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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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The death toll seems to have come to a grand total of zero.

This isn't war, this is kayfabe. An event for the sake of having an event. Is the Iranian military truly this incompetent? They could do better than this if they really wanted to cause damage. It feels like the purpose was domestic propaganda. All regimes need some level of popular legitimacy. "We are the only state willing to open fire on the Zionist dogs," is good for Iranian prestige in the region.

Hey, US taxpayers are paying for many of the pretty lights in the sky. How much do you think Arrow interceptors cost? Several million each. It wouldn't surprise me if Israel and co spent a cool billion on air defence today. Iran wouldn't have spent nearly so much - they come out ahead even before damage is factored in.

It is a win in a multitude of ways:

  1. Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.

  2. It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.

  3. Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.

Iran just gave Israel the option, but not the obligation, to launch a massive attack on Iran without Israel losing the support of the US.

So do you think this is why Israel bombed the consulate? Every reply so far seems to be concentrating on Iran as the aggressor, with nothing about "but their consulate was bombed".

Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?

I suspect the US response to be blaming the free speech rights of an American that was orthogonal to the consulate attack

I don’t follow.

I'm pretty sure he's referring to the narrative blaming the 2012 Benghazi attack on "filmmaker" Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims."

Huh. Learn something every day.

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