-style countries typically operate as "political markets" -- if you can assemble enough people who believe in X Policy to vote for you, you can make X Policy a reality. Of course, there are limiters, like Constitutions -- but even those can be changed if enough voters/representatives buy into such changes. It is a bottom-up model, theoretically.
Communist ideology anti-market. How a country is run is not at the whim of the citizens, but is, instead, top-down: The benevolent leaders determine what is best for the people, and the people comply, because they know that their wise leaders have figured out that the optimal way for everyone to receive equal everything is for Boris to dig ditches (even though Boris is skilled at architcture) and for Ivan to design buildings (even though Ivan is the useless son of a bureaucrat) with as little friction as possible.
What happens if Boris looks at Ivan's bullshit architectural models and petitions that he can do better? He might be correct, and a government that cares might agree and switch the two occupations. However, the government also knows that if Andrei sees Boris dissent from the system and succeed, that maybe Andrei will also dissent from his assigned role so he can be as personally fulfilled as Boris will be. This kind of thing is contagious. And so is the perception that the government of unelected elites who designed this perfect mechanism is flawed and makes mistakes, which undermines the entire theory that this system is really optimized for anything.
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It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.
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No.
Not unless you engage in significant somersaults to exclude right wing regimes that engaged in significant censorship of dissent and say that they are therefore left-wing.
Power has a non-unique tendency to suppress dissent, regardless of its style or origin.
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I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.
Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.
As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.
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Sample size is a bit of an issue here especially since a few of the examples have cultural/historical reasons. Russia has been authoritarian for centuries in large part due to institutional memory of invasions. China has always been somewhat collective because I think the theory indicates necessities of what worked for rice farmers. It could be why they chose communism and communism not being the cause. Russia though I would list as just authoritarian due to history. N Korea would have some of the issues with China but obviously they are even more extreme for Asians. Japan obviously has some of the “harmony” attributes.
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It seems there were two separate things going on. One: these regimes generated more internal dissent than non-communist dictatorships. Two: they reacted to existing dissent in more extreme ways than non-communist dictatorships normally did to the same sorts of dissent.
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Regimes that use military force for legitimacy could, in theory, let people think and believe what they want, but they would never ever ever let people have access to arms, since that would threaten the legitimacy.
Regimes that use consent of the governed for legitimacy would never ever ever let people think for themselves, since the people may turn against the regime. If communist countries' legitimacy comes from a (perceived) consent of the governed then the regime must control the information and minds to ensure the people continue to perceive the government as legitimate.
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Russia and China had below-average tolerance for dissent before the Communists took power; thus 'persecute anyone who Notices that the sun doesn't shine out of our you-know-where' was seen as a more legitimate tool than it would be in the birthplaces of the Enlightenment.
I wouldn’t be certain about the former. The state response to Bolshevik terrorism and agitation in the late years of Czarism was, when compared to similar policies of Western nations, actually mild on average. The sheer difference between that regime and the Bolsheviks in terms of the number of people who were sentenced to forced labor or internal exile is also rather telling.
I was more referring to the tolerance for peaceful dissent.
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Governments and institutions have a general tendency to suppress dissent.
A state fundamentally sells security. You get courts and a capable army; they get your taxes. Supply, demand, solve for the equilibrium. Don’t push too hard, though, because failing to come to an agreement is a lose-lose proposition. Suppressing dissent lets states push that much harder before the revolts start.
It was true for the panem et circenses and for medieval fiefdoms. It’s true for us, too. We Westerners have the advantage of liberalism to take the edge off, but that’s all; we are not immune. When the going gets tough, you’ve seen Americans line up to sacrifice those principles. Just this once. Just for the really bad actors, right?
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I don't think there's much of a connection between the dissent-suppression of communist regimes and the dissent-suppression of leftist wokescolding. The latter has more in common with busybody church folk, and bitchy high-schoolers of whatever gender. That they both use Marxist gobbledygook is...a coincidence? A historical artifact? Orthogonal? One of those.
It's a direct and specific traditional inheritance which can be specifically identified and is so. So much so I would argue there is no actual meaningful difference. Wokescolding is a communism.
I thought wokescolding was invented during the protestant reformation.
I hesitated in including that communism is a liberalism which is a protestantism, but of course.
I suppose one could say further that these techniques are written in the human soul but even if cult behavior and purity spirals are just something we do, the specific modalities are inherited from somewhere.
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If you read the captive mind, it talks about how the Soviets used exactly the kind of wokescolding behaviors we are all so familiar with to bring the Polish literary establishment to heel. The government wokescolds were called “dialectitions” and they would lead discussion assuming the role of a facilitator in exactly the same pose anyone who has done a DEI training would instantly recognize only with slightly more iron behind the velvet glove.
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You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.
If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody takes into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.
In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”
Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.
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Revolutionary utopian ideologies see dissent as delaying the arrival of the utopia and as a sign of dangerous disloyalty that threatens the strength of the movement. Comrades are supposed to be building towards a singular goal. Arguing about the goal or the methods is a waste of time at best and the start of a fracture that might doom the movement at worst. I don't think Communism is unique in this, it's just the highest profile recent example. See the French Revolution or the Anabaptist German cities for older examples.
CS Lewis had a point there, I think.
I can't help but notice the irony of a prominent Christian writer deriding "omnipotent moral busybodies", emphasis on the omnipotent.
To be charitable to Ol' Staples, he probably didn't think of God as "busybodies", given that he's triune at most and doesn't really care about your moral behavior until you die.
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Non-communist authoritarian countries usually have shared factors that make them less oppressive. The military junta that rules the Republic of Banana just wants to keep the shipments to the Dole company going. They will be ferociously repressive in certain limited circumstances, but they aren’t interested in regulating everyone’s fence-post heights to the millimeter in search of a better world.
Communist governments usually want to make major changes to the economy and society in a way that requires them to exercise a lot more direct state control.
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It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.
It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.
Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.
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Everyone wants to stay in power. This includes even democracies. The more dissent against the system there is, the more repressive said system will need to be. Communism just doesn't work very well, causing more dissent and thus needing more repression.
China is a good example. Maoism was totalitarian. Today's China is much less repressive, not because the Communist Party has embraced individual rights in any way, but because they simply don't need it as much.
Since they let go of the strict communism, they went from being as poor as Zimbabwe to being the closest thing the US has to a peer competitor. As a result, people don't generally feel like they'd be better off by overthrowing the system. And ambitious people can throw themselves into making money, rather than the only outlet for ambition being scheming either within or against the Party. There is less need for repression, and therefore there is less repression.
Capitalist-ish dictatorships generally have better economies and more outlets for personal ambition than do traditional communist dictatorships, therefore the latter are going to need more repression just to keep going.
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It's not that there's something inherent in Marxism*. Rather, it's that Marxism was built by, and continues to attract, the types of people who already have a preexisting psychological disposition to suppress ideological dissent and view it as threatening. You see the same dynamics (that is, the dynamics of ideological suppression and the fear of wrongthink) play out everywhere from indie video game circles to "serious" leftist political organizations, it's plainly one and the same underlying phenomenon at work.
(* The notion of "communism" in general predates Marxism specifically, but, the Marxist and Marxist-inspired ideological strands are the ones that have been the most evolutionarily successful.)
Don't totalitarian rightist governments have a dim record on free speech too? Yes, but, it's different; it's subtle but different. Flipping things around for a moment, consider how Heidegger in his "Introduction to Metaphysics" lectures, delivered in 1935 (two years after the NSDAP came to power), argued that The Human Being As Such is ontologically grounded in "violence" and "struggle". I view this as an authentic expression of "the rightist mind" (or at least, a particular subtype or strand of it), and I view this as a legitimate difference between leftists and rightists. A committed Marxist simply wouldn't think or say that; even though they have engaged in a great amount of violence themselves in good conscience, and even though they have a certain degree of libidinal investment in the continuation of certain struggles that they claim to want to bring to an end. For all that, they are still not invested in the abstract concept of struggle itself; it doesn't structure their imagination in the same way. And this is part of what makes them leftists in the first place, and ultimately structures all the really-subtle-but-still-clearly-there differences in the ways that leftists and rightists think, talk, organize themselves, etc.
Analogously, rightists will suppress dissent for all sorts of reasons; because it's tactically the best move, because they legitimately believe that the target views will cause great harm if left to proliferate unchecked, because they simply take pleasure in the fear of their enemies; but they won't do it because they love suppressing dissent as such. The mind that loves struggle needs, first and foremost, enemies to struggle against. The mind that loves peace would rather see their enemies simply disappear into the mists of time. Or the mod queue.
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Communism- by which we mean intentional socialism or Marxist-Leninism- is too unworkable to exist without an authoritarian edifice, and so it only exists where dissent is suppressed.
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It's not unique to communism so much as a natural outcome of both the left's and the dissident right's embrace of collectivism. If you shift the focus of judgment from individual responsibility to the collective, the only practicable solution to the free-rider problem will be totalitarianism.
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So I think talking about "communism" is kind of a bad way of thinking about it. It allows people to go back to the loose ideas Marx had and try to pretend the dispute is about economic ideas.
In practice Communists are trying to implement Leninism as practiced.
The best way to understand it is Moldbug's Brahmin trying to remake society by force. There's no room in that for a loyal opposition or principled dissent.
The Brahmin particularly don't like being called out for their mistakes by their lessers and will always crack down harshly when they can get away with it.
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There's a brass tacks, Anglo-libertarian bias to a lot of these responses, which I also share. But to hear Catholic Integralists e.g. speak of vigilance in their statecraft as soul craft agenda, I can see them being as dedicated to policing people's hearts and minds in a way on par with communists.
Many understand that all totalitarianisms are the same ultimately. But few understand that all politics are ultimately totalitarian.
The commies just get there faster because their ideology is uniquely prone to the strife that accelerates the logic of power.
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I think it's just that dictatorships have a tendency to suppress dissent and communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.
Ok, and what do you think those reasons are.
As for repression, it's inevitable in a dictatorship. If you are unhappy with the work of the dictator the only way to express it is through rebellion and rebellions need to be dealt with with repression. That's just how it goes.
Typically the pattern that you see is that the first dictator is overall a high quality individual that does a decent job governing and sees the need for repression decline over his reign. But every subsequent successor is a lower quality individual that's only good at playing court games, does a worse job governing and needs to apply further repression. So my recommendation to dictators is to make sure it ends with them, but that's easier to do in a capitalistic system than in communism. Communism however still has the AI god emperor option, it just has never been tried.
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Also add the fact that communism has a tendency to cause dissent due to its poor material outcomes. Many authoritarian capitalist governments don't have to suppress very much dissent because the people make money and are at least happy enough not to rebel (ie modern Russia).
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Communists are more repressive because they actually think people can change.
Rightists and Leftists broadly define the outgroup as a minority. It might be defined as an economic class (‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeoisie’) or a social class (out of touch ‘elites’), or it might be defined nationally, religiously or ethnically, but the outgroup is generally a minority of the population.
What do you do when the majority - or at least seemingly a large mass of people - disagrees with you? The right has a built in explanation for this, which is expressed in different language at different places or times, sometimes more or less democratically, but which is essentially ‘some people are stronger, smarter, and more noble than others, we can lead, the rest will follow’ and this is broadly congruent. This leads to repression in far-right regimes being localized. It includes those groups marked out as the ‘true’ unassimilable enemy (see above), and a very small number of others who cause a nuisance, but there is no inherent need for the masses to be brought along provided they don’t threaten the running of the state. If you are not obstructing the running of government and do not belong to a primary outgroup, the reactionary regime generally leaves you alone.
The left lacks this explanation and dichotomy. Certainly, there have been attempts. The rural peasantry are inherently reactionary. The labor aristocracy are happy being kapos. But this all rings a little hollow compared to the fundamental ideological message - after all, unlike the right which is more willing to write off some people as outside the scope of the project, isn’t the core leftist idea that everyone (even sometimes former aristocrats and capitalists) can be reformed? Can become a servant of the revolution? Eventually, you reach a stage where the day-to-day political and social views of the masses need to be monitored, adjusted, and reported on. They are simply more relevant to communism as a political project. Communism cares about what people believe in their hearts in a way that reactionary traditionalist and right wing movements don’t - in part because communists think human nature is malleable in a way the right doesn’t.
This also makes for far more repressive forms of authoritarianism. In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike. Rightist regimes don’t make people go to Church. They might change the curriculum for kids, but they make no effect to convert adults ideologically, they assume they’re either in the small enemy group or already on their side. Communist countries have this problem less (not never, but less).
Going to(thé correct)church is strongly recommended and sometimes mandatory in rightist regimes with a religious component- Vatican II happened to blow up a load bearing pillar of Franco’s regime(and South Vietnam’s, but that’s another, longer, less straightforwards, story), but that didn’t mean public irreligion was acceptable.
Irreligion, no, but nowhere near the level of devotion required by the masses in a communist society. Weekly attendance at church was at maybe 40% at the height of Franco’s rule. A lot of that was residual, even then, the product of long habits.
Fascist Germany and Italy made more serious efforts at societal rituals, mass events, regular rallies but you were still far, far less ‘immersed’ in the ideology of Nazism as a random building inspector in a large town in German in 1937 as you were immersed in the ideology of Stalinism as a building inspector in a large town in Russia was in 1949 (assuming you weren’t a member of either party, which describes most people).
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The impression I have of fascist vs communist regimes is that unless you're a Jew or equivalent designated enemy category, the fascists will be satisfied with your lack of dissent, mostly you just don't get promoted over Party Members. Communist regimes extort ideological compliance out of the populace and expect you to, well, Signal your Virtue.
I'm sure there are all manner of counter-examoles from both directions, of course. "Regime" isn't a word with positive connotations.
The central examples of fascist regimes we have (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) both made ideological fealty mandatory and were extremely interested in regulating the lives of their subjects.
The distinction there is not fascist vs communism but totalitarian vs authoritarian. Authoritarian regimes are often satisfied with mere obedience, and may actively try to depoliticize the population at large. Authoritarian countries tend to have a weak, withered civil society. Totalitarian countries, by contrast, have a powerful civil society that has been annexed by the state.
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Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?
No. Because the fall of the Soviet Union threw probably half a billion people into massive poverty. To which almost 40 years later we still haven't totally climbed of.
Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.
The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million that got their living standards fall 3 times overnight. During the 90s we had even food insecurity and hunger.
I checked Google and it seems I was indeed mistaken. I’d add, however, that 2rafa’s argument is still basically correct: the collapse of the ‘90s did not affect all former Soviet satellite states to an equal degree, and the same applies to former Soviet republics.
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People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.
So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.
That is totally not true. The recovery in Balkans was at best 2006-2007. And then the global financial crisis hit. The standard of living took almost 20 years to recover. And arguably for people that are retired it never did.
I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.
As for the Balkans…
Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.
There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.
That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.
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Threw? Or were these people already the opposite of American "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", having enough rubles on their sberkassa accounts, but no goods to spend this money on?
It did genuinely cause a massive measurable decrease in life expectancy.
You're right, I shouldn't write comments when half-asleep.
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There were also related changes of the same nature. A massive drop in fertility, the rise of suicide rates, a massive rise in alcoholism and drug addiction rates, the reappearance of contagious diseases that were considered to be already eliminated etc. The latter was the result of the utter collapse of an already shoddy and underfunded healthcare system, as was the decrease that you mentioned.
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Yes threw the 90s were apocalyptic in Russia and the poorer republics are still below where they were. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly prosperous but it wasn't exactly poverty either and the entire system was set up for their state run economy so much random stuff just stopped working in the 90s in the former USSR.
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The Soviet Union effectively repressed almost all private enterprise from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s. There were some smugglers and black marketers in 1975 but far fewer than there had been fifty years earlier. It was mostly effective. North Korea has a larger black market but it’s largely tolerated by the state due to extreme poverty as a supplementary income source.
Yes, and the Francoist regime also repressed the liberal forces, until eventually it didn't. (Also, my understanding is that the black market was already quite considerable a force in the Soviet economy in the early 80s.)
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All entities with a capacity for action will attempt to modify their environment to be more favorable to them. Communist states. Other states. People. Liberal democracies usually market themselves with free speech as a selling point, but observe them in action and you will notice that over time, they do their best to qualify and restrict that nominally free speech, to penalize undesirable utilizations of speech under some pretense, or to raise up institutions that exercise nominally non-state pressure to suppress certain types of speech.
This isn't unique to communism. Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval or never pretended to place value on free speech.
I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.
In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)
But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.
So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.
Well then we're just back at "Real communism has never been tried", and we can never judge it.
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Not unique, just cruder methods. The chinese, once they got rich enough with capitalism to be able to afford state of the art censorship, no longer have to use concentration camps very much. Neither does Russia, for the same reasons.
The US can afford the very best, an entire ecosystem of disinformation funded by dead rich people's estates being directed by the current fashionable elites from the best schools. CIA cutouts, partisan outlets, VOA penetration. And because it is so sophisticated and decentralized, there is no need for camps, or even to do much int eh way of directing things. The system does its own targeting, see the SPLC.
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We often see complaints and questions about the Iran War in regards to what the US's victory conditions and objectives there even are supposed to be. Despite the inconsistency on many given reasons, the US has stayed pretty consistent on one reason, Iran was working towards nukes and we gotta stop them.
But was Iran actually working towards nukes at the time? The "Former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent" (the guy who resigned in protest) has revealed that the intelligence community apparently believed otherwise.
So this begs the question, what is the real reason? Kent says Israel, and everything seems to be pointing towards that as the true cause. Bibi has been pushing hard towards this goal of attacking Iran for at least three admins considering he's given the same pitch to Obama.
And as I've pointed out before, even the US's own official explanations are heavily pointing towards Israel as their main focus.
Literally, they say it themselves in this press release.
Mike Johnson has said it. and Rubio has said it. Lindsey Graham is blatant about it. This war is for Israel. Rubio and Mike Johnson later denied their own words, and mayve it's true they both made a mistake. Interesting that two high ranking officials apparently both made the same mistake in saying Israel brought us into the war, and this same mistake was then repeated in the official press releases.
And they say it's not just Israel, and sure maybe it's not the only thing, but it is strange that it's both their first listed reason and most of the release is focused specifically on Israel and Israeli interests. And Israel being listed first happens quite a bit here.
It's not in alphabetical order, so can't be that. Why is the focus quite consistently putting Israel before the US like this in the USG's own official justification press release?
So if we didn't actually get into this war over Iran building nukes, is there any other explanations actually left? That's the only thing the Admin seems to be actually consistent about, and it's apparently completely fabricated.
And the White House's response to Fox News about this seems to be really interesting in how they worded it. For example
You see, it didn't actually address what Kent said.
They took "Iran building nukes" and made it into "Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and could pose a threat to the US". They took "Israel was the main reason for the operation" and made it into "Israel forced the president". Why did they dodge it like this?
Likewise again, this doesn't address the claims about US intelligence! In fact, this statement is also perfectly in line with the "Israel was going to attack Iran and Trump felt they had to also do strikes beforehand then because of retaliation" story given before. But at least it wasn't literally forced so that's good news, despite no one claiming that.
Replace "Iran" with "North Korea," "China," or "Russia," and "Israel" with "South Korea," "Japan," and "Ukraine" and no-one (well, almost no-one; Ukraine is a bit more controversial) gets all that upset. Still leads me to believe the concern with Israel is overblown.
I think that Americans would absolutely lose their shit if we started bombing China at Japan's urging or North Korea at South Korea's urging.
I think Americans would also lose their shit and demand bombing if China did half the shit to Japan that Iran and the broader "Axis of Resistance" pulls in the Middle East. Moreso, if China was vaguely associated with significant local ethno-religious tensions and terrorism the way that Iran is associated with islamism (despite being Shia, rather than Sunni like the vast majority of the problematic refugees/terrorists).
Why do you think Americans care about the Middle East? Didn't Trump explicitly campaign on getting the fuck out of that region, or at least 'no further entanglements'?
They have a lot of oil and there's this thing that happened in early September of 2001.
"Sunni terrorists under the guidance of a rogue Saudi noble (and likely backed by Saudi money) murdered a couple of thousand Americans, so obviously 25 years later we have to support Saudi Arabia against their Shiite enemies, otherwise how would we ever learn if Shiites are better at killing Americans on their own soil than Sunnis?"
The minor liturgical spats between the various folks in the region chanting death to America are of less interest to us than the chanting and bonafide sincere desire they possess to enact that feeling.
Middle Easterners are much more interested in killing each other (and Israelis) than killing Americans, popular slogans notwithstanding. Just like Americans hate other Americans more than they do any foreigners: proximity breeds contempt.
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9/11 bought ~20 years of middle eastern misadventures before Americans got bored and/or jaded. Soldiers dying, bases getting bombed, allies getting blown up? Americans shrug. All Iran has to do to preserve American apathy is not attack American soil.
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A rogue Saudi aristocrat living among hill tribes in a failed state sent a terror attack under the aegis of Iran's greatest religious enemy that exploited fixable security issues in America?
That happened on 9/11. What was exposed is that there are about half a billion people who hold a sincere religious belief that killing Americans is good, and that they hold supermajorities in basically every country in this particular region. And that the only think preventing them from performing on said sincere religious belief is their own total incompetence.
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Joe Kent is a clown who was grossly unqualified for his position and only obtained it because of an unsuccessful political career based on undying loyalty to Trump. In the time since his resignation he's latched on to the Tucker Carlson/Candice Owens/Alex Jones cadre of wackaloons to cash in on his brief fame and maybe prime himself for another failed crack at a congressional seat. His statements on Iran's nuclear program are indicative of this schtick in general where it's not enough to suggest that going to war with Iran was a bad policy decision, or that the threat of an Iranian nuclear program is overblown; no everything has to be a huge conspiracy knows that there is and never was an Iranian nuclear program and the whole thing was some kind of manufactured consent for a war that nobody is in favor of anyway, apart from the roughly 30% of Americans who comprise the Bush/Mendoza line, for whom if Trump shot their child they'd assume he had a good reason to do so.
This is all part of a larger storyline where Carlson et al. have to account for why they spent so many years singing the praises of Our Lord and Savior Donald J. Trump under the delusion that he was some kind of swamp-draining peacenik when anyone with half a brain could tell you that the only thing that ever concerned him was having the biggest dick in the room and that if anyone who didn't have nukes pissed him off he wouldn't pass up the opportunity to use the full force of the United States Military to make you bend to his whims. And that the cadre of morons who put poster board signs in their yard about how they shouldn't have to pay school taxes since they don't have kids and who regularly attend township supervisor meetings to complain about how their neighbor's retaining wall violates setback requirements actually gave a shit about the anti-war stuff even though they'll still tell you that Obama pulled out of Iraq too early.
Trump kept saying he was! He even continued to claim it after the campaign where it didn't matter anymore, like he said this during the literal victory speech
And Vance was (and in some ways still is given that he seems to be dodging having to comment on the war now) anti interventionism so he kept saying he was against war and had people around him with known anti war track records.
Maybe people were stupid for trusting Trump and not thinking he doesn't change on a dime for personal benefits or whatever, but I don't think it's as delusional as you think to have expected us to fuck out of the middle east.
And you're just figuring out now that he's full of shit? Sure, he has Vance, but he also has Rubio and Hegseth, neither of whom have reputations for peacefulness. I can't say I would have predicted the war, but I'm not surprised by it, and I'm not surprised that most of his supporters are in favor of it.
Oh yeah certainly I'm not that surprised but I get why some people would be.
This is the least surprising thing of all. Political parties have always had a bit of cult of personality going on where people shift their claimed views to the person they like but Trump is definitely next level. Either by changing their views themselves or just somehow being blind to it.
Like I remember all the comments expecting some sort of epic showdown between Mamdani and Trump, Capitalism vs Socialism and it's like you do realize that Trump is also an explicit anti market statist right?? Like wtf you mean capitalism vs socialism when he's literally having government take stocks in private enterprise, implementing tariffs, and doing the same "greedflation" rhetoric right down to price controls and blaming corporations for home prices being high instead of government meddling. No wonder they're buddies there.
Just because they have a lot of different views on other topics doesn't change their deep similarities on the market and economics.
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He had John Bolton in his first term, and made him cry with edging and constant refusal to actually start any new wars.
I think "he had John Bolton his first term" says it all right there.
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Joe Kent went on 11 combat tours in the Middle East, his wife died in combat there, how can you call him a clown for not wanting to lose another war in the Middle East?
Plus he actually studied strategy at university, he's 10x the leader of someone like Hegseth or Laura Loomer or whatever neocon idiot Trump takes advice from.
It doesn't take a great strategist to realize that attacking Iran is moronic, or that the Israelis are just lying when they shriek and whine about nuclear weapons. They've been shrieking and whining for decades, far longer than it takes to acquire nuclear weapons. The clowns are the people who still listen to Netanyahu when he only brings them lies, costs, war and ignominy by association.
Are you confident that's his main motivation? And do you have the same level of confidence that you had for your claim that Israel bombed a girl's school in Iran?
Agreed.
Looks to me like you are the one who is shrieking and whining and lying. Meanwhile, the Israelis have been actively sabotaging the Iranian nuclear weapons program, thank goodness.
Anyway, I have a question: Do you still hate Jewish people as much as you did when you falsely claimed that Israel had bombed a girl's school in Iran?
You go on incessantly about me mischaracterizing a US bomb dropped in an Israeli war as being Israeli as some kind of terrible, unforgettable error that shows the blackness of my heart... when it didn't even affect the main point I was making in the slightest. In my naivete at the time, I assumed the only reason anybody would be interested in the bombs origin is because of the insane Israeli propaganda that 'actually the Iranians blew up their own school to make the West look bad' as mentioned upthread. That would be a meaningful distinction as compared to US vs Israeli bombing, that was what I was most interested in refuting, which I did. So I said it was an Israeli bomb. Damn!
Meanwhile, your main point, that bombing Iran would not affect their likeliness to nuclearize since they already maximally hated Israel and thus Iran should be bombed more aggressively, remains wrong and bizarre and is 10x more bloodthirsty than mine. It is also causing a massive global crisis whose main redeeming feature is that people are going to trust and favour Israel much less in future.
So in conclusion, these kinds of gotchas are neither intelligent nor charismatic, nor particularly likely to make me or anyone else love Jews more.
It certainly undermines your credibility - dramatically.
Please show me where I said that Iran "should be bombed more aggressively." Please quote me. TIA.
t. you
By "the Chicago Way," what I meant was respond very aggressively to each act of aggression on the part of Iran. Which of course can include bombing, but it doesn't mean to escalate from out of nowhere.
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I take it you don't believe in the concept of holding a breakout time or "screwdriver ready"?
The US intelligence services said there was no imminent threat from Iran, so apparently they believe it.
Attacking and killing the guy with a fatwa against nuclear weapons doesn't seem like a smart idea. If you don't want the Iranians to break out, why not simply refrain from attacking them and incentivizing a breakout?
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I just would need to see a lot of evidence to believe this. Why is 2025-26 the only time in the last 40 years Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon? Is Trump's aura just that legendary that even the suicidal Ayatollah would give up his primary ambition of the last half century just because of the orange man mogging him?
Maybe this implies they spent the last 40 years also not developing a nuclear weapon? Given that 1940s tech was sufficient to make a nuke, maybe they thought "almost having a nuke" was valuable enough and stopped enriching roughly around there and then just made lots of noise about how "they were totally gonna finish enriching any day now"
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I think you're responding to the wrong comment
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I think there is a semi-coherent argument that the Iranian revolution's ability to "mog", as you say, the Carter administration is a large part of how the regional relationships worked out the way they did. From allowing the Shah to get deposed, to the return of the Ayatollah in a
sealed train carAir France charter plane, to the embassy hostage crisis (and Eagle Claw), much of the regime's legitimacy plausibly comes from American own-goals.Well yeah, a bean sprout could mog the Carter administration.
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Electing Trump was a roll of the dice on whether we'd actually escape from the middle east. Electing establishment GOP or Dem would have basically been asking for even more adventures in the Middle East. I rolled the dice and lost. I'd rather have voted for Vance or someone even more vehemently anti-interventionists, but those choices weren't on offer. Instead my choices were "uniparty interventionist stooge #73829" and "Trump.". I don't think I'm alone in this calculation.
Surely you are not suggesting a run-of-the-mill president or "uniparty interventionist stooge" would have had Middle Eastern adventures on the scale of Trump?
Iran happening and going how it has gone was not in my worst-case Trump scenario either so I don't blame you for rolling those dice, but you very much lost a lot more money than you would have lost betting on a "uniparty" candidate.
Biden helped Al Qaeda take over Syria.
Obama bombed Libya to the stone age, surged troops in Afghanistan, started the first Ukraine war and helped jihadists take half of Syria.
George Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump's first term was relatively peaceful and Trump was the first candidate in a long time to be outspoken in his criticism of previous wars.
Alright, I'll bite: you can criticize him for inaction concerning Crimea, but how did he start it?
John McCain and Victoria Nuland were on Maidan square together and the US was actively funding groups in Ukraine and pushing for regime change. There was clear Ambition to expand NATO east and to cross Russia's red lines even though they were fully aware this would lead to a major war.
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He paid hundreds of thousands of crisis actors to fake colossal pro-EU protests in Ukraine, forcing Russia to invade eastern Ukraine to... do something.
"Obama/the US caused the Russo-Ukrainian War" rests on the claim that the Maidan protests were an American op.
I think the paid opposition narrative needs to end. It seems very genuine at this point Ukraine has a lot of pro-EU people. They have spilt a lot of blood for it so it seems reasonable to believe they are genuinely pro-EU. And I despise the EU but it’s still a better path for them.
They like the EU because they have watched Poland go from poor to rich. When you see Polish people returning from London as maids and now Ukrainians are the polish maids.
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"Caused" is a bit strong, but "failed to deter" is a plausible view if you point to non-reactions to Georgia (in fact, pulling out a "reset" button accepting it) and that "The 1980s called and want their foreign policy back" line at the debate when Romney claimed Russia was a potential adversary merely 2 years before Crimea. Frankly, the flip from that to Russia-gate makes me take the left's positions on international relations as deeply un-serious.
Although the other side seems to have never met a proposed intervention they didn't like, which is its own failure mode.
The problem I have with failure-to-deter and other sins of inaction is that unless you're withdrawing some active intervention they're overdetermined. Obama could have done more to oppose Russia post-2013/4, but so could most of Europe. The sheer indifference of most European allies colored the US' own response.
Specifically regarding failures of deterrence, it is not clear to me what critics of Obama expected him to have done other than something really outside like cooperate in suppressing the Maidan protests.
I don't think this follows. Obama's dismissiveness of Russia as a source of problems in 2012 has certainly aged poorly, but at the time the US was trying to switch focus from Europe and the Middle East to Asia-Pacific and China (it is still trying to do this) and the broad consensus was that Russia was a gas station with nukes. The flip on Russia was a direct response to Russia doing things. You should expect people to update
The reason why right-wing anti-interventionism will never have any legs is that the right-wing elite is full of people who fundamentally believe in the crude application of force to achieve positive results and the right-wing base is full of people who think you have a moral obligation to support the team no matter what. The result is that right-wing elites constantly try to fix problems with violence and their supporters always back them because it is practically unthinkable not to.
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Trump 1 had very few Middle East adventures and started putting the kibosh on Afghanistan.
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He’s still not made big mistakes of land wars. He’s kept his adventures limited. And Iran atleast has a fig leaf of geopolitically neutering China and not purely a let’s bring Democracy to the ME.
And still have hope that Trump pulls up a positive sum outcome with Iran that ends in diplomacy acceptable to both sides that benefits America by cutting China out of depending energy supplies.
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Do you actually believe in anything? In the space of a couple posts we've gone from "trust Principled Conservative Erick Erickson" to "trust America First Joe Kent." The only common throughline in all your top-levels is that you want to pick an internet fight with themotte's Trump contingent, and are happy to dance between positions, arguments, and sets of facts in order to do so. Kudos to the guys who have the patience to fisk your posts, I guess.
I trust different people in different contexts.
Believing that Erick Erickson is a principled guy is not the same as believing he is right about everything. I think he truly believes that it is for the best if the US meddles with Iran and follows Israel's lead into war. He probably truly believes the claims by the Israeli and US governments that Iran was building nukes any day now and we had to strike them. Erickson is not sitting in these classified intelligence meetings getting the details like Kent was, he just trusts the propaganda.
Same thing, do I trust Joe Kent on every single topic ever? Probably not, I don't think he would have say, great information on whether or not some local restaurant chain plans on expanding into North Dakota next month. But Joe Kent does (or at least did) have access to all classified information and discussions during his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. When he says something there, it's a lot more meaningful.
I have reason to believe the CEO of local restaurant chain on their expansion plans, but not on info regarding the Iran War. I have reason to believe the former head of counterterrorism on the Iran War, but not on the expansion plans of a local restaurant chain.
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If that's what he's doing, what's the problem? If anything I think it has been to the detriment of this place that arguments have come to be dominated by true believers of some cause, whose local feeling of success, identity and tribal interests are all tied up in "winning the argument" and not ceding any ground.
Tolerating bad faith actors inevitably ends in an equilibrium where bad faith is the norm.
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I can't help but notice that it's never people on the receiving end of these tactics that make these sort of arguments, only people like watching it being done to others. For the good of the forum, of course.
Of course it would look that way, because people who are "on the receiving end of these tactics" and don't mind it will not complain about it, and it is seemingly by design a type of "tactics" that is not apparent if nobody complains.
I guess you could counter that you would expect at least some scenarios where a "bad-faith" arguer argues against multiple people, one of them complains, and another says he is actually ok with it. There is a less universalist/more provocative explanation I could have reached for right away: the accusation is only ever levelled by our right-wing majority against presumed left-wing posters, and the right-wing majority broadly agrees that uppity left-wingers should not be welcome. There are right-wing posts that would seem to meet the same criteria of "bad faith" being applied here (switching allegiance between seemingly incompatible authorities, such as TERFs/Christians/old-school atheists, based on fit for a particular argument + an apparent expectation that the poster will look down on anyone who disagrees); it's just that nobody complains about them, so it never registers.
Maybe you think it makes a big difference that the left-wing "agitator" expects to see the people he will look down on in the responses, while the right-wing "agitator" expects responses of agreement and camaraderie and will only look down on abstract people far away and maybe one or two black sheep commenters. Making a criterion that essentially says the same sort of thing is only bad if people here disagree is a way to circlejerk reinforcement, though.
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That's also the case with people who are arguing in purely negative bad-faith, except that their local sense of identity is even more purely tied up in winning the argument. Darwin2500 arguing with MAGApede2016 is a failure mode, certainly, but so is this - the non-failure mode is when people bring sincere theses to their top-levels, after exploring and considering the evidence on their own, and then debate things with other users as individuals. Some people are too tribal to be psychologically capable of doing that, and some just don't find it fun enough, but it's possible.
It seems like youre defining this though through "person making arguments and points I don't like to see".
Like hell look at your actual complaint here
What is bad faith exactly here? That I'm not blindly partisan and don't consider Erickson (who I disagree with on a lot of topics) as trash whose opinions and views are unusable? I think he can be a very stupid man sometimes, but I also recognize he is a guy who is rather principled and has interesting input sometimes. This is exactly what good faith should be like!
Likewise I think Joe Kent has a number of idiot views. I also recognize that he is a former top official who left his influential and powerful position over his principles, and acknowledge that he has some value when he talks about stuff he personally dealt with in his role. I do not dismiss Kent's input on counterterrorism and US intelligence because he's for example, an anti vaxxer. A stance I literally think is hurting and killing children!
You're complaining about tribalism, and yet seemingly mad that I'm not tribal enough.
And also what tribe am I supposedly loyal to anyway? I'm a Reagan stan who advocates for individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, small government. Does this sound like a "blue tribe"? No. But it's also not the "red tribe" either, at least not anymore.
To a partisan who can't comprehend the world beyond tribalism, of course I look bad faith, because they can't grasp a person who doesn't participate in tribal partisanship and doesn't radically change their views based off what Current Party Leader decides.
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How do you define "bad faith"? If it's merely "doesn't truly believe the point he/she is arguing", then I think the term is loaded and the case that it's a bad thing has not been made, because trying to make the most convincing argument for something you don't actually believe is an interesting exercise, both for the person making the argument and for any bystanders. If it is more about the "bad-faith" arguer experiencing personal disdain for their interlocutors in the process of the exchange, I think it would capture a lot more posters here than just those who try on different positions for sport.
Defining bad faith is something like defining pornography, but when you spend enough time here you get a sense of what motivates whom. We've had an influx of low-quality, trollish posters doing the exact same schtick as MKC (AlexanderTurok is the last one I recall), though he's certainly the most literate of them so far. I suspect largely a meta-contrarian reaction to the 2024 Vibe Shift, as exemplified by Hanania/Karlin/Spencer/etc.; it'll pass like all the other motte fads ('member the civil war we were going to have in 2020? I 'member!)
When done as an exercise, that's entirely good-faith, and rationalists do that all the time. You should be able to do that! The key is as an exercise.
I think you're almost there. The key is that bad-faith posters are, psychologically, not posting to make arguments with some sneers attached. They're typing up arguments so that they are able to sneer. It's like the difference between someone who goes out to a bar and has a drink, and someone who goes out to a bar so that they can have a drink. Tribally-motivated sneering is pretty easy to spot because it's usually so ham-fisted, compared to a poster who puts real effort into his sneers.
Yeah, this seems like confirmation your usage of bad faith is along the lines of "when they disagree with me". Why do you think these writers aren't being serious when they say things that are unpopular? They could be way more financially successful grifting the populist vibes only saying a bunch of low quality stuff that everyone wants.
Or is it that possible perhaps that when people say things you don't like and don't agree with, maybe sometimes they believe those things? Maybe the world isn't filled with everyone secretly knowing that you're right and the only reason why someone like me or Hanania would have a different view is because we want to be contrarian.
You are welcome to pattern-match me to as many caricatures as you like. Apologies if I'm impugning any of your actual heroes, as opposed to Erick Erickson.
Ok for real, is this intentional trolling? This is a pretty big case of pot calling the kettle black if not, your whole thing here has been making up caricatures to assume about me.
Really, it's hard to see this as anything but trolling. You either don't grasp the concept of being able to take someone's ideas seriously without looking down on them or you're being intentionally daft. This is like Rationalist 101 shit. Scott Alexander, basically the guy of rationalist discourse illustrates this all the time and constantly references people who he disagrees with constantly like Freddie Deboer, Hanania or Tyler Cowen. That doesn't mean you view them as "heroes".
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"Bad faith" covers a broad spectrum, from straw men and weak men to gish gallops and gotcha questions to outright trolling.
Since we're not mind readers, it's necessarily a judgment call and if we don't mod someone who people think is obviously posting in bad faith, it's because our threshold for pulling the trigger is higher than the threshold of people being triggered.
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What part of magicalkitty's posting history makes you think they are trying to make the most convincing argument they can as an exercise, as opposed to the best arguments-as-soldiers for their latest culture war stand or poke at others, to be abandoned as irrelevant when the topic passes?
I love me a good jawboning and devil's advocacy, but there is a difference between treating debate as a sport and using debate to make sport of others. Faith is as good a distinction as others- after all, if the other person has no faith to believe you're interested in the sport as opposed to making sport of them, there's not going to be a sport with them because it takes two to debate in good faith.
One of the ways to demonstrate good faith, in turn, is to hold to present and maintain sincere positions. Sincerity in turn can be demonstrated not just by elaboration upon request- as in someone who sincerely wants to be understood as opposed to someone deliberately trying to instigate misunderstandings and conflict- but also by maintaining consistency across iterations. You can absolutely provide devil's advocate / steelman positions distinct from your own position, but only if you actually have a position of your own.
To my knowledge, magicalkitty has denied being darwin / guesswho/ whatever other alts that person had. But Darwin was a bad faith interlocuter par excellence, and he had his own history of defending or deflecting accusations of his bad faith arguments on the grounds of 'just trying to adopt a position he didn't believe.' That was the demonstration, not defense, of his sort of bad faith.
The counter to that Darwin-esque behavior, in turn, is pressing the person to make clear their sincere position, and seeing if / how they either directly answer it or try to wiggle out of that challenge.
You can make whatever vague accusations you want, they're practically unable to be disputed because they're vague and meaningless.
But if you're going to claim I'm unreasonably inconsistent in my values, maybe you can show it. Should be easy to provide obvious and nondebateable examples if you aren't just making things in your head. There's plenty of deep principles I've said I support that you could look for me being hypocritical on too!
I say I believe in free trade, laissez-faire capitalism, individualism > collectivism, that people who complain about the modern world are typically just historically illiterate, that government should generally be small and stay out of people's lives (and that government oppression differs significantly in severity from "social oppression" which I don't care about as much because government claims the monopoly on violence), and that people should generally have near maximal freedom including doing things to themselves that others think is bad or unhealthy like drugs. Or whatever else.
Your choice, should be easy after all.
Given the phrase "he had his own history", it seems you are implying that I also have some big history of "just trying to adopt a position I didn't believe". So again, a specific allegation against me that you should be easily able to show right?
Right??! It should super easy to show all the times I've said I don't have any belief in the things I've said and are just being a devil's advocate on things I don't think at all or see logic in.
Cause certainly I've done that, you wouldn't just make things up I hope. Would be really bad faith to just make shit up about someone like that.
There's nothing particularly vague about my view of you. I think you regularly exhibit many of the not-late Darwin's worse tropes in your posting style, regardless of whether you are another sockpuppet of his or not.
This includes his propensity to fight the culture war by fronting a position only to drop or even deny it when inconvenient for the current culture war. Darwin also had a habit to quibble that he never did such a change even when provided past evidence, invite people to engage on his framing of the issue, and then ignore their actual position (and, routinely, follow-up posts' positions).
Like, say, taking a post on ways to counter Darwin-esque evasiveness and demonstrating a difference from Darwin-esque tactics, and then claiming that it is a personal accusation. And then challenging that the reasonableness of such a personal accusation should be demonstrated reasonable through past history to be pulled and cited. A history review which has nothing to do with demonstrating the good faith in arguments provided as a way to distinguish good and bad.
That is very much the sort of implicit accusation and argument deflection Darwin liked to pull.
I invited you to provide some of this unexplainable hypocrisy I apparently do if it's so common. I invite you to do it again. Should be easy.
Wait was it not about me?
Then why did you say
Is there another person with a name like this you were actually referring to? It sure seems like your comment was about me first and foremost!
Now I don't know who you're talking about still, but you do realize "we couldn't provide any actual proof with this other guy either" is a very unconvincing argument to be making. But hey, I realize I'm actually just the completely unrelated third person because the "magical kitty" you were referring to was apparently someone else.
I don't normally report comments but I'm definitely going it here. This "I'm not talking about you, I just said your name multiple times" gimmick doesn't have a good explanation beyond actual bad faith. Extremely childish, reflect on yourself.
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I'm not gonna lie dawg, I've read this entire exchange and I'm 1) incredibly confused and 2) completely unconvinced Magical is Darwin or adjacent to Darwin (also confused who that is, but assuming a troll)
You've accused them of being a bad faith argument shifter here to troll but produced 0 evidence of this despite claiming it exists...
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I don't see a lot of object-level opinion overlap between darwin and magicalkittycat. One example: Darwin was constantly pushing idpol and I haven't seen that from magicalkittycat.
Hence the Darwin-esuqe, as opposed to Darwin-specific. It was always the style of argument, not merely the position, that made Darwin bad faith.
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My increasingly regular agreement with you on forum culture is starting to feel like the Franco-Ottoman Alliance of themotte. Allah Allah!
I'm not sure how I resemble that remark, but I feel like I should be offended by the comparison!
The joke was, specifically, that you and I have very different styles of thought but agree on something strategically key. I like the Turks and have been known, in unguarded moments, to give grudging praise to the French.
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Has it? I thought it was WMDs in general, rather than specifically nukes, and specifically that they hadn't fully thought through the possibility that Iran would be more concerned with maintaining regional status/deterrence via ambiguity about their programs/stockpiles than that they'd be concerned about foreign intervention.
What other WMDs could they be worried about? Did Iran make hantavirus?
Not hantavirus per se but biological weapons do exist, yes, along with chemical and radiological (the latter being distinct from a nuclear weapon). I believe Iraq had previously used chemical weapons during wars, at the very least.
There's some evidence that Iran developed a small chemical weapons program during the latter years of Iran-Iraq but found it ineffective. The US government, as part of its support for Iraq, blamed Iran when Saddam gassed the Kurds. Anyways, chemical weapons are a meme; the US wouldn't have destroyed its stockpiles if they were worth using for a serious military. And unless you think Iran has mega biolabs capable of creating another pandemic, biological weapons are no real threat either.
I think that you are oversimplifying things. The utility of chemical weapons depends a lot specific conditions. For example, they were used a lot on the Western Front in WW1 (though they did not lead to a military breakthrough), while they saw little to no combat use in WW2, not because Hitler was a nice guy who would never stoop so low, but because his blitzkrieg tactics did not require area denial.
So CW depend on doctrine, and doctrine is not something which you can just pick. The Reichswehr could not simply have invented the blitzkrieg, they lacked the vehicles to pull that off. The US military is very long on equipment and rather short on atrocities. They are highly mechanized (which means that CW for area denial are less useful to them), but any war they join is likely to be a voluntary overseas engagement, and they have an electorate back home which tends to get upset over atrocities. For Assad and his ilk, the calculation is different. He did not have the mobility to do blitzkrieg, but he also did not have to consider what his electorate could stomach.
If you are not trying to achieve a tactical objective, but the goal is to spread terror, then chemical weapons are probably 10x as effective per death than bombs are, and radiological weapons might be 100x as effective as plain old explosives. That Japanese cult could have achieved the same death toll of their infamous Sarin attack by throwing a few pipe bombs into a crowded subway car at a fraction of the operational complexity of synthesizing a nerve agent. But if they had done that, their attack might not even have made the top spot in international news, and would long have been forgotten outside Japan.
It's the same as dirty bombs. The radioactivity from a dirty bomb will not, realistically, cause particularly many cancer cases. It will, however, cause an absolutely absurd amount of panic, and I mean that both in the literal sense and as an intensifier.
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Chemical weapons are ineffective against actual militaries, the Reichswehr spent the latter half of the great war figuring that out. They're effective against mobs of unarmed protestors, which is who Assad actually gassed- but they're less effective than munitions(which Assad did not have enough of, he was filling barrels with oil and lighting fuses before pushing them out of helicopters). They're not great for targeting villagers, but Saddam didn't run a militarily optimal regime. People who can afford better(chemical weapons are cheap), do.
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What even is going on around Iran? Haven't seen anything crop up in my feed for the past 2-3 weeks, which I'm taking as a sign that things have died down even though there's no official end to the hostilities. Is it just a double blockade now, with both sides playing chicken?
As far as I can tell from various third worldist twitter accounts who post about the conflict 24/7, the US has allegedly sent Iran a proposal to end the war, and Iran is yet to respond. I feel like I've read similar things 5 times in the past few weeks.
If someone has similar pro USA or pro Israel accounts, please link for comparison. I'm not engaged enough with the topic to see fact from cope anymore.
Most of the fake scoops have been from Barak Ravid of Axios. He is Israeli so one would expect his "scoops" to be for the purpose of advancing Israel's interests, but from my POV it looks like he's the Trump administration's mouthpiece for market manipulation leaks.
Which is odd, because his previous credibility with scoops has been impressive. Either one of his reputable sources is playing him, or he chose to cash in his credibility now for some reason.
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This is a fairly pro-Israel and USA account: https://x.com/Osint613
This is a summary from a Fox news person of this week: https://x.com/LucasFoxNews/status/2052661509642432875
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There's a cycle where oil prices go up, Trump makes an announcement that they're "very close" to a deal and that there's a 10/14/9/12/23/746-point plan that's on the table, the details of which are never disclosed, oil prices go back down slightly, then something happens that makes it clear Iran is nowhere near ready to sign a deal, people start firing and blaming the other side, and oil prices start to go back up. Unfortunately for Trump, oil prices and gas prices are directly correlated, since the former are based on speculation about the supply in a month's time, and the latter are based on current supply and demand. So while oil prices have fluctuated gas prices have been steadily going up. In my neck of the woods, within the course of a week they jumped from $4.19/gallon to $4.99/gallon; they were a little over $3/gallon at the time the war started. Some of this may be a switch to the more expensive summer blend, but that happens every year and the price doesn't jump that much.
The only time Trump's actions had any effect on the actual price of gas was when the initial ceasefire was announced, when they dropped by about a dime before continuing their march upward. The reason I'm focused on gas prices here is because this is the only reason the war has any political salience. If gas prices stayed the same most people wouldn't give a shit about the war because it was something happening halfway around the world that didn't have any immediate effect on their lives. But keeping gas prices low is important here, because not only does everyone have to buy a lot of it but it's the only such product where there one is constantly bombarded with signs advertising the price.
Near me they dropped by $0.20/gallon over the past couple of days.
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The short version is that the US has announced and then called off a program to send vessels through the strait, during which brief window they successfully transited both warships and civilian vessels through the strait. (There were rumors that at least one Gulf State was not a fan of the escorted transit plan and pulled or threatened to pull basing access, and that's why the US flip-flopped). The US also blew up a bunch of Iranian military assets that tried to attack them or were otherwise deemed a threat, and interdicted several Iranian tankers that were trying to run the blockade with Super Hornets. Despite this of course the ceasefire is still on, we're assured!
The cynical part of me wonders if all of this hasn't been a bigger part of the news cycle because despite the embarrassing rumors that the USA and its allies got crosswise on how to approach the situation, or the humorous claims that the US attacking a bunch of Iranian assets was "just a love tap" and not a resumption of the conflict it is more or less good news for the Trump administration militarily; it suggests that Iran actually does not have a good grip on Hormuz if the US can escort civilian shipping and handily fend off attacks.
I wouldn't call 2 ships in 2 days evidence that Iran doesn't have a good grip on Hormuz. The problem for Trump is that Iran's actual ability to block the strait doesn't matter because commercial ships won't transit it so long as they say it's closed. All Operation Project Freedom proved is that they won't be able to get the 1600 ships that remain stuck in the gulf out before Trump's term ends at this pace, which requires a non-negligible amount of mobilization, let alone get the strait open to normal commercial traffic. In other words, the only thing likely to get the strait open is an end to the war.
It was more like 4 or 5, wasn't it? 2 tankers, 2 or 3 destroyers?
This does seem unlikely, but the incentive structure that seems to be forming (ships not participating in the scheme get hit) would work to Trump's favor, if Operation Project Freedom was something we were doing, which it isn't, unless of course it is (I dunno I haven't checked the news this afternoon).
Fundamentally I think this is correct. But it does appear that the US has a substantial military ability to protect tankers going through the strait. And there were, as I seem to recall on earlier Iran threads, strong suggestions otherwise. So I think it's interesting, both militarily and from the perspective that it theoretically allows the US to, however marginally, ease the constraints on them, while maintaining the constraints placed on Iran.
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Apparently a South Korean owned ship had gotten hit.
Which highlights an issue here for any long term plan, the US basically has to succeed every single time they want to escort any ships in and they have to spend tons of resources for a relatively small amount of traffic. Iran would just have to get a good strike in once to up the danger again and make people skittish to cross even under escort.
Worth noting that the Namu, as I understand it, had been in the Gulf since the start of the war and was not attempting to transit the straight under US protection when it was hit. Apparently was instead anchored offshore when it was struck. It also doesn't seem clear that Iran actually hit it (at least intentionally – apparently they denied the claim they had attacked it.)
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Because this is Israel's possible last chance to use America as a beatstick on Iran for at least a generation or two. I think Israelis call it mowing the lawn with Palestinians, this must be like getting a contractor to trim the trees. I also try to finish eating the old food in the fridge as it gets closer to the expiration date, Netanyahu's reasoning may be similar.
Democrats and younger Republicans are turning neutral to anti-Israel. Since pro-Israel US politics is increasingly associated with older Republicans, a Republican president right now is the best chance to cash in on all the AIPAC lobbying investments while there are still pro-Israel democrats in office. Now or never.
Netanyahu may have hoped for the IRGC to be fully wiped out and for Iran to be occupied by the US, but this is probably the minimum expected result. At least Israel will be relatively safer for a few years, at which point they will be stronger and possibly able to deal with Iran by themselves.
Always keep the expendable chaff on the front line to soften up the enemy before the real battle starts.
I can not speak for the Republicans (or for the Americans at all, really), but while I was never a fan of Netanyahu, I was willing to give Israel a bit of slack to crush Hamas after Oct 7. Unfortunately, Netanyahu displayed a total indifference towards civilian lives. Personally, my attitude these days is that it is sad that the religious nutjobs in the ME want to murder each other, but we can't really prevent them from doing so and should just stay the hell away from them.
I think this is going to backfire badly for him. I would claim that the natural attitude of most Americans towards Israel and the ME in general is one of indifference. Sure, some might prefer Israel holding Jerusalem for end-time prophecy reasons, and others might really prefer a two-state solution (and even be in denial about what kind of murderous thugs Hamas are), but Israel has not been a dominant topic in US politics. This was a great environment for AIPAC to work in -- their support could certainly buy a candidate more votes than it cost him in die-hard Palestine supporters.
Trying to starve Gaza made a lot of people care more about Israel, but still not to the point of being unsalvagable. Trump's war on behalf of Israel will make Israel support a prime CW hotspot for the coming years.
Israel's strategic situation without Western support is not all that great. Sure, it is somewhat tolerated by the Sunni's because they have a common enemy, which is Shiite Iran, but my take is that most of the Sunni population does not like Israel very much, which for now does not matter because they can't really vote in another king. They have a population of 10M, e.g. roughly that of Cairo alone. Sure, they have by far the best tech in the ME, but even that depends on Western pipelines, they can hardly maintain a cutting edge weapons platform for anything from submarines to stealth bombers by themselves.
Oct 7th must have triggered the policy of "never let a good crisis go to waste".
I think the worst that happens to Israel from the US is that some aid gets cut, so they have buy more weapons out of pocket. I don't think an arms embargo is on the table because there are too many senators still beholden to AIPAC, for now.
American public can still change their mind and become indifferent over Palestinians, especially if Islamic terrorism gets newsworthy again. In fact, I expect at least one sizable left-leaning media outlet to be bought to support Israel, like how Politico was purchased by Axel Springer. It would emphasize shared struggle against terrorism to try to divide the left flank of democrats.
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I feel like Israel has really squandered their position. They've had total dominance and Western support for 50 years and been unable to forge a lasting peace. Mostly based on the idea they could keep a subjected Palestinian population indefinitely.
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Ok, minor correction. The 'We need to support Israel to bring on the end times because the prophecy requires Israel hold Jerusalem' is not very common in the red tribe. These guys are seen as weirdos sorta like mormons, seventh day adventists, Christian scientists, etc.
The typical zionist church in the US- and this attitude is legitimately very common in the red tribe- teaches that God will carry out retribution against those who do not protect the Jews from persecution. This is a different position, one which doesn't care very much about Israeli territorial expansion and may even have sympathy for Gazan civilians- but also isn't willing to see Israel fall.
Hey, that's a interesting nuance I wasn't aware of, about protecting the Jews from persecution. What branch of Christianity did this develop from? Was it promoted by Zionists after WW2, or was it something older? Did it exist in Germany during Hitler's rise?
Knowing this, I'm mystified why Israel even attempts to court red tribe support if it's already a common attitude and religiously ordained. Israel should be courting the blue tribe to make sure they control both parties..
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In Chess the pawns go first.
I feel like this is more like a wild queen's gambit, if you were told by the referee at the start of the match your queen would be removed from the board after 20 total moves played. Might as well damage your opponent as much possible.
Got me missing the xmen movies though, might have to do a full rewatch.
The worst portrayal of magneto was in X-men 2,3. Just dreadful.
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Opening repertoire’s were always my weakness originally and it was where my deficiencies showed, but in end games I was always rock solid and had near machine optimal moves. I always preferred the Ruy-Lopez. I also liked to emulate Dubov playing the Tarrasch but my calculation was never as complete or precise as his. Watching him play is beautiful, despite my style being wholly antithetical to his own.
I was curious to see if Yagiz Kaan could steal one from Magnus or at least draw him, since he’s now the youngest 2700 ever to play the game; but Magnus never loses endgames. It took balls to see such a young kid so eager to swim out to the deep end of the pool. You could tell he realized the single blunder he made where it was lost for him. My boy’s been taking our people to the Promised Land for nearly 20 years, #VikingPower. Chess belongs to the North, 💪 👊 ⛪️ 🇳🇴 🇸🇪.
But I’m proud of Yagiz. Kid’s got a bright future and I look forward to watching his games.
Ruy Lopez is the way my dad taught me to play. It's my opening as white far too much, to the point it's a crutch and probably weakens me severely playing black.
Never heard about Yagiz until now, but being so young there's no way he doesn't get better unless he has a mental breakdown or something.
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Start with two simple facts:
Iran has some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Easily extracted, light crude, no fracking, no complex processes or tech required, almost (but not quite) Saudi level cheap to extract at well below $15 /bbl
Iran also has the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, huge solar capability which has been successfully tested, and plentiful hydroelectric power which also provides ~15% of supply.
So why is this a country that needs “peaceful nuclear power”? Even if you disregard all the extensive reporting, everything said by every western government or Israel, every leak, all of the scientific resources poured in, the underlying hostility of the Islamic Revolution towards Israel and some other countries and so on - Iran needs peaceful nuclear power less than almost any other country on earth. There is no domestic / energy supply problem in Iran that nuclear power could possibly solve. Even if Iran wanted a nuclear power station, they could import fuel rods wholesale rather than enrich themselves (like many nations with nuclear power but no nuclear programs).
You would have to be unfathomably credulous to believe that Iran has any reason to spend (waste) large amounts of money on enrichment for civilian nuclear power generation for no reason. It is obvious that the program is for weapons, and Joe Kent is a liar. There is no logical counterargument and there cannot be, the only reason for Iran to have a nuclear program is for weapon purposes.
But Iran had a promising nuclear medicine program that required enrichment. It exported radiopharmaceuticals to neighboring states. They need Mo-99/Tc-99m for cancer imagining. It is a top 3 producer of Tc-99m. They need to produce 90% of their domestic medicine because sanctions. They’ve been shouting about this since 2019 and the answer “sorry, all those kids with cancer have to die without treatment” is obviously not satisfactory.
Why did sanctions get put on Iran in the first place?
Succinctly: wealthy and disloyal pro-Israel Americans lobbied Trump to get rid of the Iran deal, because spending the blood and treasure of Americans for the safety of Israel is desirable to them, motivated by a mix of nationalism, racism, and religion. And you can hardly fault them! If I could pressure loads of Israelis to die and waste trillions of their own dollars to expand American hegemony, I would do the same. (Of course, they would respond to this by ensuring I have no influence.)
As a follow-up question when do you believe sanctions against Iran started to be imposed?
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As I understand it, you can absolutely produce Tc-99m with LEU rather than HEU. Is it optimal? No. But any explanation for Iran's enrichment other than nuclear weapons requires them to be insanely unoptimal for zero reason, so at least this would be unoptimal for a good reason.
You're also introducing a weird chicken-and-egg situation. If the reason they have a sketchy nuclear program is for medicine production, which they ony need because they've been sanctioned for having a sketchy nuclear program...
Yeah, they went out of their way to signal their goodwill by keeping enrichment levels below 3.67% during the Iran Deal.
So you claim that they get to 60% in 10 years?
I think you can get to it in months from 3% if you have the capabilities of Iran, but this is a double moot point: DNI + five eyes says no desire to build one (no whistleblower has said otherwise), DNI says destroyed in Operation MC Hammer (sub-operation can’t touch this). Maybe even a triple moot point because of the fatwah, a quadruple moot point because it would be an irrational decision for them to ever aggressively launch a nuke, and a quintiple moot point because Israel is an aggressive power (increasingly religiously extremist at that) in the Middle East with nuclear weapons that aren’t inspected.
And when I buy couple of tonnes of peroxide and acetone it is because I really like to get my nails done and I am very clumsy and always have road rash on my knees.
I think the question could be delegated to the intelligence-gathering of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. They would make sure that the rumors of your nail-polishing habits aren’t being disseminated by a company that produces clip-on nails.
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What is the point of having 60% enriched if not for weapons? I’m not arguing they don’t need them, or they shouldn’t be allowed to have them, or anything else, I’m just saying that they obviously want to retain the ability to create them very quickly if necessary at the least, and that counts as ‘wanting nuclear weapons’. Kent is saying they don’t want them, which is very different from admitting they do but justifying it. The unspoken ‘or else’ part of Obama’s Iran Deal (which I don’t think Trump should have broken) was implicitly an admission that the enrichment was ultimately for military purposes.
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I think that most civilian nuclear programs were subsidized by their government sponsors with more than a passing thought about the military implications. I am not a nuclear engineer, and it might be an urban legend, but I have heard the claim that nobody uses thorium reactors because they are less useful for weapon manufacturing.
It seems obvious that Iran wants to be in a situation where they can quickly switch from a civilian program to a weapons program.
And quite frankly, the Iranian regime would have to be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon. At the moment, they are in a situation where Israel and the US bomb them whenever they feel like it, and they have little ability to retaliate and cause similar damage in Israel (though interdicting Hormuz is working very well for them). They would fare much better under cold war rules, where both sides will use proxy forces to fight the other and avoid a direct confrontation.
I think that for the most part, civilian nuclear programs are mostly unrelated to weapons programs.
I will say that the US order of things was kind of insane: nuclear bomb -> nuclear submarine reactor -> civilian reactor.
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Like a lot of infrastructure, it's dual use. Iran is a sovereign nation and can spend money on whatever it believes is in its strategic interest, as long as it abides by its international commitments.
That begs the question though, if Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapons for decades, why don't they have them already?
From Iran's perspective, they are next door to a hostile nuclear power with illegal nuclear weapons. Iran knows that they won't get the same special dispensation from the international community, so they have to try to ride the line of maintaining some form of deterrent without ending up as an international pariah like North Korea. Historically that has meant having a robust civilian nuclear program, and then using their degree of further enrichment as a bargaining chip. That was the whole point of JCPOA - Iran's breakout time would be regulated through limits on enriched uranium stockpiles and centrifuges in exchange for diplomatic normalization and sanctions relief. These sorts of negotiations have been going on for decades with no prospect of Iran actually producing nukes, despite Israel's constant claims to the contrary. That's my understanding of Joe Kent's statement about IC reporting - he was saying that there was no indication that Iran was planning to break this holding pattern and try to actually produce a nuclear weapon.
From a game theory perspective a way to think about this I suppose is that they are deliberately giving away the information that they are incapable of performing a first strike, but maintaining the potential capability for a delayed second strike. That adds significantly more risk to an Israeli first strike without incurring the full diplomatic consequences of having nuclear weapons. The issue is that the potential for nukes in weeks/months is not the same as having nukes ready to launch - I highly doubt they would have risked a decapitation strike on Iran's top leadership if there was the prospect of immediate nuclear retaliation.
From America's perspective the old status quo was fine - or arguably even beneficial because it discouraged Israel from doing anything too disruptive. The American interest here is essentially just "don't fuck with the oil supply" and by that metric, this conflict is a complete own-goal.
Israel is also a sovereign nation, and NOT a member (unlike Iran) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Okay, I'll be more precise - Israel is not a recognized nuclear weapon state ratifier or acceder under the NPT, but still possesses nuclear weapons. That puts them in the same category as North Korea, which followed the agreed-upon withdrawal procedure and is also not bound by the NPT.
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Sure, but everyone else can take notice and make their own reactions accordingly. America (current iteration) and Israel don't like the prospect of them having nukes, so bombing them into the stone age would be an equally valid exercise of those countries government power under the "strategic interest" theory of governance.
It wasn't and hasn't just been Israel. It was a consensus western position that they were seeking nukes until Europeans soured on GWB over Iraq. Was a consensus American position until the Obama bros decided Israel was a colonial state that needed to be eradicated, and remained a consensus opinion on the American right through Biden's presidency. It still largely is with only some super online folks deviating from it over the Israel question.
But like, objectively, they enrich uranium whenever they can, they have crazy leaders who are willing to, and have now been, blown up over enriching uranium. Iran having any uranium is objectively bad for the world, you only don't think that if you hate Israel or America more than you care about the prospect of a mushroom cloud in a major city sometime in the next 10 years.
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Counter - They had a very real need for nuclear weapons. As a non-western nation in a western world having the can’t fuck with me card was viable.
Maybe they should have given up some other geopolitical aims that put them at odds with Israel but actually gotten nukes a long time ago.
Sure, you can argue about why they might want them. But the idea they don’t want them is laughable.
Can confim - Having nukes is great!
They have one negative. In Armageddon your country is basically guaranteed to get nuked.
Chile might get ignored.
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You reidentifying with your ancestral homeland (since I don’t think nukes have done much good for Britain) somehow reminds me of the fact that, perhaps moreso than anyone else (even the English! Even the Indians!) Pakistani elites really do have a deep, abiding contempt for their own domestic poor. I think the only time I encountered more was during a long conversation with an elderly Jamaican academic.
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Yeah, there's no way that strike on Iran's top leadership would have been approved if they had nuclear weapons. Blowing up the top layers of the chain of command is too risky when you don't know who's going to end up with the launch codes, and what they are going to do with them. Just the existence of nuclear weapons alone is a powerful deterrent to regime change attempts.
They could have done one or the other. Build the nuke to back off foreign intervention or play regional hegemon games. Doing both brings the US into the game.
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This seems like it's not so much a counter as a concession?
Sure. But I also think a little different in implying that their nuke plans had valid reasons. The issue is they played regional hegemon games and always floated nukes. If they had not played games but had nukes for security while geopolitically playing more like N Korea it would be fine. The combo is very bad for other players.
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Sure, but that's a concession that they're working on nuclear weapons, or at least breakout capacity, and this is a country with a hyper-antagonistic foreign policy, that meddles in neighbors constantly, funds terrorism, etc. It's very reasonable to be opposed to their nuclear ambitions.
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The number one fossil fuel producer in the world is the US which is also the number one nuclear producer.
Russia is the third largest fossil fuel producer in the world and has over the past decade been the number two country in building new nuclear.
UAE has fossil fuels as a main export yet has built a large nuclear power plant.
Sure, and the US is also a nuclear weapons state. Anyway, the question is not the total fossil fuel production but rather what's produced versus what's needed.
I'm pretty sure that the argument being made is that (1) Iran has far far more fossil fuel reserves than what it needs for domestic energy consumption; and (2) Iran claims not to be developing nuclear weapons; therefore (3) Iran has no need to enrich Uranium.
Neither (1) nor (2) applies to the United States.
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Both the US and Russia very much were initially developing nuclear weapons from the outset, so they kind of prove my point here (the civilian sector was in some ways a byproduct) and in any case in the early days of the atomic age there was a lot of uncertainty about capability and the US was much more reliant on imported oil and it was theorized that nuclear might become far cheaper than it did (see the “it won’t even be metered” quotes from the ‘60s). The UAE’s nuclear power is largely about domestic politics because they’re governed in many ways semi-independently and 5/7 Emirates actually have no oil (almost all of it is in Abu Dhabi).
Lastly, the key developmental measure here isn’t “owning a nuclear power station”, it’s “enriching uranium allegedly for civilian nuclear power purposes”. The UAE doesn’t enrich its own uranium. The whole fuel rods are shipped from South Korea and then installed. So the situation is very, very different. And again, Iran is very poor compared to the UAE; there is no reason for the huge investment in its enrichment program if not for weapons.
Anyway, I am pretty confident that Iran could work out a deal where (1) it turns in all its enriched Uranium; (2) it destroys all of its enrichment facilities; (3) energy grade fuel rods are shipped in from South Korea or whatever; and (4) they are carefully monitored by international observers. If Iran has no interest in a weapons program, that would be a pretty good deal. But of course they wouldn't voluntarily agree to that, because they desperately want nuclear weapons.
As a side note, I'm also pretty confident that there is near 100% correlation between (1) people who deny that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons; and (2) people who hate Israel. Yes, this is bulverism, but I think it's worth keeping in mind the source of peoples' delusions.
I'd heard "however much free uranium you need to run your plants if you dismantle your enrichment facilities" was indeed an offer prior to the shooting (that was refused), but of course, it's nigh impossible to tell what anyone has actually put on the table, it seems.
I agree in the sense that in situations like this people have a tendency to lie about what was offered and what was refused. Each side wants to spin things so that it appears reasonable while the other side appears unreasonable.
That being said, Iran has a track record, as does Israel. For many years now, Israel has had uneasy peace with Egypt and Jordan and has refrained from military strikes against them even though Israel has more than enough military strength to do pretty much whatever it wants to either or both of those countries. At the same time, Iran has been aggressively and viciously attacking Israel (and Jewish people in general) by means of proxies for decades now. Its leadership regularly leads chants of "Death to Israel," etc. Even though it could easily have the same uneasy peace as is enjoyed by Egypt and Jordan.
With this context, I am reasonably confident that Iran was presented with reasonable offers and refused them. With "reasonable" meaning a deal along those lines.
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Both the US and Russia are nuclear powers.
The UAE is not enriching nuclear fuel domestically, but importing it from the US.
https://www.framatome.com/medias/framatome-and-enec-sign-nuclear-fuel-supply-agreement-to-diversify-and-strengthen-uae-clean-energy-security/
And why not refine it yourself if you can? Being dependent on imported fuel is a risk and a cost.
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I think looking at this from a meta perspective is interesting. It seems that to evaluate the wisdom Iran war comprehensively, we need three things:
The first two are by definition not known not right now. The last one seems to be only factually resolvable by classified information, but since we don't have that we have to rely on the dual heuristics of 'What figures do we trust?' and 'Do we trust the structure of the arguments made for/against the war?'. The answers to the indirect questions seem to rely on tribalism, especially the first. You have officials with similar arguing for both sides of this war, and for other security issues like everything surrounding Russia, and which officials general you give credence too tends to rely on which officials either match general your 'tribe' or best match/flatter general your personal ideology.
I bet if you took each personal who isn't directly involved in this conflict, and you had a list of that person's ideology and personal 'tribal' affiliation, you could 99% guess what their take on this war is and who they consider credible. Once everyone states their priors, there really isn't that much discussion to be had about Iran right now.
I think that this is giving in to epistemic helplessness.
Sure, the people in the intelligence community might have a better idea of what is going on, but they are not an alien superintelligence way beyond what an ordinary thoughtful person might notice.
If I go to the zoo and see a giant striped big cat in an enclosure, I will call it a tiger, instead of saying "that is probably some kind of animal, certainly a life form, but as a layman I should not have an opinion on its species when there are experts with PhD's in zoology who are much more qualified, and we should await the verdict of an expert panel and not make any assumptions about what kind of cat it is -- perhaps the zoo has painted stripes on a pony."
GWB's wars have certainly taught the world that a successful invasion can still be a disaster in terms of grand strategy. The reverse is not true, so we can certainly place upper bounds on the success of Trump's adventure from his lack of strategic success despite tactical dominance. As another analogy, if I observe a chef preparing a meal and it seems to go well, that does not mean that the meal will be tasty. But if I observe a chef yelling at the dough to rise already and threatening to pour a pound of salt into it while also setting off the fire alarm, that will very probably not result in a great meal.
The chef's spraying spittle could be flavoring the dough! Let him cook, he has a process, we don't have insight into his secret recipe as outsiders. The fire alarm gets the line chefs motivated, he has an unorthodox management style. I have every confidence that his pizza will be delicious and that he will be remembered as one of the greatest chefs of our country, up there with Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay. He took a long piss in the last pepperoni pizza I ordered and let me tell you, my extended family thought it elevated the whole experience.
In fact, I got together with some other enthusiasts and we booked a reservation to have him defecate directly into our mouths. It's a bit pricey but I'm pretty sure it's going to be worth it. My wife had some unkind words about it, paraphrased "emasculating", but I think it's actually very manly to receive man stuff from another man.
What is this contributing to the discussion?
Make your point without the performative snark.
Apologies.
The US is probably in a state of strategic failure on oil flow through Hormuz unless one of two undesirable options is chosen.
First is the complete surrender of the IRGC. Trump attempted this, but was not as successful as in Venezuela with the capture of Maduro. The Iranian state was more resilient and decentralized than anticipated. Iran is effectively 99% militarly crushed, but the threat of the 1% coming out of hiding is what keeps insurance rates high for oil tankers. These insurance rates and possible risk of loss of a tanker keep oil prices high, so Hormuz is de facto closed. If Iran can be 100% crushed, this is desirable, but unlikely without ground troop intervention.
The second option is massive concessions to Iran in return for peace. Allowing them to develop nuclear weapons and monetary reparations of some sort, like a toll. Trump is probably headed this way, unless he wants to preside over a defeat in midterms and a new oil price shock. The oil shock may be unavoidable, but the duration and severity can be mitigated if the oil starts flowing sooner rather than later.
Some of Trump's supporters believe that he has a plan for this situation, which cannot be disclosed to the public due to national security concerns. It is true that Trump has usually managed to extricate himself out of politically difficult situations. Other critics, like @quiet_NaN and myself, are a bit more skeptical that there is a good offramp with Hormuz that both prevents Iran from having further nuclear development, and also manages to open Hormuz in a way that shipping is mostly back to normal. Trump also has a time limit to resolve this situation - midterms and the end of his presidency. In less than 6 months, if gas prices stay elevated or push even higher, the republican party is likely going to suffer higher than expected congressional losses from typical midterm reversals. In 2.5 years at the end of Trump's term, if Hormuz is still closed, we might see the democratic socialists take power in the US.
The spice must flow!
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I think as a general rule I agree with you; people without intelligence clearance could tell Iraq was a Quagmire after a year for instance. At the same time, I think it's so early in Iran that it's hard to tell the long term impact. Especially since, lacking the intelligence our leaders have, we don't know how real or fake their nuclear accusations are.
This is where I think we have to fall back to our priors. I don't trust Trump, Neocons, or the Israeli right on having a foreign policy that benefits the US or the world so I'm naturally predisposed to dislike this war. I also don't trust their truthfulness regarding foreign policy facts, such as how advanced the nuclear program is, so I'm skeptical that Iran was aiming for building a bomb right now rather than aiming for the ability to build a bomb quickly. I also don't buy 'seriously not literally' as a communication strategy, so how this war has been communicated makes me skeptical of the enterprise as well. As a result of the above, the war seems like a bad idea to me and I don't trust any promises of victory. The epistemic uncertainty for me comes in that I don't know a lot of the relevant data, and I suppose it's possible in a year data could come out that shows this war was necessary and/or it actually worked out well for the world. I wouldn't bet on it though.,
Above sums of my opinion of the war. If you look at it, almost all of it is just flowing from my priors. It hasn't been updated in the past month; I don't think the events could've moved it. The flip side is if someone was predisposed to trusting the authorities I mentioned above, then their priors would make them like the war. My main point is that one's opinion of the war is more based on priors than anything else, so I think discussing priors is actually more fruitful than discussing the facts in this case.
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I find this type of claim infuriating, not just because I believe they're lying, but they don't even make an attempt to reconcile their claim with known facts, such as:
So we know that creating a HEU stockpile is expensive, and that literally the only use for such a stockpile is to create a nuclear weapon. Then the obvious conclusion is: Iran created the stockpile with the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon. Why else would they do it?
I would like to know how Joe Kent explain this away. Why did Iran invest so much into building a uranium stockpile, if not to ultimately build a nuclear weapon?
The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that Iran hopes to use it as a bargaining chip: it will give up its stockpile in exchange for America lifting sanctions against Iran. Maybe that's even the preferred outcome, over actually going through with building a nuclear warhead. But it only works as a bargaining chip if Iran is willing to go through with the threat, so that means they cannot be committed to not creating a nuclear weapon.
No it doesn't. You're jumping the gun by assuming Joe Kent is speaking the truth, when there is plenty reason to assume he's in fact lying. Nothing we know is inconsistent with the following statements:
The nukes might not be the only reason for the Iran war, or even the primary reason, but there is absolutely no reason to assume they weren't a reason for the war.
60% uranium is basically weapons grade, it only takes a little further enrichment to reach 90%. Iran easily has the technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles are a lot harder technically. This is 1950s technology.
So why haven't they? If they wanted nuclear weapons, with that stockpile of 60% uranium, they could simply acquire them.
Iran seems to want flexibility, they want some kind of deterrent capability without starting an arms race with Saudi Arabia or a disarming strike from Israel or America. But clearly the deterrent capacity of Iran's latent nuclear capability is insufficient to prevent a disarming strike.
This war is a massive own goal even in its backers own terms. It spurs nuclearization.
Iran has the capacity to complete nuclear weapons if they want to, and this has been true since the '90s at the very latest. What the Iranians want to do is sell their nuclear program multiple times, while maintaining the ability to quickly fabricate one if needed. Trump is trying to stop that cycle, which no other president has been able to do. Only time will tell if any of these projects will hold in the long term. It may have to be enough to set them back some period of time.
Either way, there's multiple win/loss conditions.
'sell' their nuclear weapons program?
Countries don't develop nuclear weapons (or latent nuclear capacity) as part of a commercial strategy, they develop them because they feel threatened or face some kind of strategic challenge.
Some Americans seem to have this idea that Iran was getting free money from Obama or various 'weak' administrations or that there's some kind of tension-raising economic routine going on. Not so! Obama returned some frozen Iranian funds, a pittance compared to past and future sanctions and the active subversion of the country by US and Israeli intelligence. Iran had to develop their own weapons industry, oil production facilities, car industry... they chose the hard road of sovereignty rather than beg for sanctions relief by capitulating to the US/Israeli camp. They didn't do those things because they were cheap or easy but because they felt they had no choice.
If Iran was principally motivated by avarice, they would act a lot more like the UAE or Saudi Arabia.
If the US is worried about money being taken for a ride by greedy and unscrupulous foreigners, look to sub-Saharan Africa, not Iran. Iran isn't a 'tricky negotiating' power but a 'directly extracts wealth forcefully' power, that's what they're doing in the straits of Hormuz and with the cables there.
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If they are going for bomb, why they aren't going plutonium route which is cheaper?
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No, it is also needed for naval reactors. They have to use highly enriched uranium in order to be small enough to fit on a boat.
Sort of absurd to think about, but it sure would be a pain in the ass if the US navy had to worry about fast attack submarines sneaking up on their carrier groups.
The French have been operating nuclear submarines with LEU for decades, so it's not exactly a hard requirement
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They don't have to, but the US submarines do. I believe the Russians and UK do, and therefore India as well. Not sure about France and China, though.
They'd be pretty useless to Iran, though, as they don't need boomers (sonce they don't have nuclear weapons, natch), and they don't need to transit significant distances at high speed. See also: why the Baltic/Nordic powers don't bother with nuclear.
That's all pretty much a moot point, though, since Iran hasn't even pretended that they were ever going to consider a nuclear propulsion program, so they can hardly use it as a fig leaf justification for enrichment.
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Somehow they misplayed the nuclear card. It was obviously to be a deterrent and some reason they thought it was always going to be better to be close than actually have them. The point of being close is to be able to finish them when you think American leader decides to significantly bomb you. But they didn’t get that done.
Iran had multiple contingencies to deal with a Bush or Trump invading. One was unleash Palestinian, militia, hezbollah hell on Israel and the region. The next was to close the Straight. And then you would have the bomb.
Oct 7 was dumb. It just United Israel to deal with shit. And then they actually did a really good job neutralizing various groups Iran was funding. Then shutting the straights ended up not being that big of deal for the economy. Especially the US. And then they didn’t build a lot of bombs before Israel and US started bombing them. I assume at this point they don’t have the equipment to finish them.
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The real answer is, of course, that there's a coalition of groups inside Iran who for various differing reasons* want nuclear weapons, or the appearance of nuclear weapons, or just conflict with the west generally and Israel specifically. Allied to all sorts of social, class, scientific and business interests. What this has produced is a kabuki theater of nuclear escalation and leveraging of the nuclear program as a diplomatic/political tool, which everyone is pretty sick of at this point. Which is why the nations in the region aren't raising much of a fuss, and why Iran is bombing them all. There's not even a single Iranian military, they have parallel organizations which are so heavily partitioned and currently attrited all to shit.
*nationalists who for obvious reasons see nuclear weapons as the basic requirement for big-boy international status and realpolitik military clout, which they do not currently possess, for an example. Millenarian suicidal religious nutters for another.
The precedent is Saddams pugnacious ambiguity about WMD, where signaling WMD potential was meant to keep other actors off his back while he, I dunno, tried to beat brain cells into Uday. The utility of having a WMD program in the pocket seems to be too tempting an ace to keep from developing, even if it meaningfully changes the strategy of the table if people have to consider hidden cards.
The precedent is also that if you don't actually have the goods, the US will eventually get sick of your shit, and right or wrong, is going to end your tenure.
Yes, that did end up being the find out phase after fucking around. Maybe Iran believes it was either hiding its fucking around better by pretending to cooperate with the JCPOA and 'new number who dis' to their proxies when they themselves were finding out, but its certainly decided that riding out the finding out phase is relatively painless compared to what Saddam encountered.
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The direct impetus for the air strikes was obviously the Iranian protests and the slaughter of thousands of protestors weeks before. Having the government of Iran be replaced by protestors who owe the success of their revolution to U.S. airstrikes is presumably a best-case outcome for the U.S. (and for Iranians), but Trump has varied between explicitly calling for regime change and minimalist goals regarding further destroying their nuclear program, probably in large part so that he can declare victory regardless of how things turn out.
When the protests were still ongoing Trump was supposedly hours from ordering air strikes against Iranian police/etc. to support the protestors but was talked down, supposedly in part by Netanyahu fearing retaliation before Israel was prepared for it. There was a lot of talk at the time about how this was a betrayal of the protestors, who he urged to take over the institutions and implied U.S. support but then didn't deliver while they were slaughtered. Meanwhile U.S. assets were moved into the region to support a better-prepared attack. By the time U.S. assets were in place the protests had been suppressed but Trump went ahead with the attack anyway. Since the attack both Trump and Reza Pahlavi have been explicitly urging the protestors to wait and it is unclear if Trump believes revolution is now futile, if he wants to do more work to weaken the regime before calling for protests to resume, or if he wants to keep his options open between some sort of agreement and attempting regime change.
These protestors were armed by the US and Israel. It was an armed insurrection backed by an enemy state. Iran had every reason to shut if down and it is far better to shut it down than turn into Syria. The casualty numbers are sold to us by the same people who lied about every other regime change war.
Is there an example of an acceptable insurrection that a host country wouldn't have every reason to shut down?
What about the one in Korea recently?
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I'm skeptical of this. Is there any source for this claim?
From the perspective of regime survival, I would agree -- regardless of whether the protestors were backed by an enemy state. If you are trying to argue that Iran's actions -- gunning down and executing protestors -- were morally justified, then I would have to disagree.
As much as you would like to ignore the context, the reality is that Iran has been relentlessly and aggressively making proxy war on Israel, and to a lesser extent the US, for decades now. For example by bombing a Jewish community center in Argentina. I'm skeptical that the US and Israel have been arming protestors, but even if they had, it would certainly be morally justified based on Iran's behavior. And Iran's leadership has no moral basis to oppose it.
Probably the most important piece of context is that Iran has always had -- and still has -- the option of an uneasy peace, such as what exists between Israel and Egypt.
The US attacked Iran in 1941 and then overthrew the government in 1953. In the 1980s it paid Iraq to invade Iran which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Since then the US has invaded a neighbouring country three times and launched to more wars in the past year against Iran. Israel helped jihadists take over Syria, a country that has friendly relations with Iran. The US and Israel has bombed Iranian embassies, flooded Iran with migrants and heroin, sanctioned Iran, shot down an Iranian airliner, assassinated plenty of Iranians and openly called for overthrowing the Iranian government.
This isn't Iran fighting a proxy war, this is Iran helping its neighbours in a justified way.
Iran wanted peace in 2001. The US refused it. The Iranians have tried to negotiate, and the US has murdered negotiators.
I'm skeptical of these claims as well.
Please provide backup for your claims that (1) the protestors in Iran were armed by the US and Israel; (2) the US attacked Iran in 1941 and overthrew the government in 1953; (3) the US paid Iraq to invade Iran; and (4) Iran wanted peace in 2001 and the US refused it.
Ok, so in your view, when Iran bombed a Jewish community center in Argentina, killing and injuring hundreds of people that was "Iran helping its neighbors in a justified way." Do I understand you correctly?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/us/politics/iran-israel-trump-netanyahu-mossad.html
Trump admitted he gave weapons to protestors:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/has-trump-confirmed-irans-claim-that-protesters-were-us-armed
Admittedly the war was more of a British thing at first but the US was clearly involved in the subsequent occupation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
The US overthrew a democratically elected leader and installed a brutal dictator.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-seven-muslim-states
Netanyahu and the neocons have been pushing hard for war against Iran. US politicians talk openly about overthrowing Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_relations_during_the_George_W._Bush_administration#State_of_Iran-U.S._relations_in_January_2001
Iran was warming up to the west after 9/11
One bombing in the 80s fundamentally doesn't matter that much when millions have died in the middle east.
Assuming this is correct, I take it you are unable to support your claim that Israel armed the protestors?
Ok, so you admit that you are unable to support your claim that the US attacked Iran in 1941?
Umm, what's your evidence that the US paid Iraq to attack Iran? I don't even see any hearsay on that subject in the article you link to.
Ok, just to be clear, your evidence that "Iran wanted peace in 2001. The US refused it." is your own (unsupported) claim that "Iran was warming up to the west after 9/11"?
Maybe it matters a little, maybe it matters a lot. But part of your Gish Gallop included this claim:
I'm just asking if this includes Iran's attack on the Jewish community center in Argentina. It's a very simple yes or no question. Why won't you answer it?
I like how you completely glaze over the definitive evidence for the '53 coup, which is what actually matters here.
No, he posted the evidence right below. Are you blind?
You're the one Gish Galloping by demanding infinite evidence and then refusing to budge an inch when said evidence is provided.
You need to prove that Iran did it, to start. But once again, he did answer it:
Again, do you have faulty vision? Do you suffer from severe brain damage? Is your IQ below the level of legal retardation? Are you suffering from severe inbreeding? Are you just trolling?
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You didn't address this question. It was their main point.
Can you support that claim?
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TIL Britain and the USSR are the US
Always has been.meme.jpeg
Only the Americans have agency. Anything done by the allies was because the Americans enabled them.
Based and america-pilled
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And anything done by enemies was because the Americans provoked them.
This man Americanas.
Though not as hard as those bold Americans who invaded Iran before Pearl Harbor.
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And Americans will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of their own this year.
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Those protestors were not armed by the US, Israel, or anyone else.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/has-trump-confirmed-irans-claim-that-protesters-were-us-armed
Mossad and CIA have been backing all sorts of groups to create chaos in Iran.
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My understanding is the US tried to arm the protestors, but the Kurds kept the weapons. The protestors were not armed.
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