2rafa
2hr ago
It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years
Or, alternatively:
After a brief, less-than-century-long catastrophe largely of its own making, China - historically one of the oldest, most developed, highest IQ, most populous, most civilized places in the entire world - recovered to its natural position in the hierarchy of nations, much in the same way that Czechia becoming prosperous again 30 years after communism ended should not surprise us in the slightest.
China being rich and prosperous is its default state for most of the last 3000 years.
2rafa
2hr ago
You can dynamically align the interests of the local elite with yourself. The US and UK did this with large parts of the Middle East (not least the Gulf) already, and quite successfully.
Don’t kid yourself that these people are ideological zealots. Every few years there’s a scandal in Iran because senior IR regime figures are caught on vacation, wives unveiled, chilling in some vacation destination. The son of the ayatollah is a westernized property developer. There are a lot of people even at the top whose devotion to the revolutionary crusade is limited at best. The reason they didn’t concede wasn’t ideological zealotry but the knowledge that if the whole regime was overthrown, which is possible in a kind of Gorbachev-cascade, they’d have nowhere to hide from the people angry about 50 years of domestic repression.
That said, this will go badly because the most zealous anti-government protestors were killed months ago.
Of course it’s still possible but the attacking force need to go back to premodern offensive tactics like killing or relocating entire villages to prevent the existence of any civilian population that could give succor to guerilla fighters. This makes it nonviable in our civilized age.
But it’s also why Trump’s tactics are smarter than anything in the War on Terror. In Venezuela and Iran, he leaves open the door to regime change but doesn’t seek it - he just wants to kill enough leaders that the next guy is willing to deal. He doesn’t have the humanitarian aims that the neocons did where on some level they did imagine that Afghanistan could become a Western democracy.
2rafa
2hr ago
The US carved out a state in Korea despite the endless onslaught of millions of Chinese bodies in a zerg rush and the risk that the Soviets would send millions more. That’s very impressive. There was no need at the time to fight further and harder to get a few more map inches up the Korean Peninsula, which was broadly seen as just another offshoot of communist China.
Houthi air defenses were, to be fair, constantly being replenished by Iran. The Houthis are also a tribe who spent decades hiding out in the caves and mountains of Yemen, and still have forces concentrated there. The Iranians have a conventional military built along standard lines with standard bases, supply chains, etc.
In addition, there were ways of defeating the houthis but they involve a return to the brutal counterinsurgency tactics of the mid-20th century that are still considered, for now, too inhumane.
2rafa
2hr ago
Israel already sells its technology to third-party powers that can easily export it onward to Iran (and already have trading relationships with Iran), this isn’t really a gotcha, there’s no defense against that happening.
According to the Washington Post it was also a sudden burst of last-minute Saudi support:
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution, the four people said.”
After the strikes last year, attacks on proxies, the mass protests, the calculation by Iran’s enemies (principally Saudi Arabia and Israel) seems to have been that this is as weak as they’ll ever be, so might as well attack now. Unfortunately, that they’re as weak as they’ll ever be doesn’t mean they’re weak enough to be overthrown.
2rafa
1d ago
It actually seems impressive how many Iranian missiles the Gulf states have seemingly shot down. A few casualties here and there, but nothing crazy yet.
2rafa
1d ago
Most Lebanese expats in America are Christian Maronite elites, many of them even left before the civil war blew everything up. Places that received more Muslim immigrants - especially Australia where about 40% of the Australian Lebanese population are hardline Sunni Muslims - have problems with them.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think that this has turned into a happening that big yet. Maybe if the regime falls or looks like it, or they actually fully close the strait, but not yet.
2rafa
1d ago
Trump abruptly cancels press conference scheduled for shortly (ie this US morning). First possibility that comes to mind, given the reported strikes on the ayatollah’s compound, is that they aimed for the supreme leader and either didn’t get him or aren’t sure yet, such that a triumphant morning announcement has been delayed or cancelled.
2rafa
2d ago
I honestly think that if Trump had been fast on the trigger and started targeted bombing IRGC field offices, police stations, local army bases during the height of the last protests it might have been enough. As you say, hard to know for sure but there were at least hundreds of thousands protesting in Tehran which is close to the level where a motivated force can overwhelm non-hardened government sites. But today? There were some renewed student protests this week, but nothing on the level that could topple even a weakened government.
2rafa
2d ago
For the Iranian government to fall, there would have to be mass protests today (or maybe tomorrow) coinciding with more strikes. I don’t know, that feels unlikely.
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
—-
More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
There was just as much reciprocal persecution of Jews in Arab and Persian lands, in fact 18th century Western European Jewish travelers to Jewish communities in Persia lamented the extreme persecution of the local Jewish community, which was worse than anything in Europe at the time. A specific animus against ‘European Christians’ seems unfounded.
The difference is that outright expulsion was rarer in the Middle East because those were already relatively confessionally diverse societies with various random leftover minority groups, both ethnic and religious, from Assyrian Christians to Samaritans to Zoroastrians to Alawites to Eastern Catholics etc etc. The ruling elite might viciously oppress minority groups but these societies didn’t (until the late 19th century) generally consider the possibility of outright ethnic cleansing. It is unclear to me that being expelled is actually worse than being extremely cruelly oppressed by the way.
By contrast, European Christian societies were more exclusive, regularly fighting wars of religion that were explicitly designed to cleanse territories of other flavors of Christianity until comparatively recently, and Jews were often caught up in that fervor. Ethnically and linguistically they were often still very much diverse, but religiously they were more exclusive, and they fought more internal wars, which again have a habit of leading to ethnic cleansing regardless. In addition, and this is again rarely noted even though it’s obvious, the “110 countries” are mostly European because a large swathe of Mitteleuropa consisted of hundreds of tiny micro states for centuries, whereas the Middle East was mostly divided (at the macro level at least) into much larger polities like the grand caliphates and later Ottoman Empire.
2rafa
2d ago
Buying premade staple ingredients is usually both good value and efficient. For example, I regularly cook with what I guess is a standard vegetable / ‘soffritto’ base (very finely diced onions, celery, carrots) as a base for sauces, stews, whatever. Could I buy the ingredients myself and make this on the weekend, freeze it in bags, then use it when I’m cooking? Sure.
But I can also get it perfectly, finely and evenly diced, with no waste or disproportionate amounts of celery or whatever from the grocery store, where 1lb of the “frozen soffritto mix” costs me $2.50. There’s a French grocery store I found that sells pre-finely-diced frozen shallots, perfect for a fast pan sauce if you don’t want to buy and chop shallots, which I use too.
I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me). I buy jarred diced ginger, chili etc in vinegar, which saves both time and in the latter case that horrible feeling when you chop chili and imperfectly wash your hands and then touch your eye or something.
The store also sometimes has very good pre-marinated meats which, again, save a lot of unnecessary time and effort at miniscule cost (perhaps an additional 10% on top of the price of the meat itself). Store-bought curry sauces are also great; the gain from hand-grinding spices, mashing chillies, hand-making a massaman or red curry paste over a good store-bought base is real, but minimal. I think the same about homemade pie crust. A premium store-bought brownie mix is likewise superior to most homemade alternatives.
2rafa
2d ago
If Ellison wanted a liberal who was also a Zionist there were thousands of people in the NYC media business (and indeed already at CBS News) he could have picked to run the news business, it would be a remarkable turnaround in your view on the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community if you disagreed with this.
So the fact he picked Weiss transparently has much more to do with her “anti-woke” views and perceived sympathy or at least neutrality toward Trump (whose administration ultimately has to approve his empire building) than policy vis a vis Israel (which a ‘traditional’ candidate from TV news could also have).
2rafa
2d ago
In Singapore the power distribution is relatively ‘fairly’ distributed by proportion; the Chinese are in charge, obviously, but they are also the majority. In Lebanon the outcome of the Civil War was an arrangement that is tripartite and so not strictly proportionate but certainly moreso than it was before (and part of the instability is precisely that the Maronites have fewer children but cling onto the power they have, even still). There aren’t many historic examples of states where a large minority of the population (more than 25%, say) have been Jewish. The highest it got in prewar Eastern Europe was 6-10% really, the latter in Poland on the eve of the Second World War. There just aren’t that many Jews.
2rafa
2d ago
The patriarchs themselves generally remain, but their large extended clans, daughters, grandchildren, many sons, cousins and so on often spend substantial time abroad and have European citizenship.
2rafa
2d ago
As much as I like the idea of all our posting being immortalized by AI, it is very frustrating.
Bombing is a strategy, the objective is what’s relevant. Is the objective here bad? Yes, that’s why I opposed this action. But that doesn’t make the strategy impossible.
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