domain:greyenlightenment.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
Would you even believe him if he threw up his hands, said "fine, I don't want to kill the Jews"?
Sure, but I'd still ask "Okay, then what do you want to do about them?"
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
I'm not asking you to denounce anything. I'm honestly curious to know what you actually want to do about the Jews, and I am also annoyed that you keep dancing around it and then denying that you are hiding the ball.
hanikrummihundursvin
22hr ago
I'm saying genocidal lunatics should be put in a box and locked away on all sides. Especially those who are somehow incapable of disentangling an 'existential' conflict between nations that exist on the opposite ends of the planet.
AvocadoPanic
22hr ago
Even our 'friends' hate us, we just destroy them differently.
Perhaps we should try being less horrible.
anti_dan
22hr ago
Do you think that our (now quite successful) treatments of childhood leukemia are as ineffectual as extending the unhealthy lifespans of the very elderly?
That's not the work of most doctors. Even the specialists administering the treatments are essentially just following protocols that were invented and tested by a very small number of people.
ABigGuy4U
22hr ago
The Islamist faction didn’t have huge popular support, it was (again, like the Bolsheviks) a minority faction that was very well organized and coordinated compared to the fractious mass of the other revolutionary factions. That’s why the current administration has such a domestic siege mentality and has to exercise a lot of top down force compared to say, Saudi Arabia.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
22hr ago
Seriously, like @Hadad said, I'm not your dancing monkey. I'm not going to denounce something I have never said. I stand by everything I have said, but I'm not going to play this game where you just invent positions that you claim I hold and demand I denounce them in order to try to convince you I don't hold them.
hanikrummihundursvin
22hr ago
The Iranians chant death to America and have publicly gone to great length to explain that the slogan is not a direct wish for harm against American citizens, but a screed against their government and its belligerence and hostility towards Iran.
Which fits rather snugly as a contrast with the more Orwellian terminology of the west, like 'regime change'.
You are constructing a false equivalency. Iran and the US are not the same in their terminal goals towards one another.
There are hawks on both sides. People expressing animus towards other peoples via slogans or discussions on TV does not have to exist as a direct analog to what terminal goals governments have towards one another. But as far as I can tell, both parties want a government that is favorable to them, and would prefer not to torpedo their own political projects in a costly confrontation.
To that extent there is no false equivalency that doesn't rely on some drastic otherization and dehumanization. And it's hard to pretend that Iran is hogging all the religious lunatics when Americans have decades of failed Zionist adjacent policies laying in their backyard. Which happens to also be Iran's back yard. Along with theologians like Ted Cruz...
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22hr ago
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.
This is not a huge mystery. If you're a left-leaning zoomer, you've spent most of your adult life watching right-wing Israeli governments take advantage of the US government to commit human rights violations while aggressively snubbing the Democrats and boosting the Republicans. You can invoke the history of the conflict or the gruesome spectre of a Hamas victory all you like, but you're contrasting ancient history* and lurid hypotheticals to current reality. If Israel had pursued a measured response to the Oct. 7th attacks (and especially if they weren't also constantly nibbling away at Palestinian territory), they would have been able to garner a lot of sympathy. Not from everyone - there are indeed people who think Israel can do no right - but from most. After all, it seemed like a vindication of the aforementioned lurid hypotheticals. Israel, however, does not do measured responses. And if the IDF's conduct isn't quite the war of annihilation their most vocal critics claim, it's still increasingly hard to argue that Israel isn't waging a war against the Palestinian people rather than simply going after Islamic terrorists.
Even if you're not left-leaning or otherwise sympathetic to the Palestinians, it's easy to feel like this is an incredibly one-sided relationship.
*which is not always especially favorable to the Israelis in any event.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
I'd be cautious there that a middle option is technically possible: Obama ordered airstrikes on Syria against ISIL, and there have been American boots on the ground there since (unclear on exact deployment dates and current status), but they've remained in a limited capacity as such without being a full-blown invasion a la 2003. It's possible the exact wording of your prediction may matter quite a bit.
Hadad
22hr ago
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
I'm sufficiently white trash that the cultural norm of my people is to call out bullshit, but not so white trash I'm willing to cavalierly go to prison. I'd take a foam sword for myself, offer one to the kid, and ask if he wanted to play. If the parents seemed reluctant to let him, I wouldn't force it -- legally I couldn't -- but I would obnoxiously question why they're doing this to their son.
I'd willingly burn down every bridge I had with that family to force a social confrontation. If I ended up convinced the situation's abusive, I'd call CPS.
Hadad
22hr ago
Demanding he denounce a position he hasn't staked out, no matter how much you might think he believes it deep down, is pretty obnoxious. Would you even believe him if he threw up his hands, said "fine, I don't want to kill the Jews, now hush"? Or would you assume he's just saying that to hide his power level?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
I find it somewhat amusing that the US has state-run education, and we regularly talk about how the $17k spent annually on the median K-12 student is too low (but is still higher than peer nations). But healthcare is (mostly) privately run, and we spend more than peer countries and in this case it's obvious that we should save by switching to a more centrally-run model. I'm not sure those positions really square with each other.
UwU
22hr ago
No clear evidence that their nuclear program is knocked out, a pretty strong incentive now between the outcomes of Libya, North Korea, Israel and Iran for any country that doesn't want to be a colony of either the eastern or western bloc to develop nukes.
This would be true regardless of whether the US conducted this strike or not. One might argue that allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons without any sort of kinetic response would have encouraged state actors to pursue nukes even more rigorously.
Hadad
22hr ago
Their hate being warranted or not is irrelevant to our incentives. They do hate us. If they're deadset on going nuclear, we must destroy them.
Iran's only hope is to stop being so hateful. Even if they think it's justified.
Hadad
22hr ago
This doesn't refute America's incentives, so what you're saying without realizing it is that we're in existential conflict and should eliminate Iran.
5434a
22hr ago
Picked up Cyrano de Bergerac without realising it was a play instead of a novel. Makes quick reading though.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.
Because Israel is white and neo-colonialist. In their view. And that's pretty much the worst thing you can be.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
If bombing Iran buys us five or ten years, it’s probably worth it. I don’t think they can restart a program we just blew up and have a bomb in two years.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
EU also didn't find any proof that the gas was stolen IIRC.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
True. But if you do your diligence, you'll find that we (Russians) were rarely good guys.
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
It's about as close as you can get, and still, no.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
No, it isn't. Iran's political platform is explicitly and publicly stated by their political leadership and their supporters. We have some hawks who will not miss a chance for an opportunistic war. You are constructing a false equivalency. Iran and the US are not the same in their terminal goals towards one another.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
23hr ago
Does McCain's singing bomb Iran to the tune of Barbara Ann while he was a sitting senator and on his way to being the republican presidential nominee?
The Houthis say they'll renew their anti US shipping campaign with the current strikes on Iran. And they have continued their anti-Israel missile/drone attacks throughout.
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