Throwaway05
5d ago
Unless I'm missing something isn't the whole point that the one group is the metaphorical arms of the president and the other group is supposed to be objective separate body? I feel like everything falls neatly from there...
Throwaway05
5d ago
How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
Throwaway05
5d ago
One of America's war aims is to leave the Iranian people in a better position after the war than before. Likewise modern Western armies have an incredibly strong taboo against civilian damage, to the point where we made a missile that acts as a fucking blender so it can kill literally one guy.
This level of restraint is basically a new invention, and most non-American armies don't bother (see: Russia). It's the equivalent of besieging a city and allowing food in "so that the civilians don't starve."
It's incredibly stupid but has been at times sustainable because the U.S. is that powerful and because most of our adversaries understand that the primary move is to use propaganda pieces to perpetuate fighting warfare in this way.
Loosen restrictions and things open up immediately.
The Iranians can't do much if 16 million people in the Tehran metro area are starving to death. Now that's pretty abhorrent but this is how wars were fought throughout history and America has the ability to make it so.
Without drifting that far into awful behavior you can still force evacuation of cities, destroy critical infrastructure and all kinds of other stuff we are very very voluntarily not doing and a good chunk of which is totally valid even with this restrictive mode of warfare.
Throwaway05
5d ago
Iran succeeds because the U.S. and Israel (despite propaganda to the contrary) fight with two hands tied behind their back.
If we fought like Russia fought, or even worse like a country in WWII we'd "win" pretty quickly.
Iran does not have a peer military, it has an ineffective organized military and essentially a very well organized insurgency and excellent doctrine that takes advantage of Western militaries primary weakness (political will).
The U.S. has the ability to stab Iran in the gut and step back and wait for it to bleed out, Iran knows this and therefore made sure that their combat model is making as much trouble while they bleed out as possible. They've also given themselves a very large helmet so they can't just be shot in the head (IDK the metaphor fails).
So we don't.
Making this further complicated is the fact that we don't actually hate the Iranian's, and figure that leaving them in a good state is better for us later.
Make no mistake, Iran knows our exact strategic posture and how to take advantage of it but that doesn't mean that we can't just do something different if we want to. That's what got us into this, Trump called Iran on some of the threats and went to town, but now he has to clean up and go home before the midterms.
That's not Iran being "strong" it's masterful use of the cards they have.
A question - why hasn't Iran pushed a major terrorist attack on US soil? They could probably pull it off, but they don't because they know that if they do and they miscalculate how bad it is then America will actually come for them for real.
That only ends one way.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I'd google it and try and see what tricks you can do, I think you can look at the underside of a mattress but with the way my travel habits work out it's not something I actively think about so I'm not the best source.
I would definitely use some of the other tricks in terms of things like where to put your bag and stuff, lower level hotels are much more likely to have the problem and taking it home suuuuccckkkksss.
Throwaway05
5d ago
Australia
Point of order - Australia is less habitable than it appears, the population heat map looks the way it does for a reason, same with Canada.
Now ingenuity can make it work but the empty space is unused for a reason.
Throwaway05
5d ago
Do I understand your position correctly?
No, you don't.
To my recollection I don't really take a stance on what to do about people who (actually) identify as trans or have trans thought content.
I also think (based off of my reading of other comments you make in this thread) that you've missed the core insight of my initial post.
Which is: The problem is that a number of phenomena that vary from pretty convincingly "true" trans to not really trans at all (tomboys) to definitely not trans and even activists should acknowledge it (forensic malingerers) all get labeled the same thing.
This has all kinds of negative effects, such as not getting people the correct care (ex: Schizophrenic patient needs antipsychotics, malingering patient needs boundary setting) and also things like an inappropriately enhanced level of skepticism in the moderate and conservative population.
How difficult to deal with trans people are is entirely orthogonal to the question of why they exist and it seems obvious they should exist given the variation in the human population (especially if you believe in non-woke biology).
This is not helped by the woke incoherent post-modern understanding of gender theory that probably doesn't match the biological roots of the true underlying phenomena.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I think conceptualizing the situation as Iran being strong is the way to think about it, holding the best hand is much better, but mixing up these two confuses some things.
Iran is a homeless man with a gun outside of a guy's office building. Threatening? Sure. But it is a homeless man with a gun. The man in the office can go buy some body-armor and a shotgun, he can hire some thugs to beat the guy up, and so on. He doesn't because he's worried about inconvenience and cost and other people in the building bitching at him.
Iran's calculus as it has been for the last several decades is to find a way to ride the annoying line and not trigger an actual response. Yes they can be a physical threat (especially with Russian and Chinese intelligence) but fundamentally they continue to only exist because the U.S. cares about civilian casualties what happens afterwards, nagging third parties.
As a politically entity the U.S. can be defeated and that's the goal, but it is a mistake to lose track of the force disparity.
Throwaway05
5d ago
y, and then book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough,
Just be careful of bed bugs.
Throwaway05
6d ago
I will have you know that only applies to 50% of the Jets fans I know. That's right 1 out of 2.
I consider it a personal accomplishment knowing that many.
Throwaway05
6d ago
What is your evidence for this claim?
What's your evidence you can't do this? You can determine if someone likes bananas, is a neurotic person, has had an episode of diverticulitis from just talking to them.
You can even do very hard things like determine if someone in jail is pretending to be crazy or not.
Why would this specific thing be any different?
Throwaway05
6d ago
I mean it's not rocket surgery, assuming no need for secondary gain you just ask some pretty basic questions and you can figure out which of the phenotypes are here (assuming secondary gain it's harder but we do have inventories for that).
Coming up with and validating a structured interview or formal scale request genuine research and investigation, even if a few guys in a room can quickly spitball something that likely does the job that ain't the same thing a formal gold standard form of testing.
As for if it actually exists, I mean you have people who are attracted to feet, children, being murdered and eaten. Getting the gender/sex wires crossed seem to be a much simpler thing.
Throwaway05
6d ago
The answer also isn't no.
Does an objective way exist? Almost certainly.
Do we know what it is? No. Politics impairs true scientific verification.
Is that too strict a bar? Likely.
Could myself and a bunch of other non-woke educated professionals hash out something that is "good enough" in a day? Likely.
Scientific rigor encapsulates a wild and wide range of certainties.
Throwaway05
7d ago
I think the science would have to advance beyond the politics for the answer here to be yes.
Throwaway05
7d ago
In my clinical experience (which is admittedly anecdote, research on anything related to this topic is poor) I've encountered people who seem to be trans because of mental illness, people who have predisposition to mental illness and are trans and mentally ill, and people with no mental illness whatsoever but are trans.
Just like depression is a word for a variety of phenomena that include "I live in a war zone" and "my brain is clearly malfunctioning in an obvious way that generates depressive thought content" and a million things in between, "trans" refers to a variety of complex social, psychological, and biological phenomena.
Throwaway05
7d ago
From a clinical perspective - my licensing bodies and professional and social milieu have very strongly embraced the idea that trans identification needs to be accepted without clarification or question, even when it is deeply questionable (for example patients in the forensic setting clearly seeking special privileges).
I don't have any interest in harming my license are ability to teach by deviating from this in the slightest so I will not.
That said.
You can investigate the various "trans" phenomena, explicate on the types, do research on outcomes and care needs, test questionnaires and scales that help you identify what's going on for an individual person...all the usual things.
We know what to look into but nobody really does it because countries are either "burn the trans" or "transition children immediately" with no effort at moderation.
This has improved a tiny bit in the US in recent years, however.
Psychiatry in particular has a pretty good history of breaking apart various phenomena into healthy, range of normal human experience, and mental illness (this side of the conversation is missed by normies for the most part).
Throwaway05
7d ago
A real trans person is pretty much what you expect, they do exist and are rare. The clearest examples I can find are people who have absolutely zero social deficits or mental health issues they just seem to have identification with the opposite sex. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a weird misfiring of biology could create this (rarely) and that in a permissive social environment these people would be allowed to exist.
Slicing these people off from "fake" trans people should be reasonably easy but in the modern environment where you aren't allowed to asks questions it is impossible. A fact of life in medicine is that we treat people who are almost certain not trans (especially a category I didn't mention above - malingering types) as trans because it's not acceptable to ask questions.
Hopefully things will settle down and we'll be allowed to get more focused care each segment.
Throwaway05
7d ago
Which of us is correct about Russia, Iran, and the U.S. is a different issue from the fact that you seem pretty heated by relatively mild discussion on the internet.
You can disagree with someone including about important things like religion and politics without thinking they are subhuman or wish you harm. This kind of black and white thinking always leads to bad things.
Throwaway05
7d ago
"Trans" is a word used by woke LGBTWhatever people to capture a large number of wildly different phenomena.
Some of these you may believe in or not believe in, some of these you may have sympathy for:
-Old school cross-dressers.
-Drag.
-People using their appearance for social and financial opportunity (ex: some of the Thai Ladyboys).
-Blanchard Typology Types.
-True "Trans."
-BPD or serious mental illness with identity disturbance.
-Autistic and socially adrift people who latch onto trans identification.
Some of these are social contagion, some of these are "traditionally treatable" (ex: pure mental illness types), some of these are reasonably healthy or unburdensome (fetish types and people looking to make money).
But modern culture homogenizes them and thinks they all need to be treated the same. That's tremendously unhelpful. A true trans person who does great and is very happy after top/bottom surgery does not need the same type of support and engagement from society as someone who just needs some Haldol or protection from being trafficked. Distraught young men need counseling but a different type of counseling, not to be piped straight into LGBT.
So the steel man is something like: "fuck these idiots, real trans people exist but are rare and other conversations obscure what these people are like and what they need."
Throwaway05
8d ago
As long as my truck has a machine gun on top I see this as an absolute win. Although I imagine I would shortly thereafter be arrested after an incident on the interstate.
Throwaway05
8d ago
Yeah it doesn't work for America but by golly does it work well for England. I wish more Europeans got to experience and enjoy both models but in most countries Football has nearly all the mind share (which admittedly is a large part of how the whole thing works).
Throwaway05
8d ago
As always Technicals remain the most superior war fighting weapon.
Throwaway05
8d ago
Great game!
If you are struggling it's easy to make the game easier by gear hunting, the difficulty is very front loaded - once you have more options it's easy to break the game if you want to (without touching modifiers).
Throwaway05
8d ago
I mean the amount of love that I see in Europeans for a local football team that sucks and always sucked is far higher than what Jets fans can put out.
All that is an argument for "should" I jumped into this to make a point about "can."
I've seen a lot of people misunderstanding the situation about "can" (in part because making this unclear is in all likelihood an organized part of our adversaries propaganda efforts).
The Iranians are smart and clever and have a good plan and are winning or losing the political war depending on who you talk to. They lost the war war so bad it's not even funny.
This isn't a bad trade for them if they get what they wanted/out unscathed, but it's still happening.
And it's important that people understand it's happening because if you don't you'll miss how the ethics of conflict are being defined and the role of propaganda in shaping policy and mood.
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