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Notes -
Donald Trump Won the Iran War
From an essay endorsed by Pete Hegseth on twitter:
Critics say that Iran is winning because they now control the Straits of Hormuz. In reality it appears that trade in the Gulf is returning to pre-war levels as it risks the Straits or bypasses them entirely:
Critics say that the Iran War has driven America's allies to shake off American leadership. In fact we see the opposite:
America recently carried out strikes in Iraq, working with the Saudi military, to push out Iranian militias, and is now concluding multi-billion dollar business deals:
Meanwhile, how's America's blockade going?
Iran’s oil exports stall and Kharg Island idles under US blockade
It's possible that Iran has been unable to successfully sell it's oil for even longer:
Iran is still able to make money from oil tankers that left the Gulf during the last ceasefire and are currently in Asia, but that crude will all be sold soon and Iran will start to be squeezed even more, unless they come to a deal with the US or somehow engineer a military miracle.
Iran is facing inflation of ~87.9%, which is to say, the average Iranian has lost almost half of their wealth compared to this point last year:
How's Iran's Nuclear Program doing? The New York Times put out this report today concluding that Iran's program is "slowed but not stopped":
[https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-program.html](Trump Vowed to Thwart Iran’s Nuclear Program. Here’s Where That Stands.)
However, under the headline, here's where things stand:
Iran has enough nuclear material to manufacture 10 nuclear bombs? Wow, what are they going to do with it?
America destroyed Iran's capability to "convert or enrich" that uranium, and then locked the uranium that remains deep under collapsed tunnels that can be bombed again as soon as Iran tries to retrieve it.
The sites that were bombed last year appear to remain inoperable, which is to say that, after America bombed them, they have not been used.
(The New York Times then concludes that this is both a significant setback and also doesn't actually matter at all. Well, that's what I heard three months ago. I'm sure that three months from now, people will still be saying that Iran can build a nuke anytime it wants to, it just doesn't want to.)
So here's where we're at now:
Trump, Iran, and Oman are apparently on the cusp of announcing another deal to reopen the Strait. But it increasingly doesn't matter: Iran needs to make a deal because their economic crisis is so acute, while America and the rest of the Gulf can shrug it all off as increasingly a minor inconvenience.
Trump won. Trump was right from the beginning. The Iran war is below-the-fold news now.
Iran will never toll the strait, Iran will never bring the global economy to its knees, Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Iran cannot defeat America militarily or overcome the blockade. The Iranian regime will eventually fall, or make significant concessions, or surrender, or continue to limp along losing strength and relevance -- it doesn't matter which. Either way, Iran loses, America wins, the writing is on the wall.
Trump won. Iran lost.
This is hilarious to frame something created very recently as "unprecedented", no shit it is, the BOP has no precedent of anything to begin with. Add in that it's US led and basically controlled by Trump himself and it is literally just this meme when the deal fell through already anyway.
It's slightly more serious than the FIFA peace prize and really is a brilliant illustration of how far the goals here have to be stretched for even a semblance of "victory". Hamas still has their weapons and eventually people will stop counting the Trump chickens before they hatch. But this is the man also claiming the US has already won back in March already so I'm not sure why he's even bringing up old news here. Certainly 5+ months after the US winning bigly and the conflict ending, the results would speak for themselves right?
You’ve completely confused object and subject. The victory is the agreement to disarm Hamas, not that the BoP is the one announcing it. You can be skeptical of the deal if you want but ignoring the deal to attack the BoP is genuine SVO-SOV level confusion. “What did he mean by this?”
Fair point I misunderstood what it could be meaning there. Still by now when it comes to Trump a "deal" is not meaningful till we actually see it happen. Hamas still has weapons. I'll change my view on his handling of Gaza if it ever happens that Hamas is genuinely disarmed.
I'm reasonably optimistic but I agree that that's reasonable skepticism and it may be too soon to count it yet.
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Trump lost. Iran lost. America lost. The world lost.
Iran is suffering an acute economic crisis and is further away from acquiring nukes than it was before the war. But since there was never any demonstrable threat of Iran nuking anyone, this is a moot point. All we get is an economic crisis for 90 million people.
Iran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz is shrinking. But given the strait was open before the US attacked, this is a moot point.
Iran's military strength is waning. But since they were not a threat to anyone before the war outside of zionist expansion plans, this is a moot point.
Trade in the Gulf and across the global economy is continuing almost uninterrupted if we discount the disruptions in trade in the Gulf and global effects like fuel rationing in Asia and increased fuel prices globally.
America's leverage in the Middle East is growing, not shrinking. Which is bad news for the world considering the disastrous results of US interventions in the middle East and the complete failure of their foreign policy in the region. Which include but are not limited to the collapse of multiple countries, the refugee crisis in Europe, the formation of ISIS and the promulgation of global terror the likes the world had not seen since 9/11.
>America lost
>America’s leverage is growing
>This is bad news for everyone but America
What are we doing here what is the argument.
You can just say America is winning and you wish they lost because you’re on Iran’s side. That’s more respectable than whatever this is.
I'm adding the context you perpetually leave out to maintain your rhetoric. If America is winning a war that is of no benefit to anyone but zionists then I don't fully subscribe to the notion that 'America' is winning given the nature of the conflict.
Following that: when you narrowly define 'America' as just being a measuring stick for whether zionism is better or worse off, then you can say just about anything regardless of what is actually of benefit to American people.
How has the 25 year middle East adventure benefited Americans? Let's clarify some things. America in your context is just US foreign policy as dictated by zionists. No American person living an American life sees benefit from any of this. This is just money out of their pocket. The ZOG of America has more leverage in the middle east now. That's the actual extent of your definition of victory. In other areas, that operate on non-zionist assumptions, America is worse off along with the rest of the world.
That would be the opposite of what I am saying though. Beyond that I would not give a penny for what you think is respectable given your glee in cheerleading for this war.
Yeah if you make up novel definitions no one else shares you can try to claim to win the argument a priori.
Iran is one of America’s greatest geopolitical enemies and has been for decades. They take Americans hostage, bomb American bases, attack neutral ships and fund terrorist networks throughout the Middle East.
Basing the interests of a nation on the nationals that live there and what benefits them? Novel indeed.
Not a single one of those examples can stand under any scrutiny. Unless you define every nation that isn't a puppet to America as a geopolitical enemy. Which is coincidentally what zionists are wont to do.
Go ahead and put those examples under scrutiny then
They take hostages only to return them. Bomb army bases during wartime, sometimes giving a warning beforehand, attack neutral shipping as a last ditch defense deterrent and fund militia groups region wide as a response to decades of proxy wars and terror campaigns being waged against them and the entire Middle East. Principally by the US and Israel at the behest of zionists.
There is no ground for calling them an enemy of America unless you define America as an arm of zionism. As the continued actions the the US in the region are not in any way representative of the interests of American people and only make sense in the context of zionist ideology.
Yeah that's how taking hostages works
Correct
(!)
You're not arguing that Iran is not America's enemy. You're arguing that Iran is correct to be America's enemy.
It simply sounds like you hate America and want it to fail, but you don't want to come out in favor of bombing and kidnapping Americans.
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Iran running a temu sampson option shelling the entire region with missiles upon being attacked by israel and the US does indicate that they pose a military threat to their neighbors. And thats not counting their arming and training of militias everywhere
When Iran's neighbors ally with the people bombing Iran, shelter them in their countries, allow them to build bases and collect intelligence and sometimes even launch strikes from their countries then they're not neutral. Iran threatening to stop shipping and proportionally retaliate where they can is not a Samson option strategy at all.
Israel and American also arms and train militias everywhere. So do some of the Gulf states. Iran is doing nothing that a rational geopolitical actor wouldn't do in that environment.
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This is just the complete opposite of reality.
??? He went into this war going on about regime change and then that failed like a lead balloon... Then he tried to reopen the straits of Hormuz after Iran closed them. And that failed too.
Trump threw rocks at the bee hive and a bunch of people, Trump included are getting stung and you're like 'wow we've squashed the beehive's capacity to destabilize the region' unironically? At the small cost of the bulk of remaining US missile interceptors that'll take years to replace?
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
There is no trade in the Gulf! Nothing is crossing Hormuz. You even admit this with 'announcing another deal to reopen the strait' but ignore the fact that reopening the strait is only happening on Iran's terms since they control it - that's why they're supposedly gonna charge 7% in a toll according to these same deal negotiations. The Israelis are probably gonna try some more perfidy and wreck this. The farce will go on further.
Your whole thesis is epic-tier coping, twisting facts around to present them in the most flattering configuration no matter how hard they have to be tortured to do so.
There's nothing confusing about how to win the war. The US navy should move in, secure the straits and maybe Kharg Island too. They should destroy Iran's drone and missile forces (actually destroy them so they can't hit targets in Jordan, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia). Then they would defeat Iran's strategy, remove their leverage, allow trade to pass the straits irregardless of what Iran says. That would allow a good negotiating position. But America can't do this. They haven't done it! Why is that? Because American soldiers are whimpering sissy girlymen too afraid to get into a fight with this almost totally defeated enemy? Because Trump's a massive cowardly loser desperately afraid? Or because a sober assessment of risks and gains says 'they'd try, die and fail' so Trump and the military don't try that? I personally believe the latter.
US was escorting oil tankers through the straits even before the MOU and its subsequent collapse. Iran is not capable of exercising control over the Strait. All they can do is threaten to bomb and drone neutral merchant ships (and despite all their rhetoric they have done precious little of this).
Meanwhile, the US has Iran under blockade. It’s Iranian ports that are empty. America has the mouth of the Gulf bottled up — so what does it mean when ships are still transiting the gulf? It means that America is allowing traffic through.
Iran will never control the Strait and will certainly never be allowed to toll the Strait. Declarations of the opposite should be viewed with the same credulity we give Baghdad Bob announcing that Saddam will push the Americans back any day now.
I’ve been over this before in this thread but this is fake news. The two missile types running low are stockpiles of an old interceptor from the 90s, and test units of a new prototype being used on the battlefield.
I guarantee that America will continue to deploy interceptors as needed in Iran and across the world. As this happens you should consider how it is you came to believe fake news.
I’m afraid this reads more like cuck porn than an argument.
Your belief is that the American military can win any time it wants to, but simply chooses not to? Or that America knows deep down it would lose so that’s why it doesn’t even try? That’s not even remotely close to anything happening in the real world, that is an emotional reaction being projected onto world events.
In reality, Iran is weaker than ever, facing economic crisis, cannot control traffic through the Straits, cannot stop trade from rerouting around the Straits, cannot meaningfully damage the American military, cannot break the American blockade. Oil is barely more expensive than when the conflict started, contrary to all predictions that Iran would have the global economy by the throat and would bring oil to $200 a barrel. America, meanwhile, is totally unphazed.
You need to up your reading comprehension. I clearly said 'the latter'. That's why the US carrier group is lurking south of the straits, just outside the edge of Iranian anti-ship missile range. That's why US soldiers left their Gulf bases to hide in hotels before Iranian missiles demolished them.
If the US is so powerful and strong and the Iranians so weak, why not simply sail north, through the straits, stay there for days and weeks escorting shipping and show everyone there's nothing to fear? Why haven't they done this? That would immediately ease the insurers concerns and sort everything out.
America has been escorting ships through the strait.
America is constantly operating within range of Iranian missiles
You seem to be advancing a weird sadomasochistic view of war where America not going out of its way to increase risk means it must be running scared.
The fact that Iran can’t kill American soldiers and can only hit empty bases is a good sign that they lost.
As I understand the strait did not need American escorting until the decisive victory of America. If true, then for how long does America need to expend extra effort escorting ships through the strait before it stops looking like America gained something?
The entire global supply chain is held up by the implicit promise that America will escort merchant vessels. Iran is now threatening neutral vessels, so America is escorting them.
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The whole point of using the cuck language is to expose the contradiction in your argument.
So why not sail through to show exactly who controls it? Why is anyone talking about Iran getting 7% tolls, or splitting profits with Oman, or charging 1-2 million per ship? Nobody would do this if there was a carrier group sitting right there in the straits. Why are there drones hitting ships? Why is traffic crossing the straits at 2% of prewar average? Why are they effectively closed if the US is so powerful and Iran so weak? What the hell was going on with Yemen a couple years back? Why did Trump start blaming his allies for not sending their navies to the straits back in month 2?
Why are there drones attacking US shipping in Suez last week for that matter?
You said yourself that all Iran could do was plink away at a few cargo ships and they barely did much of that... Are we to believe that a US navy carrier battlegroup is weaker in battle than a few civilian cargo ships? This sounds like an easy win! What kind of coward shrinks back from a few measly drones? Protect the shipping, save the day.
You keep saying that America is so powerful. But when it comes to showing that power and reaping rewards, mysteriously it becomes 'going out of their way to increase risk'. It's just cope. When Communist China was threatening Taiwan in the 50s and 90s the US sailed a carrier group through the straits to deter and show power.
It's your perspective that ironically necessitates the US military being absolute lily-livered crybaby pussies, that's my point. My theory explains it perfectly. The US isn't run by effeminate cuckolds. They know that if they tried to secure the straits in actual fact, asserting their presence and escorting more than a tiny handful of ships, it would probably fail, get a bunch of sailors killed and cost more than it gained.
Because Iran is a third-world country blustering and bloviating as they are being defeated, and a lot of panicans and Europeans are choosing to take that seriously. Really: You are asserting that Iran's ludicrous claims to toll the strait are evidence that Iran can toll the strait, and that I have to explain this somehow. I don't pay it any attention at all. I take it as seriously as the Navy Seal with 300 confirmed kills threatening to wipe me out.
This is what the American military is currently doing. American ships and personnel are under constant threat. You have invented some new requirement that American ships have to go where you, an amateur, with no skin in the game, with no military intelligence -- that American ships have to go where you believe they should go, or else they're chicken. In point of fact you have no idea where American ships are actually stationed at any particular moment.
But we do know for a fact that American ships have physically escorted merchant ships through the straits, so we can at least conclude with certainty that you are wrong.
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I have to rebut both of your points, in that...
A) the Trump Administration put out war goals at the start of the conflict, that did not mention regime change. Perhaps that was an internal goal that was not achieved for a lack of effort, but it was not a political commitment that they had to wind back.
B) Tankers that turn off their maritime transponders wouldn't show up on your website. Not to say that they're all doing that, but a small trickle of traffic is making the run. Saying 'no trade in the Gulf' is an exaggeration.
What else could the goal have been? Why would they launch attacks against leaders in the government on day one if not to cause regime change? At the very start of the war Trump was going on about unconditional surrender which is another word for regime change. The idea was that some anti-clerical force would take over and be friends with Israel, the whole rotten structure would come crashing down after he kicked in the door... but this didn't occur.
Here are some stated goals after the initial hope didn't come to fruition:
Well, are their missile capabilities destroyed? No, Iran's missile forces have pushed the US out of Gulf bases. The Iranian navy lost ships but not its primary mission of controlling shipping in the straits. Nuclear weapons are opaque, unclear what's going on there. I still think Iran hasn't acquired nuclear weapons for fear of nuclear disarming attacks or out of not desiring a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But maybe it could be considered a success, albeit no visible change to the status quo.
And can Iran arm, fund and direct terrorist armies outside their borders? They sure can, in Iraq and Yemen. So that didn't work either.
Imagine if those goals had been achieved, wouldn't the scenario look different? Wouldn't the US be pressing its military advantage rather than trying to negotiate an end to the war? Wouldn't there be bombing of Iranian energy facilities and political infrastructure like police stations or broadcasting facilities to further damage the regime? Why start with bombing Iran's leaders and then stop? Wouldn't Trump be looking for human rights for all the gazillions of murdered protestors, demanding reforms in Iran... Why is Trump saying that there are negotiations underway while the Iranians say these are lies? Why is there all this discussion about Iran charging tolls on shipping in the straits of Hormuz if they're the vanquished party?
Well, mostly closed then.
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I think you can safely say that if it takes a lengthy substack essay to ”prove” that you won, you didn’t. I don’t necessarily fault the administration for what they tried to do (in fact my primary criticism is that they ended the air campaign too early), but looking at a loss and declaring victory anyway is just intellectually dishonest.
Your refusal to consider evidence is not evidence.
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It takes a lengthy Substack essay (or equivalent) to explain how Citizens United doesn't say that corporations are people in the sense that the average person thinks about. Nevertheless, it doesn't say that. It would take a lengthy Substack essay to prove that vaccines work, if confronted by a smart enough anti-vaxxer who can poke holes in a one sentence summary. It certainly takes one to prove that evolution is real.
This is not a feature of the Iran war, it's a feature of politics.
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This is insane cope. It's at best a draw considering that very few us goals were achieved. If destroying Iran's proxies was really a big deal, then it would have been much easier to pick them apart one at a time, isolated and alone, instead of having to deal with this entire regional mess.
We decimated Iran’s military capacity and what little remains is dwindling. Their influence throughout the Middle East is being extirpated at every level. They will never have nukes. They will either surrender their foreign policy ambitions, or they will wither away unable to do anything to change their fate.
I think we’re making progress here. A few months ago war critics told me that Iran was winning outright and would emerge stronger than ever. Now the argument is that we’re somehow at the status quo, with a concession that what America achieved was not “really a big deal” and could have been done a different way.
I don't know of a nicer way to put this. Your takes show signs of significant delusion. It's like you're in Trump's PR team.
Your takes are hidden behind private mode.
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No matter, Google and ChatGPT have everything cached anyways:
4 months ago you wrote
Two months ago you wrote:
A month ago you wrote:
And you wrote:
Is it still the case that Iran has the strongest hand of cards because they hold the world economy by the balls and America wasn't prepared for this most obvious response? Does Iran still have the upper hand?
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I don't care how nice you are, but I think it would be appropriate to actually disagree with his points here and ideally back up your rebuttals instead of accusing someone of delusion.
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Delusional Iran simps will claim that Iran's position is better than every, and America is much more on the ropes than before. I think this is not true, but it's also not true that Iran is in a corner either. The truth is more complicated.
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Going down the list,
The UAE is the worst possible example because they literally flew a cargo plane loaded with billions of dollars in cold hard cash to Tehran to pay the Mullahgeld. The fact that Iran's neighbors are now paying them protection money to use a strait that was previously free is a point for "Iran is winning".
A bizarre example considering Israel also rejected the deal. Not that you have many better examples, considering the other Gulf "allies" are currently either begging Iran to stop hitting them or paying them protection money, kind of the opposite of what you'd expect strengthened American allies to do.
Again, you keep giving examples that prove the exact opposite of what you intend. The Saudis attacked Iraqi militias because they launched a coordinated attack along with the Houthis on their oil infrastructure, effectively demonstrating that Iran can cripple Gulf oil production relying entirely on proxies hitting the production sites directly should a Hormuz blockade be insufficient.
In the same place as it was after Midnight Hammer, which is to say that it's irrelevant to judging the success of this war.
But the general consensus is that Iran's centrifuges were definitely evacuated and their HEU is either spread across the country, evacuated to a new location or sitting at Fordow waiting to be dug out. It would not be particularly hard in any case for the Iranians to turn said HEU into a bomb regardless but I personally think the odds they race for a bomb are actually pretty low, if only because the Saudis or Emiratis getting a nuke is about the only way they could deter Iran alone at this point.
The deal Iran cut with Oman includes a 5-7% toll, a ban on "Zionist shipping" and an exemption for the Chinese, hence why the oil price is rising again. If we count confirmed Mullahgeld payments like the UAE's moneyplane then not only will Iran toll the strait but they have already tolled the strait so even by your definition Trump lost.
Then again, I'm sure even if ships literally had to sail through a giant gate marked "IRAN TOLL BOOTH" generating Iran tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year you would still find some way to pretend that this was all part of Trump's master plan.
Mr. Chatgpt and Mr. Gemini both agree that it's physically impossible for that plane to transport remotely close to the claimed amount. Maybe there was a bribe in that plane but the overall claim is not credible.
Maybe it was flying in rare Beanie Babies.
Would be almost as hysterical if they flew a plane out there transporting a piece of paper with the number of a checking account on it though.
More realistically it would be to sign papers over the deal and shake hands
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How are LLM's reliable here? They are word predictors not engineers. They have no way of calculating what is and isn't feasible.
LLMs are perfectly capable of looking up simple values such as the cargo capacity of an airplane, and the weight of money, and doing the simple arithmetic based on this.
If you disagree you are more than capable of performing the back of the envelope calculation by hand.
The onus is on you to verify what the LLM outputs, not for us to do it. Anyone can query an LLM, the only thing that makes such output valuable is when a human fact checks it.
I'm the most rabid anti AI luddide on this forum and I can tell you that LLMs can do perfect basic arithmetic.
I'm ready to wager $50 right now that you can't demonstrate a single example of gpt 5.x, gemini pro 3.x, claude opus 4.x making an error of more than 10% of basic arithmetic (plus minus multiply divide) for any 2 numbers up to 10^10. Just share the chat link and I will PP you the money.
Justification for 10% margin: since we are talking back of the envelope calculation, a trivial error does not change the answer
Not that I am not asking for the latest models, but I am ruling out cost optimized models (gpt mini, gemini flash) as they are intentionally compromising capability heavily to lower cost.
I don't disagree that LLMs can do basic arithmetic. That doesn't change my stance. I think it's no different than if you somehow knew a gifted savant human who could do 99% of things well 99% of the time, but failed miserably at the 1%. I am fine with you asking this human to do a back of the envelope calculation. I am not fine with you just uncritically repeating what they say without checking it. Especially when it's a back of the envelope calculation, as you say. It's no different with LLMs. I think the major problem with LLMs is not that they exist and could hallucinate, but that it enables a lot of people who reach for the easy button and just press it without thinking for themselves. They can and should check everything being told to them. They can and should do their own research. When they don't, it can lead to lies being spread. Do you know why a lie can make it halfway across the world while the truth is putting its boots on? Because people don't check for themselves, they don't think for themselves, they just hear what someone else says and repeat it. A lot of people have replaced that someone else with an LLM.
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If you can avoid the tool calls, you can still get multiplication-of-decimal errors, but it is increasingly rare. That said, I'd be more concerned about the problem being under-specified; the same question asked a different way gets a different answer.
EDIT: I make no claims about the politics, here, which I'd expect to have larger impact.
Hmm I assumed it would be usd because that's what the reuters mentioned. (That's a problem with my human meat not the robot though)
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1 million dollars in US hundred dollar bills is 10 kilograms (22lbs) and fits into a briefcase.
1 Billion dollars is 10,000 kilograms (10 metric tons) and divides into ten 1 ton shipping pallets.
Transporting 30 1 ton pallets, 3 billion dollars, the amount claimed in the article, is trivial on a single commercial transport plane. The logistical difficulty is the security.
These are very basic, memorable, and relevant ratios everyone reading this should be memorizing.
Indeed transporting physical cash has NEVER been a logistical difficulty for governments, even in absurdly quantities. (Delta Force and CIA have often used rubbermaids filled with hundreds, A few single-digit million dollars, for bribing warlords in remote regions)
The challenge for criminals in smuggling large amounts of cash in a timely manner is simply the bulk once you start getting into the millions or larger.
This is why precious metals, artwork, and rare old large bill such as various countries thousand dollar bills are used for account settlement in various criminal orgs.
Parent's linked article claims it was transported on a specific plane with a capacity ofuch less than 30 tons
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Traditionally, rare stamps were also used as means to hide large sums of wealth and transport them around the world. You can see this in old crime and spy stories, rather accurately - per weight in gram, these tiny squares of colored paper are probably the most valuable things in the world (excluding some really exotic substances).
There were good paranoid reasons for Stalin's holocaust of stamp collectors.
This now fell into abeyance, because stamp collecting is now just niche hobby with limited appeal. Stamp nerds know each other, and if sus strangers arrived with suitcases full of rare philatelic treasures for sale, it will be instantly noticed.
Fortunately, modernity offers new, ever better alternative.
Imagine small pieces of paper, looking innocent and childish to ordinary normie (or ordinary orangutan in uniform rummaging through your pockets and luggage at border or airport), that can have value up to 7-8 $ figures, are not registered anywhere, are not on any blockchain and can be bought and sold all over the world with minimal or zero oversight.
Imagine collectible cards. If you are serious criminal neededing to move/launder large sums of money, and are not nerdy enough to trust crypto, Pokemon and other cards are the things for you. It began in East Asia, bellwether of the world and is now a thing worldwide.
You can add it to your crime mastermind files, if it isn't already there.
The market liquidity is low, appraisals are inflated, and valuations can be anihilated at the whim of a random guy at a game company
This matters if you intended to hold these cards as long term investment (that would be indeed unwise).
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The counterargument is not that crypto or collectible cards or contemporary art aren’t used to launder money. Clearly they have been and are. It’s that anti money laundering work isn’t really about preventing any transfer / ‘laundering’ of ill gotten funds, which while ideal is very difficult when dealing with competent criminal organizations.
Modern anti money laundering legislation is more about the IRS or FBI arbitrarily showing up at the newly purchased $10m house where a foreign government official or minor boxing promoter lives (whoever happens to legally own it) and saying or implying “we’re essentially going to take this from you, freeze all your accounts and stop you from travelling unless you can explain exactly how you or your associates legitimately made every single cent of the money used to buy this property”. The specific mechanism of the laundering isn’t relevant here, what is relevant is being able to satisfy whatever test the tax collectors or police demand.
"Since my childhood, I loved cards and collected lots of them, this was my passion. And one day, when I bought card pack and opened it, all world's luck fell on me!"
"Yes, Rainbow Fire Farting Crocodile Mouse was there! One of the most valuable cards in the world, worth 10M bucks!"
"Here is my card collection, here is the receipt from game shop where I bought the pack, here is the capital gain tax I reported and paid as a good citizen."
"Sure this misunderstanding is cleared now?"
Ok, so if I ask one hundred of the top card industry people, auctioneers, collectors in the business if they’ve worked with you for the last 20 years, many of them will have done business with you, right? You’ll have newspaper clippings and online articles about playing in Pokémon card competitions when you were 12 years old, right? You can show me eBay accounts you control that show you purchasing the cards you just resold a decade ago in competitive auctions?
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Jesus wept. Simple math, people. I like AI but stop using it because you are too lazy to break out a calculator and the sort of deductive reasoning you'd give an undergrad interviewing for his first internship.
Current spot price of gold is about $4,350/troy ounce.
An avoirdupois pound is 14.583 troy ounces, or $63,436.05. So $1B in gold would be about 15,764 lbs, or 7.88 tons.
There are cargo planes that can carry over 100 tons. So I don't know how you posed your question, but it is clearly not "physically impossible" for a cargo plan to carry billions of dollars.
(I don't know if the UAE has literal tons of gold on hand, or if that's how they'd transport cash. Supposing they have a vault full of US bank notes, each bill is about 1 gram so $1B in $USD100 bills would be 10M x 1 gram = 10 metric tons/9.8 tons. So whatever form the "cash" takes, yes, it's physically possible to carry billions in a cargo plane.)
The other guy's post claims it was a specific plane, not just any plane.
I did also assume usd but another poster helpfully pointed out that there are other currencies with bigger bills
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To concede a minor point, I don’t find it ridiculous to imagine that some Gulf states would be bribing Iran. It would actually be very natural. So I don’t want to come off as pointing and laughing - dismissing.
But it doesn’t really make a difference if they are.
US sanctions and blockades are taking tens or hundreds of billions of dollars out of Iran’s economy.
Iran makes a few billion in bribes.
Iran lets traffic through the strait.
In effect, Iran sells its only possible leverage for pennies on the dollar.
The war can continue indefinitely on those terms: America strangles Iran out while global trade is basically unaffected.
That really only trends in one direction and it’s not an Iranian victory.
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Your source for this is Iranian news outlet Tabnak, which offers as proof two pictures of a plane flying over Tehran.
If you would read the article you linked, you would see that Israel rejects the deal because it asks them to make certain withdrawals, and the Board of Peace is making clear that Hamas will be disarmed before Israel has to commit to any such withdrawals.
America attacks Iranian allies, this is proof that Iran could win if they want to... Ok, when should we expect Iran to finally cripple Gulf oil production? Or barring that, since Gulf countries are paying the Iranians bribes, when should we expect Iran's financials to turn around?
Iran can produce a bomb whenever they want to, they just don't want to.
You are just repeating the worst sort of slop Iranian propaganda while calling me credulous. Do you want to defend the position that, any day now, "The Strait would become about as profitable as Alphabet ($132B in 2025)"? Can we make a bet on this? Please?
It seems like Iran is just months away from tolling the strait, months away from building a nuke, and months away from winning the war. Just like they were a few months ago. Curious why they haven't won yet.
No, the original source is Reuters. This is just weakmanning.
The Israelis rejected the deal and Trump's BoP was incapable of forcing them to accept it. Now they're trying to alter the deal, except Hamas won't accept the altered deal, they want the deal Trump said the Israelis agreed to in the first place.
Again, this is terrible example of proving that America has more influence since both Israel and Hamas are pretty clearly defying Trump.
At the beginning of the war, Iran had to fire hundreds of missiles and drones at the Gulf to land just a few hits on critical infrastructure. Now their proxies can do the same with far smaller volleys. It has been effectively demonstrated that American bases are incapable of protecting these countries from Iranian missiles, hence why they've switched to paying them off. The fact that American allies are more confident in paying bribes to American enemies than paying America for protection is a pretty clear sign of defeat.
I have no idea how much they're going to get as revenue. I'd imagine the Gulf countries paying the Mullahgeld aren't going to be keen on revealing the total outlays so they'll resort to moving it around quietly like the Emiratis did. Regardless you're changing the subject because we're established that
Quick question: if Trump simply pulls a Joe Kent and abandons the Strait to Iranian tolls while pretending he doesn't care, would you still call it a great American victory?
No, they DID toll the Strait! The Emiratis gave them billions of dollars! This isn't something that will happen, it already happened!
You claimed that UAE “literally flew a cargo plane loaded with billions of dollars in cold hard cash to Tehran”. None of that comes from Reuters (your Tabnak link doesn’t even link back to Reuters). The only Reuters reporting I have found (discussed on a different thread here) does not allege this either. They allege that the UAE had released to Iran $3 Billion of its own funds, I.e. toggling permission.
“Weakmanning”? You claim that UAE is so desperate that they sent a plane loaded with cash. Gulf states are loading planes with pallets of cash to pay Iran off. This is central to how you phrased your own argument. This comes entirely from Tabnak. It is not credible at all.
You are regurgitating Iranian propaganda. Absurd
See what I mean?
Let's disaggregate the claims: Reuters claims Iran received billions of dollars from the Emiratis, OSINT discovered that the UAE flew a cargo plane directly to Tehran and the Iranian media claims that cargo plane was specifically loaded with billions of dollars.
The core of the argument is provided by Reuters and the Iranians are only adding specific context that only the Iranians (or Emiratis) would know. Normally Iranian media wouldn't be particularly trustworthy but in this case Occam's Razor suggests that the Emiratis wouldn't just fly a cargo plane to Tehran in the middle of a war for sport.
If the question is "what are the Iranians demanding?" then the actual absurdity is trusting serial liar Trump over the Iranians themselves.
Even more absurd is claiming Trump has more authority in the Middle East while pointing to a "peace deal" that Netanyahu responded to by practically laughing in Trump's face and calling him a stupid goy, or claiming that the comparative lack of attacks granted to the countries paying the Mullahgeld is evidence of Iranian weakness.
Occam's Razor suggests that a random picture of a plane flying over Tehran is not evidence of anything because it could be anything.
Iran is a third-world country bloviating about how they demand to be taken seriously. You are taking their ridiculous demands to toll the strait as proof that they can toll the strait.
Six months ago, war critics said that Iran was going to toll the straits. This has not happened. This has not happened so thoroughly that we are reduced to debating third-world Iranian newspapers posting pictures of planes in the sky as proof that the world respects them and takes them seriously.
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The UAE paid Iran $10-20bil to stop its attacks, according to Reuters, which probably accounts for their 85% return to oil shipping prior to the signing of the MOU, if that figure is accurate. As this is very embarrassing to everyone but Iran, I doubt we will be hearing much about it. Just this week, Iran struck three UAE oil vessels, and UAE (along with Qatar and KSA) petitioned Trump to stay his attack on Iran because they can’t afford the blowback on their infrastructure. This reads to me like Iran retains a robust ability to influence the region. If Trump flees from the war, then Iran will have more regional influence than it started with, as Iran would have proof that they can sustain attacks from a hawkish American military (imagine if it’s a Dem!) and continue pressuring the region for their own purposes.
Iran is only 9mo away from nukes, per a May Reuters report, whereas before the war they were six months away from nukes. This doesn’t seem like a big deal. I imagine the killing of Khamenei and his family will persuade the Iranians that a nuke is more desirable, and they now have information about what American buster bunkers are actually able to accomplish. It’s quite possible that Iran is now closer to a nuke than ever before, given the aforementioned, because the limiting factor on a nuke was the fatwah of the ayatollah whose family was killed during negotiations by Israel. Oops.
Are the other points you mention serious? You don’t mention the Houthis closing Bab al-Mandab Strait, but you mention random strikes on Shia militants in Iraq. But those strikes didn’t actually succeed in “pushing out” Iranian-backed forces, right? Isn’t the fact that there are still Iranian militias in Iraq embarrassing to us? And Iran’s economy is hurting, but we’re not at war with the Iranian people, so this doesn’t really matter. Their leverage over the strait remains. Trade is interrupted and tankers are being struck. Trump causing America to lose the Iran war — succeeding in none of the original mission objectives while cementing Iran’s influence over the strait — will certainly have repurcussions for Republicans in elections. Americans are worse off, in every way, and the legacy of the children we killed may inspire attacks on us decades hence, making us all less safe. Our international reputation is worse off, we have less money, our soldiers were wounded and killed, and we may lose Arab partners in the future.
So this idea that UAE is paying massive bribes to escape Iranian attacks is flatly not true, or at least not verified in anything you have shown here.
The argument here is that Iran can still produce a nuclear weapon because the unfinished nuclear material is sitting buried underneath the rubble American bombs entombed it in.
This is a silly precis. If the Iranians dig up those tunnels, we can bomb them again. They are at our mercy. "He might have broken my arm, but he didn't really hurt me at all because bones heal."
Traffic is still passing Bab al-Mandab, although at reduced levels because of the threats. We will see what the US does.
"random strikes"
The Iraqi government is disarming Iranian-backed militias in its territory in concert with Saudi and American forces. What is "random" about that? Do I need to explain why this implies that Iran's influence is shrinking, not growing?
Your position is that Iran's ability to wage war doesn't depend on its economy?
What are we even doing here?
The article says that we don’t know whether the 10-20bil were frozen assets: “Reuters could not establish whether the funds earmarked for the transfers belong to the UAE or originate in long-blocked Iranian accounts in the UAE banking system”. Actually, there’s no confirmation afaik that the UAE ever froze Iranian assets during the war. There are some articles claiming they were exploring this, but they never actually announced or confirmed that they had done this. You would expect that there would be some journalistic confirmation floating around if UAE actually froze 10-20bil in Iranian assets. This is probably why Reuters mentions “long-blocked Iranian accounts”, because the funds could be coming from accounts blocked years ago (assets were frozen in 2010, 2018, 2019), whereas recent blocks would not be called long-blocked (not by Reuters).
Reuters is a serious organization; the UAE is an absolute monarchy trying not to have their industry destroyed or lose their American partner. If there are four sources telling Reuters about this, I would trust them. I wouldn’t trust what UAE says, because they have every reason to lie about this.
It’s more verified than it is unverified, if you trust Reuters more than an absolute monarch in a precarious geopolitical situation.
I’m not the expert on their missile cities so I’m deferring to the Intel guys on this. How would we know? It would require a pretty serious understanding of how their tunnels work. I would assume that they could tunnel underground to the tunnel, to take the uranium, which would be out of our sight. But of course it’s definitely more complicated than that.
Because the disarmament push is the follow-up of a 2024 decision, it has a September 30th deadline and there are a number of articles speculating that the Iraqi government will not succeed in disarming the major Iran-backed groups. It’s possible that we get a situation where America leaves Iraq entirely and the Iran-backed groups stay.
How are you going to rely on Reuters to prove your argument if they themselves don’t have the proof? You said UAE paid a $10 Billion dollar bribe and now have to admit even Reuters doesn’t know that for sure.
The likeliest explanation is the one I supplied: this two-month-old story was part of the negotiations over the MOU, which means Iran never got that money back because the deal fell through. That would also explain why there’s no follow-up reporting anything close to what you alleged: it never happened.
Please look into “Deep Sensing” technology, also called “Ground Penetrating Radar”. For example:
https://clu-in.org/characterization/technologies/default2.focus/sec/Geophysical_Methods/cat/Ground_Penetrating_Radar/
I think one difference that surfaces in these discussions over and over again is our different priors about military technology. My sense is that the public thinks of satellites like giant cameras in space, and so they ascribe to satellites all the limitations that cameras have. I believe this understanding is 30-50 years out of date.
I think a lot of people are interpreting the American military’s posture as empty bluster because they don’t realize how good the tech is. Thousands of satellites in space, a few dozen sites that need monitoring. Iran is not invisible to us.
The MOU was drafted on the 14th and signed on the 17th, but the Reuters article was published on the 12th and the $3bil was already transferred prior to the publication of the article. Reuters’ proof is four sources familiar with the matter, and it would be pretty weird for them to make up this story wholecloth. Also, since my last comment, another UAE ship was struck near the Omani coast, bringing the the count to four ships from the UAE struck this week.
Yes, the fact that the MOU was adapted on the 14th means that this was happening in the period of negotiations leading up to the MOU.
Furthermore, Iranian drones targeting UAE ships is evidence against UAE paying a massive bribe.
“Four sources familiar with the matter” is like a bad parody of a source, because it could mean anything. But if we want to take it seriously: the story still doesn’t prove anything close to what you are suggesting.
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Read the article again please.
Sources can say a lot of things, but they do seem to be saying the thing. Is the issue here with the word 'paid' rather than 'released'?
That means they didn't release it yet. And given that Iran kept blowing stuff up, I think it's highly likely that Iran never got to smell it at all.
This is deliberately vague but the most straightforward interpretation is that these accounts were unfrozen, giving Iran the on-paper ability to spend those funds, but they would still remain within the UAE banking system. Hard to say though, as the other source says "delivered".
If the UAE already sent/released 3bn, like is alleged in the article, I'd consider it safe to presume that they intend to follow through with the rest.
I'm not sure on the timeline here. According to the article Iran has not attacked the UAE since May 4th. Talks allegedly began in June. The only attacks my google and AI can find are the recent strikes from last week on ships belonging to Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in the SoH. Maybe that's enough for the UAE to pull the cord, but maybe not, as the focus of this deal might be to guarantee that Iran will not strike the mainland.
If we were trying to tighten our language down to be more accurate then the UAE intends to release up to 10-20bn Iranian assets to Iran in deal designed to 'ease regional tensions'. 3bn has already been released, according to sources. They also intend to 'revive economic ties'.
Whilst that might not be as sensational as 'paid 10-20 billion' I'd argue it's undeniably on that side of the equation.
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I think that's a pretty crucial difference, yeah.
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If the US won this war, then it has to go down as the first war in history that required Op-eds to convince anyone that we had won. I don't think the Civil War or WWII required any explaining. Hell, Iraq was a more clear-cut victory, and I don't know that that's a favorable comparison.
This is an unfalsifiable position. “If your argument was right, it would convince me. But I won’t allow it to convince me, therefore it can’t be right.” It could simply be the case that a large number of people refuse to admit that Iran has lost, which is actually very common in the history of war.
Can you name another example of this common occurrence?
Wars where the losing party refused to surrender long past the point of inevitable defeat:
Wars where the winning party (or parts thereof) thought they were losing, or going to face much greater resistance than they in fact did:
It is really not that hard for the losing party to be delusional or the winning party to be dismayed.
Here, the US has total air naval and space superiority, Iranian strength is diminishing, Iran’s economy is collapsing, America’s is almost unaffected, Iran suffers catastrophic military losses, America suffers almost none at all, trade through the Straits is picking up and Iran is becoming weaker and weaker at stopping it. And yet a large part of the commentariat is not just skeptical but actively reversing cause and effect or reading unvarnished Iranian propaganda. Not to put too fine a point on this but: it’s really not hard to imagine a lot of people believing something that is demonstrably false.
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Isn’t this basically the origin of the post WWI “stab in the back” myth?
The idea that Germany was actually winning but elements inside the country betrayed the German army.
I mean it is technically true that elements within Germany betrayed the German army. Germany was not winning and these elements included things like 'other parts of the German military', but the German revolution really happened.
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The Election of 1864 was about whether it was impossible to defeat the South and the Union had to negotiate peace. The party that believed this won 45% of the vote. The war did not even last another six months!
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I have at least read op-eds attempting to convince me that Vietnam and Iraq were, in hindsight, successful (or at least not complete failures). Vietnam is, despite the ultimate victory of the North in its civil war, today a closer ally of the US than of nominally-communist China (somehow a win for Domino theory stans?). Iraq is, while imperfect, a much more stable and Western-aligned nation than under the Hussein regime. I'm not sure I really agree with either, but I don't think they're completely false. The "what if" of the Arab Spring on a non-Iraq-war hypothetical seems difficult, but the current timeline is at least plausibly better than a Syria-like alternate timeline.
I don't find the others a very persuasive argument, but it might at least not be the first. This one is maybe a bit early to call, but isn't screaming great success.
Technically speaking, the USA did win in Vietnam- it withdrew in exchange for a promise by north Vietnam to respect the south's independence(our actual war goal). The first time it reneged on this promise the ARVN repelled them. The second time the ARVN collapsed in a fit of coup-proofing paranoia at around the same time and commie tanks took Saigon.
Pinkos like LBJ and Nixon were unwilling to invade the north after the liberal Eisenhower overthrew the Ngo family's regime and that made the US position impossible in the long run, but we achieved our actual war goal before withdrawing.
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I would argue that most wars after WW2 have been a bit messy and complicated to explain "who won." Now that it's frowned upon (and risking nuclear war) to just march in and plant your flag everywhere, wars become even more an extension of politics. Like you said, Iraq was a quick victory over their official army, but it took a very long time grinding down insurgents and backing questionable political factions until it's become enough of a self-sustaining democratic state to really call that a victory. Vietnam was even more of a mess, but it did eventually end with a Vietnam being a free, democratic state allied with the US... I'm not sure if anyone would call that a victory though.
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The war is still going on. Iran obviously was pretty badly damaged, but the Iranian regime wins if the US gives up. If they toll the strait (with Oman's connivance or not), they win pretty big. If they just retain the HEU and keep the US from interfering in the future, they win; they'll start their nuclear program back up and nuke Tel Aviv if they can't restrain themselves... New York, D.C., Haifa, and Tel Aviv if they can hold out until they can get more bombs and some really long range ICBMs.
If they lose the HEU and the US gets to keep watching, they lose. If the regime falls, they obviously lose (the people of Iran will be materially best off in that case, though having bad leftist/modern Western values forced upon them is a danger). But Iran can still win this. I don't think they will -- the US demonstrating that commerce could be maintained (though degraded) regardless of their shooting at it took away their best card. But a big midterm Democratic win could see Trump forced to give up anyway.
Trump could also do something stupid like agree that Iran and Oman toll the strait in order to get a deal. He really likes deals.
Iran's economic situation almost doesn't matter. As long as they can keep the IRGC running, they can absorb a LOT of civilian hardship, and they've got 90 million civilians to feed into that fire. They have enough state capacity to keep the civilians from doing anything about it, too. Not giving a shit about your civilian population is a major advantage in the short term. So the US, to actually win, is going to have to do something -- either invade, or resume killing officials until either the regime falls apart or whoever is on top has both the power and the will to make a deal they'll actually follow. Trump can make as many deals as he wants with the people he's been negotiating with for months, they're going to break them all anyway. The previous MoA, though not a "US surrender" (because it had them turning over the HEU), was really good for Iran, but it wasn't good enough for them to follow. They're not getting better now unless Trump REALLY REALLY wants a deal.
Yeah, if America surrenders for no good reason Iran would technically win. Why would America do that?
Trump could also shoot someone on Fifth Avenue I guess. A meteor could fall on the Pentagon.
War runs on economics, you actually can't continue fighting a war when your economic base runs out. When Iran is locked out global trade they are not going to scrounge under the cushions to keep the war going indefinitely, they are going to lose.
This is currently America's strategy.
Because Trump is a cowardly fool. He's done great domestically but he's cucked to iran and chickened out too many times to have any faith in him right now.
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There's a lot of ruin in a nation of 90 million, and Iran seems quite capable of depleting it all. Their economic base will not run out fast enough.
Which officials have been killed recently? The people we've been negotiating with don't seem to have changed in a while.
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Basically, you claim they're suicidal, but long-termist – their entire project is to last long enough to kill maximum Jews, ideally all Jews, on their way out?
Do they nuke Lakewood too, if they get really really many nukes?
Amalek theory at its finest.
If Iran is rational geopolitical player, why it still cares about the Palestine issue, not only in words but also in substantial and costly deeds?
Egypt that is just next to Israel could throw their Muslim brothers to the Zionist sharks and benefitted greatly.
Iran is a rational player that's trying to be a regional power. Egypt is a rational piece.
The position on Israel predates the Islamic Revolution in that it was a central pillar of Khomeini’s ministry even when he was in Paris, it’s not derived from any analysis borne of the realities of governing Iran.
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Lots of opportunities in the neighborhood for aspiring great power expansion and empire building that would not cross world's first super power and their greatest ally.
But this game is not about painting map and gaining high score, this is about achievement of liberating the second holiest land and third holiest mosque. Yes, this is not supposed to be easy, even if you are experienced player!
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They wish to destroy the State of Israel and the United States (the Little Satan and the Great Satan, as they put it), not necessarily kill maximum Jews.
I suspect they want to survive more than they wish to destroy the Little Satan and the Great Satan.
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This one is causing my spidey-sense to tingle. I have no firm grounding, but my gut tells me there's some fuzziness/misdirection/technicalities going on here.
UAE numbers are believable, they have a bypass pipeline, plus allegations that they made a backhanded bribe to get Iran to go easy on their blockade running ships.
That would also be acceptable for my spidey sense that "we weren't getting the whole story about Iran not controlling the Strait", if true.
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Around this time last year (maybe June 2025), my dad started telling me about how Xi Jinping was actually losing power/influence and that the party elders were going to depose him. My dad told me that I should look into the Beidaihe meeting and then he says "mark my words, by this time next year Xi Jinping won't be in power". I did look into this Beidaihe thing and found it less impressive than what I've been told, I gave my dad the link, but essentially had a mental note on it since. Well it's been a year and Xi Jinping is still in power. I think Xi Jinping will dominate the 21st Congress (in 2027) as well. But who knows, maybe my dad is getting the vibes from somewhere and I am holding myself back from saying "heheheh, remember when...." in the miniscule chance that he is right and only off by 1 year.
Your thread reminds me of my dad.
I think there is a lot here to be convinced by, yet I am not sure the story has yet played out for us to come to a conclusion. History takes a long time. Democracy was tried in Athens and Rome, yet it slumbered for millennia before it was attempted again in the West with the US. Even more convincingly won wars, like let's say the American Civil War still has echoes way past the surrender (Jim Crow, Civil Rights, etc.).
I hope America wins, and I hope America wins convincingly, and the regime in Iran dies its deserved death. Yet there is a lot to fear as well, and all I see is the fog of war.
The consensus of people with a clue seems to be that even if Beidaihe was a thing once, it isn't a thing now. This is all silly mystified Orientalism. What elders, what factions, what Beidaihe. This isn't Wuxia. There's Xi and his Leninist Party apparatus. It's more boring and professional.
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I don't see any way to reasonably define the party who gets their entire command structure decimated, their air defenses dogwalked, and any infrastructure they care about vaporized on demand as the 'winner' of a given conflict.
That said, I will admit that I underestimated the IRGC's sheer stubbornness in the face of such a display of dominance. Its one thing to take every reasonable effort to avoid losing face, its another to keep pissing in the enemies eye, full knowing that they'll drop missiles on you over the weekend.
There remains the issue of Iran being able to threaten their regional neighbors with cheap drone strikes on important bases and infrastructure. They seem willing to carry out such harassment indefinitely unless their ability to afford it it is completely removed or there's some kind of uprising that finally removes them from power.
This seems to be devolving towards a possible North Korea situation, except without nukes.
So the actual strategic win seems up in the air still.
If the U.S. ends up forced to swap focus over to, say, Taiwan, Iran might be able to re-entrench its position. If they prove they can outlast the onslaught, that, from a game theoretic perspective, makes it far less likely they'll ever tap out in the future.
So perhaps the question is, is this a battle of willpower, or sheer materiel?
How about this way: "achieved pre-war military objectives".
Shakes' gloating and showboating about K/D ratios or "displays of dominance" is maddeningly juvenile. The problem with Americans is that they usually have no sound theory of victory, and don't believe they need one, on account of Shakes-style belief in their technological, material, financial (and frankly, ontological) superiority that makes all wars "cheap". Even if you're out of interceptors, even if you had to withdraw THAAD from Korea? who cares? Presumably there'll be more, and better ones, the best even. Some day.
Once upon a time American Air Force grilled Mao Zedong's son to death in Tongchang, like a helpless rat, along with two hundred thousand of his compatriots if not more, and who knows how many Norks. Gods of war, raining death from the sky all day long, or whatever Hegseth says. Did this result in you winning the Korean war? Perhaps the propaganda says so. It doesn't talk a lot about the Korean war. But the map says there's a North Korea today, holding the spot he died.
Resolve is not "saving face". Interpreting it as such is saving face. In plain terms, we just observe the fact that the enemy has resolve to bank on the possibility of victory, because he has a plausible theory of one, and that so far he's been acting rationally by not surrendering and not accepting vacuous deals from Kushner&Witkoff that would have failed to improve his dire security situation long-term.
Are we still doing this?
You're nearly out of interceptors in 5 months of low-intensity war in the Middle East. The denial of this amounts to a theory of conspiracy about countless independent reports. All punditry about how the US could realistically intervene over Taiwan requires ludicrous lemmas such as that Chinese production of standoff munitions is comparable in scale to IRGC's (there are such reports yes, CSIS basically claims this, which goes to show how bad the situation is if we need such lies). Trump doesn't want to "swap focus" to Taiwan, he wants his "friend" Xi to wait until he's out of office. Luckily for him Xi has too much going on to add a disruptive amphibious invasion to his schedule, so likely we have many more years of ambiguity and possibility to save face. But no, the US won't prioritize Taiwan over the Middle East regardless. Makes no sense. So Iran's calculus is independent of that.
I personally don't believe we're actually "out of interceptors" because I suspect the U.S. military has a standing policy of understating its capacity and overstating its weaknesses.
I do believe China can build them faster and may have larger stockpiles.
You mean they're lying in the congressional reports where they describe the number of munitions they buy? It's public record, we can see how many are purchased.
And why would the US want to lie and seem like their air defences are weaker than they actually are to embolden (not deter) US enemies? This doesn't seem like a very Trumpian move either, meekness is not what I associate with Trump.
I would imagine not letting the enemies know exactly how much ammo they have to tank before you run out is probably something the MIC would think up. Procurement is famously opaque. I'm not confident on this point but it seems like such an obvious thing to keep strategically ambiguous that it's difficult for me to imagine we aren't obscuring the stockpiles in some way.
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2025/Base%20Budget/Procurement/Missile-Procurement-Army.pdf
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
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I agree in principle, but I think you should word it differently. "Trump won. Iran lost" is both too simple and guaranteed to stir up anger.
Tbh, I'm not sure how much "Trump" is really in command of this war. He's an 80 yr old man, a lame-duck president, and never showed much interest for a war in Iran before. This feels like something he was talked in to and then leaves the details to others.
I'm very uncertain what's going on in Iran. Who the hell is in charge over there? Certainly not the "Supreme Leader" who hasn't been seen in public even once since his assencion. And certainly not the regular people of Iran, who have been suffering even worse since it began. It seems like the IRGC has increased it's level of control, but it's a very decentralized control. Does anyone there even have the power to negotiate terms of surrender?
Certainly in the short term, Iran can't develop nukes. But we need a long term solution there, and I'm not sure what that would be without a regime change. Is it enough to just perpetually bomb Pickaxe mountain where they store the nuclear material? Maybe it is, it seems like their air defense is in shambles and the big ground penetrating bombs are pretty good at that sort of thing. But it's a messy solution.
And finally oil. yes, world oil prices are at reasonable levels, despite some predictions of doom and gloom. A lot of that is from workarounds and demand reduction. Some oil is getting through, but not as much as before. I still want the USN and allies to go full power and destroy every single cave along the Iranian coast until it becomes clear that they can do nothing to stop oil tankers going through. But in the meantime I'll take this as good enough.
Biggest problem is really the propaganda war. A lot of people on the internet seem convinced that that Iran (represented by one all-powerful Supreme Leader I guess) has the entire world oil supply in its control, and will put the squeeze on real soon. And frankly I think a lot of that is driven by Russian and/or Chinese bots. We need to do something about that, or the US is going to give up right on the verge of victory after the Dems take power in the midterm elections.
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If, as your post claiming victory states, the end result is:
then the political situation is status quo ante, which means that the war is a draw, regardless of the battlefield results. More American rockets successfully exploded in Iranian targets than vice versa, but even when an American rocket explodes in an Iranian target, that represents both Iranian and American shit exploding to the net geopolitical benefit of Russia, China, Turkey etc.
All that’s left is for America to collect Iran’s nuclear dust. Or not, we can keep it buried under the mountains forever. Either way we completely decimated one of America’s greatest adversaries, and we did it for cheap.
On the radio today they mentioned ongoing negotiations about Iran charging a toll. They want around 7 or 8%; other countries are demanding closer to 2%. It used to be 0. Their ability to shoot missiles into ships is not that discredited.
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I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with much of what you're saying, but I'm curious as to your definition of cheap.
As it stands, it's looking like the US military expended:
Now this war has been profoundly cheap in terms of servicemembers' lives, praise be
I also am not getting into the cost of the political capital expended, both domestically and abroad, as those are hard to measure without hindsight and so can be left to argue about after the midterms lol
But it's materially degraded the stocks of offensive and defensive effectors in a way that is quite bad for a pending great power conflict against a heavily industrialized foe (rhymes with Carolina).
Was the war cheap in an absolute sense/in a vacuum? Maybe, perhaps even probably. Was the war, from an opportunity cost perspective, cheap? Less likely, and if China decides to get spicy in the SCS in the next 5 years, that becomes a resounding "no"
I think these claims were a hidden message that the entire thing is fake an a joke. There aren't many places these missiles can be fired from and hit Iran, and osint sources were pretty obviously reporting when they were used. And based on osint they were only used in a limited capacity in the latest round of strikes.
So either the US was firing off thousands of these from some secret place for most of the war, then all of a sudden decided to launch a few volleys from obvious and observable places, or the claims are complete bs.
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My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
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Hamas is not disarmed. Iran's leverage over the Straits is not discredited, though it is weakened. Iran's drone manufacturing industry will be up in a month; Iran's not California, they can rebuild and rebuild quickly.
How is Iran going to rebuild their manufacturing when we can bomb it whenever we want and they are running out of money?
Cute, but California’s GDP is ~10x Iran’s. There are military bases in San Diego with more military capacity than Iran.
The last time the USAF tried switching from using stand-off munitions to dumb bombs they began rapidly taking airframe losses and nearly had a pilot taken hostage. Hence why they instead used up nearly the entire inventory of ATACMs and PrSMs.
ATACMs are old missiles from 1991 that have been gradually replaced with newer models.
PrSMs are brand new missiles essentially being prototyped tested live on the battlefield.
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The airframe loss over iran was shot down by a manpad while doing gun runs at low attitude. We can run jdam strikes on most of the country. And are.
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Is there any evidence that the USAF used dumb bombs at all?
The go-to bomb is JDAM, which is a guided bomb with maximum ranges in the double-digit miles - not considered a standoff weapon, but not a "dumb bomb" either. The JDAM-ER triples the range, making it arguably a standoff weapon.
I am also skeptical of your broader claim. Overall, Iranian air defenses likely performed worse than Iraq's in Desert Storm against manned aircraft.
In terms of a concrete timeline, Hegseth said that the US was switching to bombs on March 4, 2026. There's at least evidence of mines dropped in Shiraz dated to March 26, the US bombed the Karaj bridge with a JDAM on April 2, indicating strikes by bombs against targets far inland by that point at a minimum. Iran hit one F-35 on March 19 and 1 F-15E and 1 A-10 (doing CSAR for the F-15) on April 3. A ceasefire was declared on April 7, but on April 5 (the same day the WSO was recovered) Iranians are said to have reported a number of aircraft overflights, including over Isfahan and Alborz - hardly exterior provinces.
And as far as MQ-9s go, by my count the US lost (to ground fire) 16 Reapers in March (12 of them by the 19th), 8 in April, 3 in May, 2 in June, 5 in July.
I don't think that this data (which I am eyeballing, so welcome for any corrections) necessarily excludes the narrative you put forward, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto it. There's no real indication that the US slowed down after the F-35 was tagged on the 19th and there's evidence of a surge on the 5th, after the F-15E and A-10 were shot down.
Are you accounting for the sortie rate? The Coalition ran over 100,000 sorties from January to February whereas the USAF over the entire Iran conflict to this point ran just over 10,000. Not to mention that the Coalition didn't have access to MQ-9s or all of the other "exquisite weapons" they have today. Iranian air defenses are far less likely to be in a position to target manned aircraft than those of the Iraqis when said manned aircraft are launching JASSMs from well beyond their range.
The counterpoint is
Ignore the statements and go purely by confirmed cases: the Karaj bridge was hit on April 2nd, suggesting that's around the time the USAF began actually penetrating Iranian airspace to drop bombs. The next day, April 3, two (manned) jets are hit and by the end of the week there's a ceasefire in place. That's a week between the US switching to bombs and the US agreeing to a ceasefire.
The F-35 was hit over the southern coastline, it wasn't deeply penetrating Iranian airspace to drop bombs. The first confirmed "deep strike" JDAM is on the 2nd, the pilot gets downed on the 3rd, the USAF uses basically everything it has to rescue said pilot on the 5th and then there's a ceasefire by the 7th. Again, within the week.
If Iran's air defenses were really as weak as you seem to think then the USAF would have no reason to waste so many JASSMs and other expensive standoff munitions, nor would Trump have any reason to agree to a ceasefire. They could simply fly over Tehran dropping bombs at will as the Iranians impotently shake their fists the way they treated Iraq after the Gulf War or Syria today.
My link is by sortie rate, yes.
No, we have good reason to believe that they (or possibly IDF) aircraft were doing it on March 26 (this is ignoring that the US flew B-2s and a ton of escorts deep inside Iran to hit Fordow in the summer of 2025) because of the complaints about the mines in Shiraz.
Just outside of the week, if you toll from the 26th as a minimum start date for penetration bombing. Much longer than that, if you toll from March 4.
Either Iran's air defenses are pretty bad (they hit all of three manned aircraft - for reference, the Iraqis got three manned aircraft on the opening day of Desert Storm, and the day after that, and the day after that, too) or US ISR is so good that it just routes US aircraft around them nearly infallibly. (Or your theory is true and all the photos of aircraft with JDAMS on DIVIDS are just for show.) It wouldn't really surprise me if US ISR (and ability to communicate it to forces in theatre) has improved considerably since ODS and that is playing a large role here.
Well, keep in mind that military planners like to use test out their equipment in live conditions and should always be expected to fire a certain number of munitions
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We can bomb things, we can't bomb everything.
The US has made building things 1000x more difficult than it needs to be. A US with the military efficiency of WWII US and modern weaponry would spank today's US. So a much poorer Iran can do quite well.
Why not? We can bomb whatever we want.
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Duh, but it doesn't follow that a person defining and claiming victory is the victor.
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In the Small-Scale Sunday of June 21, 2026, there was this thread talking about the possibility of vandals being the cause of the debacle with the Reflecting Pool and its 2026 renovations. To summarize the various positions of mottizens:
The only person that was ever indicted is former olympian David Hearn, with the grand jury indictment announced by Jeanine Pirro on July 2:
In the same press conference Pirro had this to say when pressed:
Well, on Friday, DOJ has moved to dismissed the indictment:
I highly recommend reading the motion to dismiss, it’s hilarious to see how Pirro’s office is trying to cover their ass by repeatedly pointing fingers at Doug Burgum’s DOI for giving them incomplete information.
My takeaway from this is that my position is correct regarding incompetence. Incompetence at planning the renovations. Incompetence by the contractor and overspraying. Incompetence by DOI officials and personnel in protecting the Reflecting Pool (or at the very least chase down the vandals if they exist). Incompetence by DOI officials in not giving Pirro’s attorney office complete evidentiary information. In fact, I give points to Pirro and her office for approving this dismissal, she must have known that Trump wouldn’t like it:
As for corruption, well I think it’s very likely but it’s also unlikely that Trump’s government or the Republicans would investigate themselves.
I also had the following few thoughts:
Edit 1: Looks like Trump got some more words today about how much Pirro "folded like an umbrella" and "choked" on this case.
Edit 2: David Hearn was the only one indicted, there were at least 3 others also charged and publicly named but their cases were also dropped. Earlier I said David Hearn was the only one charged.
Charges have been dropped, by the Trump administration, in the most publicly embarrassing way possible, and we still have people in the comments endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope saying that it was definitely vandalism.
The tide is going out and we're finding out who was skinny dipping.
I find this to be the lowest form of commentary. Instead of making an argument you get to sit on the sidelines smugging that the other people making an argument look ridiculous. Without even having the courage to frame it as an argument to specific people that can then win or lose on its own merits.
At the self-appointed "only plan-truster on the Motte" I'll add then -- Trump himself didn't back down! Trump said that Pirro choked. The pope is still Catholic.
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Did you read the motion? I just don’t see how the fact that there were issues with the construction means the multiple eye witness accounts were incorrect.
The prosecuting attorneys, who wrote the damn motion and are more familiar with the facts of the case than we are, despite their clear incentives both personal and from above to prosecute, thought that the shoddy workmanship undermined their case to the point that it was unprovable. The prosecutors publicly embarrassed themselves rather than proceed with the case. Because there was no possible way they could prove a crime here. Do you think that they put themselves in this position for fun?
The motion consists of the prosecutors outlining at length why they think that the issues with the construction mean that the multiple eyewitness accounts are either incorrect or irrelevant to the indictment handed down. To defend the original indictment means asserting that one knows more than the prosecutors, or assuming that the prosecutors appointed by Trump, who were willing to work on the original indictment, have suddenly become part of a TDS conspiracy for...reasons.
Assumes facts not in evidence. The line prosecutors are likely all strongly anti Trump or think it’s a waste of time focusing on a relatively low level crime. The only person with skin in the game is the AUSA. So on the one hand her office is pissed at her and the judge is giving her grief and on the other hand her boss wants her to prosecute. She also knows she will lose the court regardless of the evidence given the jury pool.
It is a tough situation for the AUSA and because of that the paragraph you quote isnt necessarily indicative. If you read the motion, the paragraph you posted is incorrect. All the additional information provided is that at least some of the damage is attributed to poor construction. But the evidence is also consistent with vandals making it worse.
You can claim the prior portion of the motion was wrong but it means some of the motion is wrong. I would wager the evidence was described correctly and the conclusion is wrong.
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Binion's takes continue to be some of the best https://x.com/billybinion/status/2084355849045123302
Like seriously, wtf does Pirro get out of this? She sold her soul, hurt innocent people through lawfare, wasted government resources (both time/manhours spent going after actual criminals and money) and in the end didn't even manage to make Trump or MAGA happy.
What Jeanine Pirro gets out of it is that she gets to be US Attorney for DC. Pirro is nominally qualified for her position, but in practice has been a tv personality for the past 20 years; no other administration would put her in this kind of role.
With Trump's coterie of subordinates, there's a pretty clear mix of opportunists and sycophants. One of the attractions of working for Trump is that because he can't/won't source talent from conventional recruitment pools, you can jump directly to positions of power if you know the right people and are willing to lick boot.
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Maybe when she shares a commiserating drink with all the other people who sold their souls, hurt innocent people through lawfare and wasted government resources, she can at least feel good that she didn't overplay so cartoonishly hard that she helped Trump get re-elected.
That doesn't explain anything, it's just whataboutism.
And even revenge doesn't make much sense as a motive, like at least with the hilariously awful Comey indictment the person being targeted is James Comey so harassing him is like understandable as the motive. But Hearn is just some random guy, it seems incredibly petty to sacrifice so much face and embarrass yourself in basically every imaginable way just to legally harass a nobody.
Yeah, totally random, self-described "concerned citizen" and double-digit ActBlue donor who knew enough about the topic to make a trip because he wanted to check it out for himself while somehow completely missing all the culture war angles, and so stuck his arm into a pool that you're not allowed to touch to feel it and wriggle damaged parts around just out of idle curiosity, but he definitely says that he didn't affect it in any way.
Completely random guy being harassed for literally no reason.
Nah, it's just rubbing your nose in your Arctic research station levels of isolated demands.
If you want a more general, real answer, it's because that's the meta. You immediately drop double-barrel, incendiary shells of rhetoric even over minor things, because the other side is going to do the same or worse, and they will never, ever, ever, show a shred of respect or grace for any kind of retiring humility or professionalism. It's not like you'd be granting respect if they'd said something bland and non-committal about "seeing where the process goes". It's not like anyone making a culture war bonfire out of a pool renovation would have chilled down a single degree - they (you) would have just kept heaping wild accusations onto the pyre*. And it's not like there aren't much more egregious examples to throw shade at elsewhere.
You just only ever notice it when you see an opportunity to pounce on the side you dislike.
*Turing Test Writing Challenge: SecureSignals style post blaming the pool issues on Israel. There was a person holding a "First they came for the algae..." sign...
The case was dropped due to lack of evidence (despite the constant lies beforehand saying there was tons of it), so yes. He got harassed for no reason, literally nothing came out of it.
Exactly, whataboutism. It didn't matter whether or not the soviets were right in their critiques of the US, what mattered is that they used the US as an excuse for their own misdoings. If the soviets wanted to defend their actions on the merits, they would have done such.
That's actually not what your own cite says.
I didn't cite anything but if you mean what the OP did, yes it does.
Yes, the part you underlined is precisely what I was referring to. "There's a plausible enough alternative explanation that we're not going to get a conviction through a DC jury" is actually a different statement from "There was no evidence of the crime at all because we made it all up."
You are reading the first and imagining the second. Or, less charitably, lying.
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Glad to see Reason is still in business; I wasn't aware. Of course, this fellow did, by all the eyewitness accounts, reach into the reflecting pool and start pulling the lining up, to the point where the park police noticed and demanded he stop, but maybe, given his background, he's just a pool lining autist, and also a true libertarian who believes that every citizen has a right to audit the structural integrity of the pool without state coercion interfering.
Yeah, I don't know what is wrong with the Reflecting Pool or how it happened, but I don't think "well this is already broken, let me rip it to bits" is acceptable. If he did what is claimed, then it is vandalism. It doesn't matter if the lining was already torn, he made things worse.
Imagine your car is stopped with a flat tyre. A passer-by then breaks in a window. "What, this vehicle was already not functional, I didn't do anything wrong!" Would anyone accept that?
Is breaking a window of a car with a flat tire the right comparison? Pulling up a bit of lining that was already torn seems more like walking by a house that's already collapsed, and picking up a handful of rubble on a whim. You could uncharitably describe the latter as "pulling bricks right out of the wall", but vandalism seems a stretch.
Picking up a bit of broken-off lining is not what he's supposed to have done, though. He was yanking it up and didn't stop when instructed to do so.
I'm not saying what he did was, on any theory, lawful (nor was it a nice thing to do). But it seems to me that the salient quality of vandalism is deliberately ruining something that was fine before you got there, or at least, fine in whatever aspect you decided to wreck. Breaking the window of a car with a flat tire - sure, that's vandalism. Poking another hole in the already-flat tire… I dunno. I guess I sort of think of "vandalism", in its vernacular if not its legal sense, as requiring an intent to deface which is moot if you're only worsening damage to something that already visibly needed replacing.
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How is it not vandalism to rip off a piece of a national monument? You have to reach into the pool to grab a piece, it's not just laying on the sidewalk raking with the leaves.
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The case was dropped after all so what Binion is really saying is don't harass random citizens with weak lawfare just to cover for incompetent contracting work.
It's hard and expensive to take cases to court and potentially all the way through trial with what I guess would be a DC jury (I don't know the nuances of how the system works with regard to the severity of the offence and the parks jurisdiction). To be fair to libertarians, I'm sure that Binion would also complain about people being charged and successfully plead out for much less serious stuff from the other side, but to be fair to everybody else I'll also point out that the balance of these sorts of cases is not exactly equal, in terms of who gets charged and whose charges make it to sentencing. Of course, a more efficient justice system would just summarily deal out minor punishments to people who commit obviously intentional vandalism on camera, but that's a regime-complete problem. The "shoddy contracting work" point has been hashed out elsewhere so I have no need to address it.
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This is just an argument for never getting into politics. If the goal is to feel as though you have never "debased yourself" then your only option is to be an irrelevant commenter like Billy Binion, always out of the fray and above it all.
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That seems like a really bad motion. Literally the evidence is “there were construction problems and therefore the multiple first hand witnesses who saw this person doing damage isn’t true.”
They saw him pulling up pieces of the liner, with his hands. If these pieces of liner were loose already due to construction problems, the "damage" is nonexistent (they'd have to be removed anyway).
Except it was described as being violent. Perhaps there was something loose but violently pulling the liner would make it worse.
While federal law's text doesn't care about the actual impact on repairs rather than just whether a nominal damage was done -- people have been got for vandalizing federal property slated for demolition, albeit only under the misdemeanor version -- in practice juries tend to be pretty skeptical and the actually impact matters for the specific version of the crime. I'm pretty harsh on DC juries, but I don't know that I could vote to convict here, at least from the public information. He probably had some malicious intent, if the "awfully sensitive" comment holds up, but that really shouldn't be enough on its own.
I think there was zero chance of winning even if the construction was perfect.
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Sure, I’ll take a crack at it, it’s a beautiful night for an argument.
Have you been to Washington DC lately? Trump got the National Guard to clean up the worst of the homeless blight. Union Station looks beautiful right now. Trump got money to turn the fountains back on. They’re gorgeous, they hadn’t been turned on in decades. I was out with a friend near the Capitol at night and we were stunned. I’ve even heard liberals admit that Meridian Hill Park is more beautiful now, thanks to Trump.
There are still some problem spots. There’s a church downtown, I think it’s the one on I street and 5th Northwest, where the ministry lets the homeless congregate on their property in a tent city. Sometimes I’ve seen them congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries. Virginia doesn’t like them either, but they’re not under Trump’s control and won’t just do what he tells them.
Have you ever been to a Trump property? His hotels are genuinely very nice, his restaurants have good food, the service is excellent. The Trump Hotel in Vegas has a good claim to being the nicest hotel on the Strip. The Trump Hotel in DC has noticeably declined ever since they got turned into the Waldorf — both of the last two times I’ve been there the wait staff have hassled me over $300 because some man who sat at the same table as me walked away to some other side of the room and they wanted to close the table down. And Trump Tower in New York is a gorgeous building that genuinely turned the corner for Manhattan in the 80s. The last time I was there, which admittedly was a few years ago, huge swathes of it had to be closed down to security threats. There are always liberals who want to vandalize it.
So now we come to the Reflecting Pool. There were protesters holding up signs saying that between Trump and the algae, they were rooting for the algae. There’s a minor black market selling chips off the tarp, because people reached their hands in and got some. There are bars all over town where you can order drinks like a “Blue-Green Reflecting Pool Margarita”.
There is, in short, a whole class of people who are cheering for decay, they want to see things break because they get to gloat when it happens, and when it does happen they will deny any responsibility as they cheered it on.
I am now receiving a lecture in incompetence from those people.
Look, it’s actually not a blow to my ego if the pool guys did a shoddy job. That happens sometimes. It’s not like Trump personally drained the pool and laid down the tarp down. He’s just going to get some guys to fix it.
You probably see that as a failure because you’re not used to setbacks because you’ve never built anything.
It’s not like Trump interrupted the left’s stellar record of building things on time and under budget. Those fountains have been off for twenty years and the Reflecting Pool has been collecting algae for at least that long. What did Biden do about it? Bush? Obama spent multiples of what Trump has spent so far and didn’t get any better outcomes. But I don’t get treated to rants about how Obama was incompetent. All I’m hearing here are defenses of how Democrats had such integrity because they conducted go-nowhere investigations so they could get a TV spot about how they’re willing to criticize their president. Maybe if I went looking I could find examples of Republicans criticizing President Trump, I don’t know, it might be really hard.
So it’s Trump’s Fault because, why, exactly? He skipped the biddings process? The famous Washington DC bidding process that always produces great and cheap results on time? The great fantastic bidding process that makes sure no mistakes or setbacks are ever had? Yeah Washington DC works so well why doesn’t Trump follow the Washington DC process? If only we’d spent more money having more meetings everything would have turned out ok. Trump must be too incompetent to hire a contractor.
TLP had this great distinction about omnipotence vs omniscience. The man who chases omnipotence is out in the world acting. The man who chases omniscience sits in the corner watching smugly with the attitude that his “understanding” is actually superior. Trump didn’t follow the rules, which proves he’s incompetent. Because I know what the rules are, which I read in a newspaper just now, I’m actually more competent than Trump.
So here’s something like a flow chart prediction of what will happen next:
Trump will hire contractors to fix the Pool again. If the first contractors are found to be at fault, the Federal Government will win back money, and liberals will say this proves Trump is incompetent. If the first contractors are not found to be at fault, liberals will say that Trump is lying and so he must be incompetent.
Once the pool is fixed, if it stays fixed, we will all basically move on forever. Liberals will never give credit for fixing the Pool, because the first time he fixed it it didn’t work.
If the pool is fixed and gets broken again, this is double proof that Trump is incompetent. In no way would this ever possibly suggest that anybody is trying to break it. If that were possibly true, Trump should be able to indict the vandals in a city that sides 95-5 with the vandals.
Because, at the end of the day, the people cheering for algae and homeless shelters in front of the churches, who will actively sabotage every attempt to clean anything up, will then deny that there could possibly have been any sabotage. The people who won’t build anything will explain why you can’t build anything. Well, actually, we can build anything, we just choose not to, we have to go through all this environmental review, contract bidding, community impact, it’s really complicated.
I’m dreaming of the anti-Trump future. Every town in America has a building permit for high-speed rail from California, and a grocery store run from New York. The fountains are all turned off so we can save money to fight climate change. Elon Musk’s wealth is confiscated so we can give it to someone who knows how to build things, like Barack Obama. And the Reflecting Pool is given over to the algae, in honor of the Piscataway, Pamunkey, Nentego-Nanichoke, and Nanticoke-Lenape tribes, whose land this originally was.
I don't see the contradiction. These people aren't cheering for the decay of the pool because they have a fetish for badly-maintained pools; they are cheering to make fun of Trump's incompetence. Now without a doubt, they enjoy having reasons to dunk on Trump so much that they "want" him to fail so they can keep on jeering. That's not a great attitude. But bringing up incompetence isn't an inexplicable last-minute about-face, it's been the point from the start. ‘Har-har, look at Ozymandias up there, the great public works he's so stupidly proud of are falling apart before our eyes, the Emperor has no clothes.’
This is just the nice rationalization they like to tell themselves. They’re not actively cheering for the pool to fail, see, they just want Trump to fail, and also want to make it likelier for Trump to fail, and they don’t especially want to fix the pool themselves, well, they would, but it’s complicated, it has to be done right, the contract process alone is very complicated… There’s always another reason why doing things is incompetent and sitting in the corner watching is wise. And the great thing about reasons is that there’s an infinite number of them.
This is why I bring up the TLP omnipotence/omniscience fantasy. They don’t want to fix the pool, they want to be right!
I'm not saying they don't want the pool to fail; I'm saying they want the pool to fail because its failure could be held up as evidence of Trump's incompetence. Why else would they care? (I agree they wouldn't particularly care to fix it if it were up to them and there was no political dimension to it at all; but I don't think we'd be seeing the same jeering enthusiasm for watching it falling apart.)
Yeah, that's the rationalization. They don't want the pool to fail as such, they want the pool to fail because of Trump. But then, next time, it will be because of Vance or *because of Rubio. And then when they're in charge of fixing the pool, there will be all sorts of other reasons why it can't be built: environmental review, DEI impact, it's not a good use of money when there are starving children in Africa, etc. etc. etc. There will always be some reason why, when they literally cheer for the algae, it's not literally cheering for the algae as such, it's knowingly self-ironic in the context of hoping Trump fails to clean the algae. And you're stupid if you don't understand the distinction. But the distinction is invented. The point is never about fixing the pool, the point is for them to be right.
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I personally think your argument can be summed down to:
I think those are fair points and can be discussed at length, but I think you didn't address the incompetence of this Reflecting Pool debacle which was my main point. I noticed I didn't detail Trump's incompetence in my thread starter so I'll do here so you can have a chance to respond.
I think Trump picked an incompetent Secretary of the Interior in Doug Burgum
Earlier you said:
Your flow chart is very incomplete, the same contractors (Atlantic Industrial Coatings) that was hired for the initial renovation was hired to repair it. I find it unlikely that the Federal Government will get any money back.
The renovation project was rushed, as stated from the dismissal:
The handling of evidence of supposed vandals was bungled. No videos, no pictures, only witness testimony by the NPS which we have no evidence whether they are reasonable and truthful people or raging liars. (Body cams would be great here).
Claims about other kinds of vandalism like knife cuts or dumping of phosphate with again no evidence.
The National Mall with the emblazoned 8647, there's no chasing that?
Now all the above can be argued is Burgum's fault, but then I would point to the quote up top. I've mentioned before but I find it very strange that Burgum can keep bungling and there's nothing to be done.
I think Trump picked an incompetent District Attorney in Jeanine Pirro
Let's work backwards from the possible futures that are already lost to us.
I don't even know why Pirro has to be DA for DC, what makes her more special than the other MAGA-aligned attorneys out there that Trump picked her. (I can also wax on about how Trump is incompetent at enlarging his circle so that he has more MAGA-aligned attorneys out there to pick from).
I think Trump was incompetent and set a deadline in retrospect couldn't be achieved
Yes, that's how it works. Just like how people can still point to the 2012 renovations that Obama did and failed. I do hope that this time the pool is fixed for good so that there is no need for multi-million dollar renovations in the future. But did it have to be done before? Can't it be done after? Just need some marketing "Today is the 250th anniversary of this great nation, look around enjoy this, because tomorrow we will start the renovations of special landmarks in this great city that has been left unfunded by all the previous guys".
Yes, I know, at this point it's veering into Monday morning quarterback, but agian, I point to the quote above.
I think Trump is incompetent at enlarging his group of supporters
If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, he would have a better pick of the litter instead of Jeanine Pirro.
If there were more MAGA-aligned attorneys, maybe they can convict vandals even when the city sides 95-5 with the vandals (remember John Adams defending the murderers?)
If there were more MAGA-aligned people, maybe there won't be any vandals even.
This is veering into non-Reflecting-Pool reasons on how Trump is not enlarging his group of supporters so I'll stop here.
Now one thing that really irked me about your comment.
You just made a bunch of assumptions about me then attacked that. You didn't even address my arguments, just attacked this imaginary me you have in your head. You've already lumped me into all the people that you detest and assumed the worst.
Ok, let's go back to your arguments
1. "Have you looked at the other things he did?"
Yeah, at this point after over a decade of Trump in the spotlight, I do have a general understanding of the things that Trump did. You can say all you want about Trump being a good builder and he makes good buildings, but that's not the same as being a good president. I put more worth on your arguments about how Trump drives down homelessness in DC. But that can be criticized too.
If the homeless numbers are down, where are they going? I don't see much news about low cost housing being built in DC. Maybe those homeless people you see "congregating on the bridges just within the Virginia boundaries" are exactly the former-DC-homeless. That's certainly one way to fudge the numbers.
I found this article from 2025 July that shows how the homeless numbers dropped and has its own critiques:
And maybe we shouldn't celebrate too early seeing as in 2026 the homelessness numbers increased slightly.
In fact, I honestly think Trump would be doing a good job of making DC beautiful (though I haven't been there recently). But there are criticism, and yeah, it's nothing to do with the incompetency regarding the Reflecting Pool.
2. "Trump tried, you can't blame him for the results of others"
I do agree with the general sentiment of applauding someone for trying, it's very much in the spirit of one of the best quotes from Teddy Roosevelt. But just as much we can praise someone for trying, it is not mutually exclusive of how we can't criticize the incompetence with which it was carried out.
And as pointed out way way above, "the buck stops here". Fairly or not, Trump will be judged in the court of opinions and history for his AND his administration actions.
3. "They are terrible people who would have persecuted him anyway"
Yes, they would, that's just competition. That's the eternal game of politics and culture warring. You have to win, and win so decisively (like let's say gay people in present America) so that you can't be persecuted on whatever it is you're fighting for. Trump could have been "he's a fascist but at least he keeps the pool clean" Mussolini-style (even if in fact Mussolini never did get trains to run on time really), but he didn't, and so therefore the narrative was made and he will be podunked on it. So yes. Incompetence.
Burgum was previously the extremely-popular governor of North Dakota, whose reputation was so strong that he was floated by national media as a candidate for Trump's VP slot. He was considered a once-in-a-generation pick for DOI because his life spent in America's Interior, and his vision for what to do with it, are considered extraordinarily strong for a position that is usually passed-over by candidates of the first rank.
Your argument is that Burgum is an incompetent Secretary because one investigation into one failure didn't produce enough evidence to convince you. And what evidence there was you dismissed out of hand. Do you have any thoughts about Burgum's record of competence on oil drilling, wind policy, solar, wildlife refuges, Indian Affairs, national monuments? Well, Burgum is incompetent because user lollol thinks NPS rangers need bodycameras.
Jeanine Pirro was appointed District Attorney after Trump's first choice, Ed Martin, was forced to step down from nomination because of Thom Tillis. The position of US attorney for DC is a thankless job because the DC attorney's office is a viper's nest of career lawyers who are more aligned to the culture of Washington DC than conservative or Republican priorities. Jeanine Pirro was, at least, somebody who sacrificed quite a lot by aligning herself with Trump over the last 10 years and was, by all accounts, somebody who was actually interested in the meat-and-potatoes work of running the DC office.
Your argument is that Jeanine Pirro is incompetent because, on one case out of the hundreds on her portfolio, she dropped a case facing a 95% Dem Jury Pool Indictment she was forced to initiate because of political considerations made by her boss. Ever been handed a lose-lose situation before? Now, look, I'm no Jeanine Pirro defender, I think Trump's assessment that she choked is probably right, and I think she's wrong to back down and lose face and she'll be punished for it. But your theory, essentially, is that she must be incompetent because, on the only issue you bothered to look at, you didn't like what you saw. You admittedly don't even know very much else about her.
So maybe you see what I mean? When I summon TLP and his point about lazy omniscience. You don't actually care about the Reflecting Pool as such, you care about being right. You don't actually know much about the details of how this stuff actually works. But you're sure Trump must be incompetent, and you're willing to seize upon whatever first evidence you find to prove that you're right. And if it weren't that, it would be something else. Pirro backed down, so she must have been incompetent. But if she had kept fighting, that would also be proof of incompetence. Etc. etc.
Just to work down the list of other arguments, for the sake of completeness:
Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in a generation. You almost surely mean something more specific by this, maybe that Trump doesn't attract more high-quality people to his movement. But I'm sure that no matter who Trump attracted, you would come up with a definition for why they were a priori incompetent.
Again, Pirro was not Trump's first pick because the Senate constrained him.
Yeah, Trump just needs super lawyers with super law who are so good they can convince even Democrats who hate them to support them. Why hasn't Trump done this?
No, the point is that in your rush to declare that Trump is "incompetent" you've hastily elided obvious domains in which Trump is very capably competent. Instead of constraining your broad strokes at all, by e.g. saying that Trump is good at building but bad at [something else], you've locked yourself into the very silly argument that Trump isn't good at anything. Now you're doubling down on that strange premise.
Your argument now is that Trump is incompetent because he didn't fix everything everywhere all at once. Trump can't actually solve low cost housing in DC, at least, not without Congress or DC authorizing more housing within DC.
Yeah that was my point. Trump can do everything in his power clean the city up, but he can't do everything in libs' power. One half of the political spectrum wants to kick the homeless out of parks, one half doesn't, the half that doesn't will shelter the homeless and say, "see, you can't kick the homeless out of parks, you must be incompetent!"
Yeah, right, my argument (my observation really) is that there are a lot of people emotionally attached to Trump being wrong, therefore they will invent a reason why what he is doing is wrong, no matter what he actually does. It's in fact what you're doing in this very argument.
This is empty rhetoric. No matter what Trump did, you would find a way to criticize it, and then justify that by saying your just calling balls and strikes. It's not an argument, it's a rationalization.
See what I mean? The pool was dirty before Trump cleaned it. But you don't want to give him any credit, so you have to contort this one-way construction where you would have given Trump credit, you would have been fair, but, alas... You've not even taken responsibility for your frame, you've just outsourced it to "the narrative".
So now that I've taken the time to address all of this point-by-point (which I will probably not do if we have future rebuttals), I want to come back to this:
"Detest" is a strong word here, I don't think I said that, I'm sorry if I did, I don't hate you. And sometimes my remarks are aimed at "you" and sometimes at the imaginary rhetorical "you," which is an effective and valid way to construct an argument without rebutting every point-by-point, please-don't-take-it-personally.
However, at bottom, I think I have interacted with your point of view to a significant level and addressed it very thoroughly, no matter if some of the points I rebutted don't describe your position as you would make it, because I think the conclusion goes more or less like this:
You believe, a priori, that Donald Trump is incompetent. You would find any flaw Trump makes and use that to justify your criticism. It doesn't matter what the flaw is. If the pool breaks, it can't be from sabotage or vandalism, no matter how many people are cheering for that exact outcome. If the pool doesn't break, it must be too expensive. Or the contract was corrupt. Or it was a bad use of money. But you would never extend this criticism to your own group: I don't see any forthcoming mea culpa about how Obama was also incompetent, or how all presidents are incompetent and Trump is just the latest, or how many leftists criticizing the pool explicitly want to destroy it. No, you want to claim the neutrality of just calling balls and strikes as you see it, but that neutrality will never reach any conclusion that isn't what you wanted.
"The Buck Stops Here"? Trump is already having the pool fixed. But I don't think you're really interested in having the pool fixed. I think you're interested in being right.
Your points about me not knowing enough about Burgum and Pirro to able to judge someone is both correct and not correct. Yes, it's true that the best way to judge and form an opinion of a political figure is to take the grand totality of what they do. But just like every other political figure, the way they are judged are usually by a few thing that defines them. Could be Biden and not stepping down from running, could be Harris and her no regrets defending Biden on national TV, could be Hillary and her non-secure email servers, could be Obama and his arrogance (Iran, dealing with Republican congress), could be Tim Walz and the Somali fraud cases.
Notice how I used Democratic figures to satisfy your complaint how I don't give examples of incompetence to your "other side"?
For me, Burgum and Pirro are defined by the events of the Reflecting Pool and the National Mall. I'll be perfectly happy to read what you have to say about their records elsewhere. Like I said:
Thank you for going through the arguments. I find that your reading of them differ from mine quite a bit. I will endeavor to go through your arguments as well
Maybe it's easier to point to examples of competence as a contrast. The reason why FDR is competent is because he's able to get people to keep voting for him and his party so that FDR can keep doing things he wanted and drive his enemies into political footnotes, one could say FDR got and maintained a large group of supporters.
Another example is Reagan, who went up in vote percentage from 50.7% in 1980 to 58.8% in 1984. Reagan is a good example of enlarging his group of supporters (with the standout example being the quips made between him and the Democrat surgeon for his assassination).
Trump definitely has an upward trajectory, from 46.1% in 2016, to 46.8% in 2020, to 49.8% in 2024. And yes, Obama has a downward trajectory, from 52.9% in 2008 down to 51.1% in 2012. But if we pit Obama vs Trump, is Trump likely to win? I think not.
And yes, I do think Trump isn't attracting the higher quality people to his movement. And I disagree with your argument that I am so uncharitable to not recognize competence in Trump picks. I never said it before on this forum but I do think and know that Tom Homan is more competent at his job of deporting people without controversy than Greg Bovino.
Your argument about the Senate, don't you feel the counter argument lurking right behind the corner: "If there was a large bench of good lawyers for MAGA, then even if Thom Tillis blocked Ed Martin due to Jan 6th ties then another Ed-Martin-esque person can be found."
And also importantly, I see you didn't respond to: "If there were more MAGA-aligned people, maybe there won't be any vandals even."
Which I want to also mention that just as much as you think I haven't proved "there are no vandals of the reflecting pool", you haven't proved "there are vandals of the reflecting pool". Incompetence of the contractor is definitely proven based on the dismissal though. In fact, it's probably better to focus on the National Mall because that's obviously vandalism.
I can certainly think of places where Trump is competent, but if you do ask me in general then I do think his presidency is more incompetent (Greg Bovino style) than competent (Tom Homan style). Yes, it is a reflection of my value judgment as a member of the public. Now I didn't count your "Trump is competent at building stuff" because that wasn't about the reflecting pool.
To showcase something I did find that shows Trump's competence somewhere in this reflecting pool thing, I was going to leave this for a future thread reflecting on the pool (pun intended) but I think Trump's "pool guy" is probably a good pick. Initial reporting has Trump saying this:
Now the article didn't know who this pool guy is but it sounds to me like the later reported John Cafaro and Greenwater Services who got a $1.7 million contract to install “nano bubble” device that clean the pool. And look, the problem with the algae arrived because they turned off and moved those devices for Trump's UFC/birthday activities as the devices are large and eyesores.
Did it take a week? probably. Did it cost about a million and a half? 1.7 is pretty close to me. Did most media conflate Greenwater Services and Atlantic Industrial Coatings (who does a different job and got a much bigger contract)? Yeah, looks like it to me. So in fact, there were actually two "pool guys" (multiple guys I'm sure), though I don't think Trump knew Atlantic Industrial Coatings so he is another layer removed from that incompetence (and yet more on Burgum/DOI and how did that come about)(but then again Trump did pick Burgum).
There, I gave you a pretty valuable piece of information, I think you can stop drawing me as a Trump-hating-obsessive person who is just jumping to conclusions seeing that I do my research and cite my sources and go into detail on things and am careful with my words.
Why did you gloss over me saying this: "In fact, I honestly think Trump would be doing a good job of making DC beautiful (though I haven't been there recently)." I literally says that I expect Trump to be doing a good job doing the things you praised him for (cleaning up DC). Ok, let me state in even more detail then: it can be both and many things, competent at making things beautiful or beautiful things, incompetence at picking people who should be making beautiful things, competence at directing military force to cleanup homeless encampment, incompetence at actually reducing number of homeless people by passing legislation, reduce red tape, increase funding, whatever. Maybe you should recognize that my frustration is the reflecting pool incompetence and how that indicates to me on where and what domain Trump is good or bad at and whether that makes him a good Federal executive. You can point out the other things that Trump does well, and I might as well and did concede on that, but that doesn't take away the incompetence with regards to the pool.
I'm going to skip your next few paragraphs, I read it though and thought I don't think anything I say here is going to change anything because I don't know when "you" means me or "you" means the greater rhetorical you that you're rebutting to.
I already said this: "I do hope that this time the pool is fixed for good so that there is no need for multi-million dollar renovations in the future."
Yes, I reserve my right to criticize Trump and his administration. Yes, I can make criticisms of other presidents, just because I didn't do it in this thread doesn't mean I don't have any. Yes I reserve my right to praise Trump and his administration. Yes, I can make praises of other presidents, just because I didn't do it in this thread doesn't mean I don't have any. I don't believe that "arguments as soldiers" is good for society. I believe that there are things that are "both sides", and also there are things that are not "both sides". You can confuse me with the
sometimes my remarks are aimed at "you" and sometimes at the imaginary rhetorical "you,"but I know do my best that I don't and didn't do that to you.Also besides, maybe you should turn around and do that then, you should think about where Trump has failed as a president, and not in the "he failed because he didn't do enough kinda thing", more of the "he failed because he went too far/overlooked/made a terrible decision". And maybe you did, and I don't know that, but in this thread you seem like a pure glazer to me.
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Clearly virgina does like them if virginia is inviting them to stay
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It seems like a "only Nixon could go to China" situation. Washington D.C. doesn't have any voting representation in congress so it doesn't have anyone to fight for it when it comes to budgeting, it has the 4th highest National Parks deferred maintenance backlog of any state even though it doesn't really have a major national park. If Obama had decided to use money from Yellowstone admission fees to get the fountains in D.C.'s Malcom X Park running again that would easily slot into narratives about Washington politicians plundering the country for the benefit of big city liberals. But Trump has a genuine passion for monumental architecture and infinite credibility with the Republican base so it doesn't cost him political capital to do this stuff in a way it would most other presidents.
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I suspect Trump has it backwards. There likely was some damage caused by vandals, but the majority of the problem was caused by it being a rush job. Note that nothing Pirro said disputes the earlier evidence against Hearn; he was accused of pulling on the liner with his hands, the claims of knife cuts were earlier. Of course once you know there were significant defects, the case becomes muddy; chance of proving beyond reasonable doubt that vandals did a particular bit of damage, especially with their bare hands, is very low and the dismissal is appropriate.
I think it's bs. The vandal did some damage, and whether it's over or under $1000, that's a question for the jury to decide.
Broken windows and all, but just because some structure is already damaged or fucked up doesn't excuse vandals from doing more damage to it.
You mean "whether David Hearn is a vandal guilty of damages more than a $1000, that's a question for the jury". Just as much as the worst possible case against Hearn can be waged, the best most charitable interpretation of Hearn's actions can be offered. And if we follow that broken window analogy, to me it was the Trump administration that led to the broken window in the first place, seems like that is more worthy of investigation and prosecution.
Anyway, Pirro made the mistake of backing down and admitting defeat. Trump would never.
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I think in order to do real damage with your bare hands it has to be at least a bit fucked up already. Interesting that they don't seem to have attempted to bring charges against the other people who were apparently apprehended by the park service, but this guy seems to have really tried to get it - pulled up a lot more than either of the two women and then started beefing with the cops.
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Imagine, if you will, an island of dogs. (No, not the Wes Anderson film Isle of Dogs.) This island is inhabited by three dog breeds: the sleek and meek Shiba Inu, the proud and elegant Borzoi, and the large and aggressive Rottweiler.
This is Year 1 of Dog Island. It doesn’t matter how the three dog breeds arrived to the island, but they’re all there now. The dogs do as dogs do, wandering the island, drinking from streams and killing small prey to stay alive. At first, most of the Shiba Inu breed with the other Shiba Inu, and the Borsoi with the Borsoi, and so on. But our dogs, since they are not redlining segregationists or hardcore Nazi racists, begin to breed with one another. The runts of the Rottweilers and the Borzoi run off to mate with the Shiba Inu. The biggest Shiba Inu girls, lacking an appropriately dominant Shiba mate, run off to get boned by the smallest of the Borzoi or Rottweiler dogs. Before long, the mostly Shiba Inu pack comes to be a mixture of the bulk of the Shiba Inu and some of the smaller members of the Borzoi and Rottweiler packs. The Rottweiler pack eventually becomes a mixture of the largest and most dominant Rottweilers and their Borzoi and Shiba concubines. The Borzoi pack, with their recessive genes, soon become dominated by the beta Rottweiler dogs who are more aggressive than the Borzoi.
Into Years 2 and 3 of dog island, all of the dogs continue to interbreed. Generation 1 is still around, the legacy purebred Shibas and Borzoi and Rottweilers, all surrounded by their interracial progeny. In this situation, the male Shiba Inu and the female Rottweilers are the least attractive mating partners.
Now, why does sex operate this way? It is not downstream of racism or even a socially constructed popularity contest. These are dogs. Instead it is downstream of sex itself. Now I will speak from experience. I am a gay man. I have had sex with a fair number of men. When you are having gay sex, you are assuming either a dominant or submissive position with your partner. This is not only true of anal sex but of oral sex, of frotting, even of kissing or of hugging. One of you is dominating, and one of you is surrendering to the other. When it comes to penetrative anal sex, you must be erect and genuinely attracted to your partner, and most importantly, you must believe you can dominate your partner. It is not that you must understand you have their permission, but you must understand that you have the physical power to dominate your partner. This should turn you on alone. This is the power to procreate. If you do not believe you are bigger than or better than your partner, you can not penetrate them. As a top it is a far easier task to dominate a smaller, younger partner than it is to dominate a larger, older man. Never mind the ridiculous situations that porn depicts- It is a perversion of reality to see a younger smaller man dominate an older one. Similarly it is strange and unnatural to see a male Shiba Inu dominating a female Rottweiler. It is embarrassing for both partners.
You may have already gathered this, but my Dog Island exposition is not really about dogs at all. As much as human nature rages against it, we too are animals bound by physical constraints of reality. The three dominant branches of humanity today can be described in modern American terms as Blacks, Whites, and Asians. (There are other branches of these people, as well as Australian Aboriginals who are usually categorized separately, but for illustrative purposes I am sticking with these three.) Blacks are the original stock of humans who evolved in Africa. Asians branched off from Blacks at a certain point, moving into the Eurasian landmass and heading East. Several thousand years later another migration resulted in Whites who moved West into Europe (as well as South Asians who moved into South Asia.) This is a broad simplification but is my understanding. Both Asians and Whites bred with Neanderthals after migrating out of Africa and most Sub Saharan Africans today still have no Neanderthal DNA in contrast with the rest of the world who do. I mention all this because it is important to understand that the races have been genetically isolated and distinct for many generations. Gemini tells me that modern dog breeds are only 50 to 80 generations apart from each other. 50 generations in human years equates to only 1500 years at the high end. Everyone from casual pet owners to hardcore communist scientists will insist that dog breeds have certain behavioral traits and habits that are hard wired into their beings. (I actually suspect the degree to which dog breeds are said to have certain divergent traits is overestimated by many of these people, and can to some degree be a result of the projection of the observer or their imagination of what different looking dogs seem to be in relation to the observer, but I am not a dog expert so perhaps it’s all accurate.) The human races have far more than 50 generations or 1500 years separation between them, but we are told any behavioral traits or habits of perceived difference between them is purely an environmental product rather than any innate trait developed by natural selection or selective breeding over the years. I am not convinced of this.
Now that I’ve proposed that sex is downstream of biology, I would like to propose that politics are downstream of sex. I can’t help but notice that the immigration opinions of people tend to match their sexual prospects. In crude terms: Large and unappealing women support the immigration of more dominant men into their societies. Smaller and less dominant men support the migration of themselves into populations of smaller and more sexually appealing women.
When you are a young gay man, you do not have the experience of being a dominant male. You have likely spent your whole life under the wing of a father, of grandfathers, of older brothers or cousins, and of older men down the street from you. So it follows, that your experience with sex is likely that you are being dominated by older men, unless you are the type of boy who likes to dominate younger boys, which will just get you in trouble. So you start out in a submissive role with older men. I too had this experience, and until my mid 20s I was somewhat uncomfortable being more dominant with other men, though it would sometimes hurt my ego if I found myself submitting to an unworthy man. Regardless, my politics were broadly aligned with this situation, as I was ambivalent at best regarding immigration into my community. As a white American Midwesterner, I imagine most “foreigners” who might move into my community as Muslims from the Middle East or as Black guys from the other part of my city. As a younger man dominated sexually and socially by older men, an influx of more dominant males wasn’t irritating to me. But ten years later, the thought of more sexually dominant men coming into my community is an irritating prospect that I’d rather avoid. As a younger man if I’d had the foresight to imagine I would ever be in the position to be socially dominant over some portions of the men around me I’d probably be quicker to dislike immigration, but lacking the experience I didn’t imagine the situation I’d find myself in today.
I love reading old fairy tales. One of the most common tropes in these old stories boils down to, basically, telling girls and young women not to hold out or run off to find a suitable partner. That she is better off staying close to home and finding a suitable mate nearby. We may imagine the immigration situation to have arisen in the past 20 years but apparently it’s such a deeply ingrained impulse that medieval storytellers had to weave it into their tales centuries ago. We may spend a lot of time on TheMotte complaining about a certain type of woman- often characterized as a liberal feminist- who is broadly unfriendly toward men around them and more fond of outgroup males. Unfortunately for you, she is behaving rationally. In my experience, she is often the type of woman who is more outspoken and physically larger than many of the men around her. (My sympathies to tall women who are quite feminine but struggle to find suitable men larger than them.) In other words, this type of woman has looked around, found the majority of the men around her unsuitable for her self, and instead of focusing on the 1 or 2 chads who could top her, and who are more likely to screw Snooki down the block than her, seeks- perhaps subconsciously- for more dominant males outside of her group to mate with. So this type of woman is in favor of increasing her pool of suitable mates, and she isn’t a racist, so she’s not looking for 6 foot tall Nordics who are a bit too fey anyway- she wants her own Mamdani next door.
Of course, some of these women are strange dominating women as well. I have a certain bourgeois friend who owns a shop in a city in the USA. The shop is in a very woke hipster part of the town, they have a sort of “toxic niceness” vibe when you go in there. She happens to be about 6 feet tall and wears, I don’t know, a men’s 3XL t-shirt. She is fashionable and presentable but simply a large woman. Her husband is a meek “performative male” a good 6 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than her. We went on a vacation together one time and I heard her yelling at him in the bedroom. I felt so bad for both of them. It’s nice to imagine a couple like this could be happy but it is so rare in my experience.
There too are men who want to be dominated by women, but I see this as a cope and inversion of their true desires, which is to dominate women, and is borne out of a perception of this being impossible. It could also be evolutionarily advantageous for beta males to imagine themselves dominated by women, as it frees the more dominant men to actually have sexual access to women instead of the beta male.
By the way, does Asian hate exist? In my experience, it really does. The most vocally anti-Asian person I know, was a white guy I knew in college. I’m going to call him Brad. He was a strange person- a gay man, but quite a jock, sort of like a slightly less attractive, stocky Abercrombie model type. I didn’t know he was gay until he told me. He was also very liberal politically. His best friend was a Black woman and he would constantly repeat forced liberal ideals he regurgitated from his grandfather who raised him. Despite his masculine demeanor, he was also a total bottom. In college, we were on a trip to London together, and he immediately met an Italian man a few years older than us, and they immediately became inseparable. Anyway, like I said, this guy is also the most anti-Asian person I’ve ever met. How does this fit with his liberal world view? Imagine the goals and desires of Brad. He wants to be topped by dominant men. So he needs to compete with bottoms. The average trait of an Asian man, compared to the average trait of a white man, is as follows. The Asian man is likely cuter and smarter than the white man. Brad, being a masculine jock, is not very “cute,” so he’s going to lose. He is also not very “smart,” so if your top wants someone with brains, he’s also going to lose. Asian men are also much more discreet and mindful of saving face compared with white people who have a certain habit of stating the quiet part out loud in an obtuse way. Brad, on some level, understands his mating success depends on outcompeting certain types of people, has written off Asian men as unfair competition.
I suspect many races of women have a similar view of Asian women as Brad. Many of the trad larpers on shadier parts of X like to imagine white women as the pinnacle of beauty or screwability but are frankly mistaken. I have spent quite a lot of time in Asia, and every time I do, I am shocked when I see a white woman on the train. After your eye adjusts to Asian women, white women look bizarre, with very large bones, and they really stick out compared to Asian women in an unappealing way. The opposite is true as well, I must say: after spending time in Asia, I am often struck by the handsomeness of any random Middle Eastern or white man I see on the train. It is not that Asian men are unattractive to me at all, on the contrary I am happy to date Asian men and do find them attractive, but they are getting so mogged by every other type of guy that I can’t unnoticed it.
Asia is a bit weird from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Imagine a continent full of petite, beautiful women, and autistic weird nerdy guys and basically no chads. You’d imagine they’d go extinct in a generation, but instead the hot girls all mate with the nerds. Fascinating. I suspect that’s what Western Europe is like too in eras where they’re not being invaded by Sea Peoples. Indeed East Asia seems like the baboon utopia I once read about where all the alpha baboons ate poison trash and died and then they became a peaceful Chad-free society. Why are we importing violent Chads into western society?
That question wasn’t rhetorical. I’ll ask it again: Why are we importing violent Chads into western society? Many people here will probably reject the framing. I’ve had pushback on themotte before from people who insist that anyone Black or brown is not a chad and not a threat and your perfect White face isn’t getting mogged by anyone darker than a swarthy Swede. Sadly you’re wrong! Let’s go back to evopsych to explain.
Look at Aaron Hernandez. He is one of the hottest men to have ever lived in my opinion. I don’t care that he is a murderer, he is beautiful. The fact that he went to prison makes me like him more, if anything. His body is fine and thinking about him smiling at me makes me melt like I’m a schoolboy again. And yet, seeing his brother, DJ Hernandez, broke my brain. He is not more beautiful than Aaron. He is not hotter. He is not even taller than Aaron. And yet, because he is about 15% more masculine than Aaron, my brain tells me I’m supposed to mate with DJ. If I’m a woman and I’m stuck on an island with just Aaron and DJ, I’m mating with DJ. Aaron’s children will be annoying and not want to work, I can just tell. DJ’s children will be tough and dutiful. My procreative intuition tells me this. DJ is mogging Aaron despite everything I love about Aaron. I don’t even like DJ’s looks that much. I could imagine mating with DJ for the kids but staying with Aaron for his beauty and the chaos he’d bring. I am saying this to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reproductive intuitions are and how fundamentally biological they are. My brain can tell me to bone Aaron all day but as soon as I have to consider the hardiness of my children and the propagation of my bloodline I’m picking DJ.
You may think this example is strange, or unrelatable coming from a gay man projecting his feelings onto the mating impulses of a woman. But I believe that all men including straight men are completely aware of this hierarchy of men as well. If you don’t believe me and are a man, go outside and walk around until you see a man. Walk so that you are in his way. Do not cede the ground to him. If he is shorter or weaker than you, he will cede the ground and may even apologize, even though you were the aggressor. If he is taller and bigger than you, see how long you can get in his way before he begins to threaten or get mad at you. I’ll give you about 1.5 seconds. I distinctly remember coming to realize the way this works in about 7th grade, that I suddenly had to be aware of the physical hierarchy of other boys at this age. I don’t know if it was because I suddenly found myself shorter than many other boys my age, whereas I had always been taller earlier in life, or if there is something that changes in the brains of boys at this age, but it became something I had to consciously be aware of. It is so powerful that by a few years later, you forget this entirely and we all submit to the more dominant male subconsciously at all times In order to protect ourselves and keep the peace.
Male awareness of hierarchy is very interesting. I have had a handful of instances where straight men smaller than me have fawned to me in the presence of their girlfriends. This is extremely strange to me and I never know how to take it. I wonder if it is an ingrained sexually eugenic impulse. It is as though they are cucking themselves in the presence of a more dominant male. Once this happened to me on an airplane, when a guy I was sat next to had his girlfriend right next to him. He was a shorter guy who I found really cute, and he was sort of ducking and fawning around me, which is not really that common for me to experience. I thought this must be humiliating for the girlfriend to see your boyfriend doing this to a strange man, but I guess there could be some child preservation instinct on display if you’re good at fawning to more dominant men that you could be better at protecting the child, and projecting a willingness to submit rather than pick fights with a larger man I guess is a strategy. But I don’t understand why the woman wouldn’t simply pick the aggressor to mate with instead of the fawning cuck boyfriend. I have experienced similar situations with female friends’ boyfriends acting the same way, which I can understand slightly better as these female friends were people who respected me as friends and I can see how the boyfriend would want to be seen as friendly toward me, but both times it crossed over into a slight homoerotic vibe that I couldn’t quite understand. (One of them, an immigrant from Western Asia, I later found swiping for men on tinder. I don’t think one should underestimate how many Muslim men who immigrate to Western society are gay, by the way, when considering the immigration patterns of people.)
There seems to be some correlation between diversity of ethnicity and diversity of gender presentation. When I think of the most trans countries on earth, my instinct is to think of Thailand and USA. Interestingly, these are two of the most prominent countries with a less dominant population coexisting with a more dominant male population. Thailand is a very diverse place now, especially Bangkok, where decades of immigration has brought white men, Arabs, Indians, Black men, and so on, all more dominant males compared with the majority Thai (and Chinese) people. America is a once mostly white country, increasingly dominated by nonwhite people. You probably already know that Ladyboys are prominent in Thailand. The last time I was in Thailand, I was riding a ferry near Pattaya, and noticed a woman who I thought was incredibly beautiful. I genuinely thought to myself, that is one of the prettiest women I have seen in ages. She was wearing a bikini and had a very basic Australian boyfriend. After we got off the boat, my boyfriend pointed at that woman, and told me she was a ladyboy. I couldn’t believe it, but he said he noticed a bulge in her pants. I was shocked. I know that many people on the right like to imagine trans women as weird men like Chris Chan, but in my experience most trans women are men who are too small and meek to compete as men, and are better off competing sexually as women. Both boys I grew up with who became trans women were this way. I don’t know why they should be forced to compete as men when they’re better off competing as women. I can even empathize with this impulse, it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I became more comfortable with my size and masculine traits to be confident enough to use my masculine traits to assert dominance sexually. Regardless, making this type of effeminate boy socialize with men of a more dominant race can only increase the impulse to choose the nuclear option for gaining sex and love: becoming a woman, competing as a woman, rather than facing the humiliation of being a very undesirable man. Perhaps if they were socialized only with men of the same race, or men of a smaller race, they’d see no need to transition to women at all.
By the way, I don’t think that being trans is or should be a left wing phenomenon. On the contrary, when I look at beautiful trans women like Andreja Pejic, or even very effeminate androgynous people like Jeffrey Star, I feel what they’re going for is much more akin to a King Ludwig II or Henry Ford or Kanye West or other great men of history, and in fact the entire “trans movement” of the 2010s was essentially leftists trying to harness the energy and power of effective great men of transgenderism and gender diversion into the insular and unproductive world of leftist politics. People like Arca intrinsically have a massive power on society thanks to their gender diversion, and the left could not leave that power unchallenged, lest it be used against them, and so made an incredible noise of adopting it for themselves. (They did the classical Narnia Witch thing of promising them rooms full of Turkish delight while bringing them nothing but a huge amount of fatigue from the general public and a weird coddling from condescending women and the healthcare industry.)
Anyway, the masculinity or femininity of races is consequential, is what I am trying to say. You may believe white genes are superior but nature doesn’t even think white genes are superior. Blue eyes, blond hair, white skin, these are all recessive traits! They are helpful in extreme polar environments with cold climates, but not even necessary (see Native Alaskans for example.) White genes may be appealing when women display them, and if anything it is good for the ego to believe that your whiteness is a good thing, but that’s because you are elevating weakness in the face of the uncaring and tortuous reality of nature.
Speaking of elevating weakness in the face of the uncaring and tortuous reality of nature: What is society? What is the purpose of having something we humans create as an alternative to nature? Imagine we are all nomadic Mongolians on the Steppe. Every day we are faced with challenges from nature: The changing of the seasons, the fluctuations of weather, sickness in the herds, attacks from foreigners, reproductive difficulties, impending death, you could go on and on. Inside the ger (tent), however, we have peace. We have remedies for every challenge in nature: We have calendars to consider and plan around the weather fluctuations and seasonal changes, we have medicine and quarantine from sickness, we have weapons to protect ourselves from foreign tribes, we have chants and folk ways to deal with social problems. In other words, the social world inside of the ger exists to bring us comfort and safety from the outside world of chaos. Imagine how quickly the peace of the ger breaks down when we begin to bring in the outside world of chaos. The calendar is thrown away, we’re at the mercy of the seasons and the weather. The medicine goes bad, we are at the mercy of sickness again. The weapons break and aren’t replaced and the girls want to breed with the foreign tribes. Chaos reigns.
Modern society today is not unlike the world of the ger for the Mongolian nomads. What is culture but a reaction against the horrors of nature? Isn’t every social construct ultimately a luxury provided against the things that can hurt us? What happens when we begin to misidentify threats and instead invite them in? Chaos reigns.
Why does this happen? Why can’t we respect the constructions of man in the face of the horrors of nature? The answer is simple: human arrogance.
Explaining arrogance to modern Western people is like explaining water to a fish. It is so ubiquitous that most people are unaware of it in themselves and even when they encounter it in others. Ancient myths and legends are so full of cautionary tales against arrogance, which we repeat with an air of understanding, then act as arrogantly as if we hadn’t read them at all. And yet humility is the most important quality needed to protect ourselves and society. Arrogance leads us to see foreign threats as no problem at all. Arrogance invites unconquerable problems into the ger. Arrogance is also a profoundly white trait. There are nearly no Asian countries today with the arrogance to invite millions of dominant males into their societies. White countries today can’t do anything else. It is white arrogance that declares everyone a universal equal, while believing themselves universally superior in secret.
If you are unconvinced of the whiteness of arrogance, or of the arrogance of whiteness, just look at any “fish out of water” tale of the past 50 years, from Piper in Orange is the New Black to Timothy Chalamet in Dune. Inevitably, the white hero encounters poor brown people who immediately chide them on their arrogance and entitlement. Never mind that the brown and black people are often as arrogant as our white heroes, it is only the white person who must struggle with overcoming it.
Despite the decades of denazification within our hearts, white people still see ourselves as the most superior people on the planet. I have come to believe this from a sort of reverse logic of the modern western framing. Since, as I explained, society is a refuge from the overwhelming power of nature, that intrinsically puts the weak at the top of the hierarchy as an opposing force of nature itself. That is, we humans in nature are weak and at mercy of the elements and things outside of our control, but to invert that is to create society. And so within society, according to western though, we must continue to invert the power structure, so that women are more righteous than men, so that children are more protected than women, and that the weak and the infirm are the most sacred people as they are symbols of both our inversion of and power over nature, and our great moral righteousness to put the lesser above the superior. There is no righteousness in putting the strong over the weak- this is barbaric at best. And so, when we must elevate Black voices, when we must hear the experiences of marginalized communities, when we must prostrate ourselves in Kente cloths like Nancy Pelosi, what we are doing is asserting the underlying natural superiority of White people over everyone else. We are doing the fundamentally Christian act of elevating the weak over the strong.
This is the very problem. The arrogance of white people to assert themselves as superior to black people. This is white supremacy. This is borne out of a rigidity of thinking and an inability to imagine a world outside of the ger where the truly powerful reign supreme. It is this shortness of insight into humanity that leads white leaders to be entirely confident in their recognition of Black and brown experiences. These are the beliefs of people who see themselves above nature, rather than subject to it, who believe they can rewrite the fundamentals of interpersonal society because they read critical theory and have had to see the very real suffering of Black and brown homeless and impoverished people on their urban rides to their positions of power. You insulate yourself from nature at the risk of inviting nature in to destroy your insulation. Society rots from the inside out.
Another way to frame the inversion of the dominancy hierarchy I mentioned above is that of class. Class, unfortunately, is evil. It is an illusion of arrogance that we believe we can be better than nature. We are not better than nature, we are a part of nature. The most powerful movie I have ever watched is called The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It is a Studio Ghibli film from 2013. The story is about an elderly couple who have no children of their own. One day the man finds a tiny baby while cutting down bamboo. He takes the baby home to his wife, and the baby quickly grows up. The baby is a gift from deities who live on the moon. The deities send them gold and treasures to pamper the baby. They are gifted with so much money that the father has a grand palace built in the capital. The baby has grown into a young girl who enjoys playing with neighbor boys and being in nature. The whole family is happy. The father, in his good intentions, wants to give his family a better life, one better than what nature can provide alone, so they all move to the capital. From this point on, the girl is beaten down and indoctrinated into the ways of society. She is made up in the ugly fashions of the time, given a proper education, and lives like royalty. She also stops growing at this point, and the whole family becomes melancholy. She is humiliated at a coming of age party by someone of a higher class. There is a dream sequence where she runs out into nature, sheds her clothing, and cries out in horror at what’s happened to her. Before long, she is called to return to the moon, and the deities come back to retrieve her. Everyone is sad. The tragedy is that her father’s best intentions ruined the peace and comfort that nature had afforded them. It is his arrogance that led to their downfall.
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When I think of the most unequal places on earth, I think of hideous New Delhi, corrupt Manila, and the slave-built skyscrapers next to shanty towns of Dubai. Postwar era Japan and 1950s America are so well loved and functional because of the inherent dignity and equality among people. I am broadly very right wing but the thing that disturbs me the most among right wing people today is the impulse to assert class privilege as a good thing. Some people are better than others, they insist! But this is bringing the horror of nature into the ger. The only righteous ideal to strive for, truly, is equality, but it is tricky to get this right. We must treat people with equality and dignity that they deserve. It truly is good to care for the weak and elevate their needs when it can be done without hurting the rest of society. It is not good to do so when it leads to the suffering of others. There must also be the understanding and acknowledgment that things are being done as they are out of a sacrifice of the powerful to the benefit of the weak, and never take the sacrifice of the powerful for granted.
Since I pointed out earlier, that all politics are downstream from sexual selection and mate selection, I can continue this strain of thought to explain communism. There are two types of communists from my experience. The first is the beta male who believes communism will afford him an equal opportunity to have sex with a woman by adopting female positions in politics. The second is the alpha male who believes he is a beta male who needs to use communism to afford himself an equal opportunity to have sex with a woman by adopting female positions in politics. The first type is an idiot because as soon as communism is tried in sex, it fails. The second type is an idiot because he is suffering a humiliation ritual he could opt out of for a more gratifying experience which is to dominate women as a man with his own beliefs rather than to dominate women as a man with insincere beliefs. The second man may succeed with a woman but it is on false pretenses, he is misunderstanding the conditions of his success with this woman, and invariably she grows to resent him.
The underlying promise of communism is that if everyone is equal, we can all have sex with whoever we want, because the least dominant man is as good as the most dominant man. Unfortunately, even the most communist woman alive is extremely sexually selective and will not choose to mate with a man in a lower class than what they believe they can get. Many women will choose not to procreate if they can not find a suitable mate. Communism is kinder to women among women, who have less variance across their own population, and for whom equality is more rewarded. They push for equality because it benefits them, but once it is applied to men, they suddenly despise the idea. This is why men should not be communists: because you can treat every man the same in principle but a communism of male sex is impossible.
However, there is a way that a kind of sexual communism is possible. If we were all living in medieval style villages, where all the men around us came from the same stock and looked just like we did, and there were not foreign and exotic bands of men from far away, we would all have a certain life path for ourselves. We start out as boys, the older men help us grow and become men, we replace the men, we retire satisfied as old men eventually. There is an understanding that we may not be one of the most dominant males right now, but if we lead good healthy lives we can eventually rise to that position. Modern society floods our immediate environment with men who are impossibly more dominant than we are, we see them and know we can never be a better mate than they are, and we are left with despair and malaise.
Ideally, every man should have a small group that he is able to dominate. Modern society pushes us into giant groups of people, of millions. When you have a group of 10 people, there is one most dominant male. When you have a group of 100 people, there is only one most dominant male. When you have a group of 8 billion people, there is only one most dominant male. During covid, I stayed in a suburban area for about 2 years. Finally, I was able to leave the country, and I went to London. I had been to London a handful of times before, as a younger man, but this time, the experience on the airplane and being in London was such a disorienting and dystopic experience for me. When I was in my suburban setting during lockdowns, I didn’t have to worry about very many other people, and the ones I did were people I saw often- my family and neighbors. Suddenly at the airport and in the city, I was surrounded by dominant men, but dominant men who all acted subverted by the world around them. It was as though the presence of millions of other larger men were subverting the domination of every man I saw including myself. To have seen a taller stronger man acting weaker and submissive broke my spirit and my hope of being a powerful man myself.
Now, because I dislike meandering tomes that point to problems and offer no solutions, and because things like that often invite the reader to imagine solutions the writer implied but did not enunciate, I will try to offer some prescriptive measures for the state of things. I do not think we can solve any problem until it is correctly diagnosed, so the most important thing to do is to openly and honestly discuss things and to get a clear and grounded understanding of reality. This should be an understanding that works across disciplines from evolution and biology to philosophy and history. Class often acts as a barrier to description- it is not very Chanel to talk about race or how Black men are cucking you out all the time. I am not proposing a genocide on our Isle of Dogs, I think that would be a tragic solution. I think any solution that involves lying to people is doomed to failure. I believe we can explain anything to any person when it’s done from a place of love- for those close to us and for those far from us. We must also love ourselves enough to quit lying to ourselves.
Ultimately, the point I am trying to make is that we are not above nature and that we are part of it. To believe anything else is hubris and arrogance and invites evil every time. We insulate ourselves from reality to our own detriment. Throughout history, aesthetics change, but the fundamentals of nature never do. We can learn from this or suffer the same fates as every other failed society.
I’ll leave aside most of this, but I’m curious. You describe gay sex almost like the top/bottom role is something that varies through life - so like, as a young twink, you were a bottom, then you became a top, then maybe in old age, you become a bottom again if you can get some younger, stronger man to fuck you? I suppose this maps to a kind of Ancient Greek or Russian military understanding of homosexuality among predominantly bisexual men in strict hierarchical male environments, but that isn’t a universal thing.
But most gay men aren’t vers, many stick with a sexual role through their lives. Take some very wealthy old gay man who has topped through his life, is he really suddenly going to get his hired men to fuck him in his twilight years? That seems…unlikely? Maybe not! I don’t know. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for aging twinks to hit the gym, get ripped, whatever to remain sexually attractive, but do they stop being bottoms? Again, I’m not sure. I doubt it, at least for many of them. If anything, a lot of the anguish for aging twinks seems to be precisely about the fact that they don’t want to top, if they did then being a hot 40 year old masculine male would be just fine.
More generally, you seem to have that very wistful, romantic view of male sexuality, camaraderie and competition which is common to almost all intelligent gay men on the right (Mishima etc). But is this a unique insight, or motivated reasoning?
I don't think my views are very romantic at all and I'm surprised you interpret them that way. Maybe my language is too extravagant. I think male sexuality is very cold and aromantic. If anything I view it more akin to Moto Hagio's hysterical melodrama than Mishima's idealization. Actually I remember a post you made positing that men relish competition and I replied that we don't, I think in my post above you can see a kind of loathing of hierarchy and competition I hold which I contrast with Japan for example where male competition seems nonexistent and cooperation reigns. (This is not true across all of Asia by the way, South Korea is much more competitive than Japan for example). I would prefer a situation where there is a legible hierarchy of men which seeks cooperation among each other, and phenotypic diversity is a major confounding variable toward ever achieving this. (This doesn't have to be racial or ethnic at all, either, if there is a situation where everyone born after 2026 grows up to be 7 feet tall I'd see this as a similarly problematic situation, but that isn't the state of things.)
You bring up a lot of various situations in the first two paragraphs which I could spend a lot of time refuting or agreeing with point by point, and if I had all day I'd be happy to, but instead I'll summarize my viewpoint and let you infer the rest as it relates to your specific questions.
Basically, when you are a young man, you experiment sexually with others, hopefully. Most of the time you will be in a submissive role in sexual encounters. This includes any act of sex and may not involve anal sex at all. The less confident man typically assumes the bottom role. Usually you are having sex with older or more socially superior men, so your bottoming does not confer a sense of degradation in it: you are, as a male, happy to be having sexual contact with someone. But at a certain point you do- and should- start to feel irritated when you're drawn into sexual encounters where a lesser man is sexually dominant over you. You will begin to feel this by, say, your mid twenties. When this begins to happen, you can either switch to being prominently a top, and avoid situations where you are being topped by inferiors. Or, you can do the worst thing possible, which is continue to be a bottom and refuse to see yourself as a top and chase after only men clearly superior to you. I describe this as the worst thing possible because you become a full grown man desperate to be topped by a superior. Never mind every inferior man below you. Nothing is more pathetic than a 6'2 35 year old cowboy desperate to be topped by a 6'4 37 year old cowman. This is not even appealing to the cowman: to know that his 6'2 cowboy can't top a 5'10 20 year old because he isn't brave enough is ridiculous.
An adult man who can not move on from the bottom role is like an adult man who has not been potty trained. It makes him look bad, it makes his top feel weird, it makes the bottoms around him feel worse about themselves.
To illustrate this better, here is the female version of the situation. In 7th grade, I went on a class trip. There was a girl in our group of 7th and 8th graders, let's call her Jasmine. She was pretty, thin, and had big boobs. If she wasn't the hottest girl in our group, she was the second hottest girl in our group. Everyone knew it. But as soon as you talked to Jasmine, all she could talk about is how ugly she is, and how fat she is. It didn't matter if you told her she was thin and pretty, she just told you she was fat and ugly. Everyone else on the trip was fatter and uglier than Jasmine, so we all hated Jasmine. The 35 year old bottom (or the 45 year old bottom, or the 55 year old bottom, or god forbid the 60 year old bottom) makes every other man around him look and feel like shit. If this socially superior, masculine guy is a bottom, none of us are worthy of topping. Great.
I hope that answers your question. Basically it is bad hygiene- mentally and socially, to be stuck in a bottom mindset. The best relationship between two men is when both act as tops, the bigger top raises up the smaller top, there is mutual respect and understanding between the two. Even though one is superior he should not act as impossibly so, he should offer help and encouragement to the next in line. No one is "just a bottom and born a bottom forever" or whatever, this is basically tragic gay thinking born out of Karl Ulrich's conception in the 1800s of homosexual identity being an innate trait rather than homosexuality being an action which is a more broadly held belief across cultures whereas the modern identity framing was politically useful for liberation movements in the west throughout the 19th century to today
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I just realized I forgot to respond directly to your last question.
Well, I do think my opinions are basically a rationalization of my experiences. That is, I am trying to explain to myself why various men I am attracted to are not interested in me. But my viewpoint seems fairly robust to me, I check my experiences against those of friends I know and couples I've seen and relationships I've had in the past. Things seem to operate the way I expect much more frequently than when they don't. Even then, nearly no one, gay or straight, discusses things in the ways I see them, so I am either completely insane and navel gazing or others often are blind to their own motivations. It seems that most people are blind to their motivations and underlying natural forces that are typically unspoken of. I don't think that motivated reasoning precludes unique insight.
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Pardon my potential homophobia. But this is exactly is why I believe society must treat gay relationships (much like dinks, polycules or harems) as different, rather than treating them as 'straight relationships but with men'. Gay men think all sex is gay sex. By no fault of their own. Straight or gay, all commentary is projection. However, commentary on intimate and emotionally charged matters is especially prone to projection.
This analogy tracks for gay sex because all involved members are male. However for straight relationships, the Shiba Inu is rarely weaker than a female Rottweiler.
In gay relationships, a man can take on either roles in intimate settings. You're in continuous sexual competition. This isn't true for straight relationships. I imagine, gay relationships end up in micro-transactional interactions that don't naturally resolve into a blending of identities. I am not saying gay relationships are any less real. However, they don't have the same obvious entanglements as a conventional straight marriage.
The key difference ofc, is women bear children. One doesn't ask another person to surrender agency, undergo physical transformation, risk pain or risk death for free. Such an ask is even less defensible if it comes at no cost to the man. Therefore, when a man asks a woman to bear his children, he also surrenders himself in return. Take away the physical burden of child birth and coming together as one entity (parents) for child rearing, and you're missing the point of relationships all together. The gay dynamics of surrendering a body temporarily don't matter, because a woman must surrender her body permanently in service of child birth. For that, she doesn't need a physically dominant man to makes her feel safe. Physical safety matters, but emotional safety matters more.
On sex, I'm straight, so I too am projecting. However, men are simple creatures. As a straight man, if I get hard and horny, then finishing is practically guaranteed. Women on the other hand, are mazes. A woman does not have sex with the man in front of her, she has sex with the man in her mind and you give physical shape to it. It means that the narrative power of the story she tells herself and her suspension of disbelief play a bigger role in her eventual satisfaction than the objective reality of the physical man she finds in front of her. If a man has to use physical dominance to dominate, then that's a man that knows nothing about women or sex.
Now ofc, physical size helps. Controlling for everything else, a woman would prefer a taller and larger man to a scrawnier and shorter one. I also acknowledge, that in an era of visual swiping apps for strangers, women and men both tend to value the physical aspects more. But, there in lies in the fallacy of equating male attraction to female attraction. Female attraction isn't nearly as one dimensional as it is for men. Once you're in front of them, straight relationships evolve differently.
80 generations of careful reinforcement is very different from 80 generations of a random process. 80 generations of dingo mutts produces more dingo mutts. You may extend your dog analogy to humans once the smallest race of humans is 13x smaller than the largest.
Again, projection. Gay couples are 2 men who fuck each other. Straight relationships are completely different. Women yelling at husbands is a tale as old as time. If anything, the smaller the woman, the more they shout. The dynamics of whether it is abuse or agreed upon relationship transaction are known only to the couple.
Most recently, the 3 biggest waves of immigration to North America have been Chinese, Indian and Mexicans. All 3 are below average on the violent chad index. So, I'm not sure your point has statistical valence.
But since you asked twice, I will try my hand at it. It's an extension of 'weak men create hard times', or said another way: 'eradication of death diseases creates anti-vaxxers'; or 'peaceful times creates weak immune systems'; or 'I can fix him syndrome'. Western women believe economic-migrants and refugees are the most persecuted people of their respective societies. On the other hand, the people with a propensity for migration are the highest agency (highest volatility) actors, ie. violent men.
I can't improve on this video. So watch this video.
I've had the good fortune of being a relationship advisor to my female friends of various levels of attractiveness and sexual proclivity. (I was a committed man in a long-term & long-distance relationship). Women don't care about big men in the same way. It is one of their fantasies, but it isn't their main fantasy. Mr. Olympia Arnold is not attractive to them. Banderas in Zorro or Cary Elwes in Princess Bride ? That is like crack to them. These are still tall, masculine and handsome men. But, the fantasies they allow for is the real juice. All that being said, being tall and fit are obvious super useful to attracting a woman.
Your instinct is wrong. India has had a history of trans communities going back millennia. Chinese royal courts were chock full of castrated eunuchs. You're projecting an instinct acquired from the modern internet.
Every group sees itself as the most superior people on the planet. White people's post industrial-revolution dominance allows them to sustain that image. Other groups have fewer stories to sustain their narratives, but the impulse to see yourself and by extension, those you look like you as superior is a standard human impulse. Much like how my eyes wander even when I am in love with my partner, it is a natural impulse. To tame it is to be civilized. To feed it is to be barbaric.
Just got to this part. Looks like we're in agreement ? I must say, to tame it does not mean to reject it to reverse it. The liberal leftists are wrong for the same reason that right-wing looks-maxxers are wrong. The tension between the physical animal and cerebral mind need not resolve with the victory of one over the other. The tension can't be resolved, it can only be tamed. The goal of a civilized people is to find achievable peace and harmony between those 2 impulses in tension.
I believe the opposite. Post war America created suburban enclaves built on the explicit and later implicit segregation of the poor away from the rich. It was a deeply unequal society. Highways and suburban boundaries allowed so-called liberals to sustain an illusion of equality for Americans were equal within the confines of their suburban enclaves. Inner cities rotted and became hubs of crime.
New Delhi did the opposite. In his socialist arrogance, Nehru allowed any Indian to move where they wanted. irrespective of your birth, you were allowed to move and erect a slum on the side of the street. Your existence was dignified by affording you the greatest privilege : the ability to occupy the same spaces as the wealthy, and impose yourself on them as they impose themselves on you.
(aside - Much like you, I tend to choose the most provocative framing of obvious points. My girlfriend finds it tedious. Reading this sentence made me understand what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of it. Just yesterday I spend 30 minutes ranting about how most humans just want to be someone's working dog, but they don't want to acknowledge it because it feels dehumanizing. I was correctly called out on the stupid provocativeness of my point. After all, I was just saying that people want a purpose, which sounds much less profound. So....I understand)
To dominate is to influence without consent. There are many ways to influence - love, respect, reliability, narration, familiarity. You aren't saying anything new here. You're merely collapsing the rich experience of being human down to 1 dimension. It isn't wrong, but it is incomplete. That incompleteness is to the detriment of your point, because the meta point has been made by every person who has written a book on society. 'People want to be loved by their community'. Call it dominance, call it influence, call it what you want. It's as simple as that.
I guess I can conclude my counter point by framing it as:
"Any solution where the lying leaders drink their own kool aid is doomed to fail. Leaders must lie to sell necessary policy, but they must insulate themselves from their own propaganda. We are not above nature, but we need not be entirely subservient to it either. Harmony is cliche for a reason."
The presence of eunuchs isn't at all the same thing as "trans communities". They're not at all similar.
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Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream? Most men are repulsed and extremely repelled at the idea of having other men fuck them in the ass. Most men are similarly repelled by the idea of fucking other men's asses. They want to fuck women. Gay sex is most prominent when there aren't women around (on ships, or in male prisons, or in male pursuits like the army).
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective. It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
??? Yet your reproductive inclinations are skewed. You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis, just like how straight men are unlike women in some different multi-dimensional axis.
In a Western culture where Abrahamic religion has had 2000 years to suppress all earlier moralities, I agree that this is true. I don't think it is a human universal - there are a lot of cultures where men who consider themselves straight would have no issues dicking another guy. Ancient Greece, obviously. Bacha Bazi in Pushun Afghanistan is another notorious example.
Weren’t the Taliban basically popular because they suppressed Bacha Bazi?
And other disgusting traditional Pushtun practices. I'm not sure whether Bacha Bazi was the most important, or just the one which made most sense to western audiences seeking an explanation for Taliban popularity.
The modern argument about how Abrahamic religion handles male homosexuality is odd because both sides' core claims are correct.
Given the long-standing theological argument about higher criticism, the Christian trads (definitely) and the LGBT crowd (probably) are interpreting the Bible correctly according to their own standard interpretive methodologies.
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Yes of course, which is why I don't bother to vote and have never wanted to reproduce. I know I am a weird inconsequential homosexual and have no intention of stacking the future beyond my lifespan in my own favor. I'm not here to push my unique experiences on anyone else but think I can at least try to shed some light on things that other people wouldn't know about, especially on the eve of some autistic LLM devouring only the most pristinely sanewashed propaganda on the surface web and crystallizing it as the baseline truth of AI for the rest of eternity. I am just pissing into the void but I'd at least like to get some people wet before I go.
Well, to some degree, everyone has a distinctly unusual perspective. None of us are the same or experience the same things. Identical twins don't even have identical experiences of the world.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Sure, I am not confident in my assessment of this. I would love to know which of these two men women would choose to mate with on a desert island. I suspect it's DJ, even though Aaron is prettier, and I imagine most women would agree. I tried to flush out why I believe my intuition about male hierarchy is the same as the female intuition about male reproductive fitness in my post but don't know if I was effective.
Well if the AIs fulfill their promise they should be capable of working out what's Actually Going On and break through whatever lying we do today.
Nah they're trained only on lies and good intentions, they'll never reach escape velocity and will just dole out leftist propaganda until everybody but Shawanda Corbett has been turned into paperclips
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This is a kind of weirdly porn brained and overly physical one dimensional analysis of intersexual selection. Size is certainly one of the better single traits to pick if you can only pick one to guess attractiveness, but given a few more dimensions you arrive at "status" as the best amalgam approximation of attractiveness. Certainly size plays into status but there are also definitely short kings and fat funny guys who command status that complicates the narrative you're slinging.
I don't want to say there is nothing there, but high status but short white dudes just aren't having trouble competing with big low status black and brown dudes for the affection of women. Look at k-pop for the most obvious example.
I would like to invite you to the rust belt of the upper midwest! My father, a thin short blond rich white man, born in the 1950s, lived his whole life in this area, and would often see white women with a Black man around town and ask me, rhetorically, "Do I have to be a Black man to get a white woman in this town?" He was a funny man, and couched it as a joke, but if I had a nickel for every time I heard him ask it, I'd be Noticing a lot of nickels.....
Incidentally, he had no trouble dating multiples of women while I was younger, but he spent the last 15 years of his life single and alone. His brother, similar in status and such on the other hand, moved to Texas and married a woman from Hong Kong and is living happily ever after today.
Look at culture from one of the most ethnically homogenous zones on the planet with few to no Chads? This is what I was pointing to with my Chadless baboon Asia concept and is logically consistent with my broader point
I really don't think that this is a matter of inability due to size or race difference. My own father started dating another women approximately instantly after enough time had passed since my other passed away. I suspect that you father could have found women to date if it was a priority.
Perhaps, being gay, you have not been around enough straight women, but k-pop obsession is very much not region locked to the east. I hate to straightsplain, but really women seem basically to just want their partners to be larger than they are and then move on to other criteria. For gay men race might generally be a dominant factor here, but sexual dimorphism means this is only really a biting problem for the marginal man. A 5'4" short king destined for bottomhood by your typography is taller than half of all women in the US. Even a 5'8" short lord like myself is 95th percentile amongst women.
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And sorry to reply twice to the same comment but I wanted to add-
I have had this exact conversation before on here, where I insist that relationships are physical and downstream of biology, and then someone insists that all women want is a high status mate (after maybe ceding that the guy should be at least 10% bigger than her.) So, if that's the case, I think it reflects so poorly on women and is similarly terrible for men. Have you ever paid for a prostitute? You may imagine it's a powerful feeling, to order people around with money for sex, but most normal people immediately feel the hollowness and grime of doing this. The prostitute doesn't like you, they just want your money. If a woman is just interested in the status of a man, why isn't she just a prostitute at that point? Besides that, how do you feel, as a man, knowing that if your own social status falls, that she will think less of you, or leave you? It's degrading to both sexes.
Like I said, class is evil and cheapens the underlying fundamental nature of sex.
On the contrary I think none of my analysis relies on the fantasies and ridiculous situations depicted in porn but rather on the truth of my experiences. The porn brained opinion is the one the majority of people hold today, that the beta can get the girl, that size doesn't matter, that race is imaginary, that everything goes and anything is possible. I believe I've lived long enough to notice the patterns of reality and they aren't a fairytale porno at all.
No.
As opposed to just like, being larger than her? I guess I think my status and personality are more intrinsic to me than money. Status isn't a euphemism for wealth, it's a high regard others hold you in. The boss in a petty crime group has a certain type of status granted by being a leader of men, the boring white collar professional is entitled to a kind of status as well. The status is highly subjective of course but it's not nearly so transactional as prostitution. A women who finds herself bound to a man with status in her milieu doesn't think of the situation like she's trading herself for his status transactionally, she feels warm and fuzzy and validated that she is with him. And her assessment of the status is relatively robust. If the white collar guy temporarily loses his job or the gang boss loses his turf she'll likely default to seeing it as a setback rather than immediately abandon him.
Anyways we're muddling the normative and the descriptive. My point is that in fact women do not behave in the way you describe. The physical stature of a man just isn't some inescapable factor.
Class is evil but dividing all men into half chads and half subhumans unfit for reproduction on the basis of race isn't?
Of course the latter is evil as well, that's the entire point of my original post! I want men to be given an equal and fair chance rather than ever be subject to the humiliation of being cast as half subhumans unfit for reproduction on the basis of their race. I feel you have misunderstood my broader point which is actually very much arguing for more equal opportunity of reproduction and I think that race conflates and belabors the situation in an unproductive way that ought to be better acknowledged if it is to be overcome.
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He's not porn brained: he's gay-brained: hypersexual gay men (which is a significantly larger portion of the pride community then liberals want to admit) think and talk and act as bluntly as this.
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I would like to suggest that you add a few section headings and/or horizontal rules. (You did use one ersatz horizontal rule, but your autocorrect turned your series of hyphens into a series of em dashes, which Markdown does not interpret as forming an actual horizontal rule.)
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Well, that was a swerve I didn't see coming. Start off with dogs (so I expect you will start in on women and female dating choices), segue to gay sex (okay?) then bam! hit me between the eyes with the race stuff!
And then we end up with - I honestly don't know what. Your fetish about domming/being dommed? We are all part of nature so... alpha males can and should rule? I don't know, but good luck to you, brother.
It was certainly an adventure of a post
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I don't think the progressive women who favor open borders actually see the immigrants as men at all. They may be mostly male, in the abstract, but they're not men, in the sense of potential sexual partners. When a hen goes broody, it will sometimes sit on anything that kind of looks like an egg. We have a competitive political and media ecosystem that is evolving ideological memes to look like eggs and the hens are sitting on them.
This is a bizarre response in my opinion and oddly illustrates a handful of the points in my original post. What evidence do you have that progressive women don't see immigrants as men? Are you certain that it is not your own self that does not see immigrants as men at all, and have written them off as something so low status that you must not worry about them? If so, this is the white supremacy and white arrogance I mentioned.
Unfortunately, the eggs are real eggs, and if the hens sit on them, they're going to hatch. This conflation of the real for the imaginary and the inability to dissect the two is the same weakness I was trying to point at in my ger society metaphor above. You've become too arrogant to recognize the threat, you've invited in the evil, chaos reigns.
The attitude I see these women have toward migrant males is one of condescension, in the old fashioned sense.
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This is a fun kink, but I'm going to caution again that it's very far from universal. There's no small number of people who need that pressure to perform removed to get or stay aroused such that they can top, and a far larger number who don't need it but still like it. And even for explicit power play, there's a lot of fun in a struggle between near-equals, or 'besting' someone and 'forcing' them through pleasure.
Conversely, rounding dominance or submission to height or build (or, uh, for an example you might enjoy, size (cw: nsfw, extremely gay, if you're logged into furaffinity) alone can be dangerous or misleading.
And, bluntly, about the point where rimming enters the scene and makes one of the very rare good arguments in favor of dental dams, 'perversion of nature' is less a problem and more a goal.
I'll caution that dog breeds had much more aggressive selection pressures (and, even less pleasantly, genetic trees that sometimes didn't even branch).
To the extent they exist (the original version of Beauty and the Beast, maybe? The Frog Prince?), it's also worth recognizing that these were cautioning about invaders at a time people from less than a hundred miles away could be foreigners.
Uh... tmi and probably not something you want to hear about, but: woman who wants to topcan pick whatever size and shape of dick (or dicks) she wants, and never goes soft or demands a condom, and in the unlikely situation she comes before you do, can keep going. There's some disadvantage when it comes to muscle stamina -- cis women don't have the advantage when it comes to thrusting unless they've picked up some very esoteric workout habits -- but it's a lot less likely to be the critical factor than you'd expect. Naturally dominant women aren't common, but if they get a good match there's a lot of ways that can be fun.
And for men who are sexually submissive, there's not really a 'true desire to dominate' under things. I'm sure there's 'submissive' men who really want to be on top but have sublimated it, but there's other people for whom it's an obligation. Subbing means letting that responsibility go, or never having to worry that you're pressuring someone, or that your decision might be the wrong one and no one would tell you.
At the risk of doing some mind-reading? Does Brad happen to have been raised in the UK or western Europe? Because the differences in how people framed 'asian' between the two continents might explain more than a masc bottom having competition, not least of all given 'size' hangups American tops have about sexual partners that they'd never want to 'use' that size.
Uh... can't dispute taste, but even ignoring the murder bit, that's really not high on my list. Not a bad body, but I've seen better faces on Corbin Fisher models. Almost all of them. I guess if you're associating jarheads with masculinity? But I've seen too many of them with their guards down, and Rudy Reyes of Generation Kill would turn every single one of them inside out.
It's a little funnier if you're taller and stronger, and you're still unflinchingly polite and responsive to other men. But that does still result in a situation that won't match your expectations. ((Though I'll caveat I've fucked with my head pretty badly to get to that point; I understand that most guys can't and won't do that.))
I'd caution against reading it as a single universal drive. There's definitely a thing some straight guys in progressive spaces do to performatively show themselves as 'a supporting ally' that's definitely not actual submission or even genuine nonchalance about homosexuality. But there's also some straight guys that see openly gay men as a space they can be more emotionally open without a fear of either being seen as cheating (if they were doing it with a woman) or a consent violation (were they doing it with straight men). And then there's some who it's an attempt to patronize from the bottom of your heirarchy, so to speak.
Yeah, that's plausible. I'm not sure the alternate universe option looks much better -- federal support for transmed stuff was near-universal just for financial pressures, a much milder anti-discrimination push with much stricter gating would have been unavoidable in an Ally's Law sense even without the diehard political front -- but a softer and less confrontational view as crossdressing++ might have left Rowling on the sidelines, even if it still resulted in some rightwing pushback.
But in turn, the ACA's coddling from the healthcare industry was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the typical trans woman or trans man, so even that would have been a hard-bought compromise within the grassroots of the movement. Nevermind the actual philosophical objection that many have to being seen as crossdressing++ or lifestylers.
No, Brad was raised in one of those fading industrial cities on the Great Lakes. He was specifically anti-East Asian, often complaining about the Chinese or the Japanese.
Hmmmm, I don't know, I watch the youtube channel "Hungarian Folk Tales" all the time and I feel like every other folk tale is basically telling girls to get a man as soon as they can and not hold out for the one prince who can feel the pea under a hundred mattresses or whatever.
I like guys who look cute and scary at the same time. My other top hottest men of all time are Khabibi and Tom Hardy who also look very cute and scary. I never saw Rudy Reyes until I googled him but hahahahahaa he is not my type at all he looks like keanu reeves but much worse
Sometimes this isn't funny at all but rather obnoxious
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Two quick points.
Ah, your point in number one makes a lot of sense actually, and makes me feel a bit weird for projecting sex onto an unsexual situation. Thank you for explaining.
Thinking about it more, there is one guy "below" me that initially showed a lot of fawning behavior when we first met. I realized a fair bit later he was gay and actively wanted to get topped by me. He figured out I was terminally straight. I always treated him like an pseudo little brother friend. Now I think we're on the same page about that.
There's also the whole pederasty in mentorship thing in ancient Greece.
I think I'm too straight to have the full picture here. I guess these "junior/senior" relationships get complicated when one or both sides has homosexual attraction.
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