Jesweez
9d ago
Not here to argue either point but what’s the source on these precision claims?
Pretty big warfare development if true!
I do think historical experiences affect a cultures outlook and subsequently behavior.
Modern Chinese politics is meaningfully affected by the century of humiliation.
The tone of Slavic cultures is shaped by repeated wars, famines, and massacres.
Turkish politics is influenced by memories of the Ottoman Empire.
There’s certainly a forgetting curve. We probably shouldn’t study Charlemagne in order to understand what Emmanuel Macron is likely to do tomorrow.
(Edit: Then again, Charlemagne looked back to Roman emperors, was himself relevant to how Napoleon behaved, the French Revolution drew from ideas from the Roman republic, and modern France has dim recollections of all of this built into its cultural identity as well as experiences from both victory and defeat in the world wars. Part of the founding mythos of being French includes empires and revolutions and it gets reflected in French behavior, such as a penchant for frequently protesting and rioting in the streets. Just as the American frontier is long gone but still affects our culture).
Continuing where I earlier left off…
But I do think there’s some historical continuity that gets built up. Having had all your cities razed, suffering a famine, conquering half the world, having an empire crumble, I think all of these things have influences on a culture that ripple across centuries.
Americans today always talk about how we are so optimistic while Europe is just this museum society. But basically all of those cultures had periods of floridly mad optimism in their history at different points, usually coinciding with when they built those structures.
Maybe we are just a uniquely optimistic and exuberant culture and will remain that way forever. But we haven’t even existed for long enough to know the other side of the coin, we’ve never even had the experience of being bested by a rival for example. And although it’s tempting to believe that we’re uniquely ordained by God or fate to never suffer such a disgrace and will never see the other side of the coin (like from the article, god is an Englishman, we invented the modern world and have its largest ever empire ffs), I’d say our time in the sun has its limits just as it does for all world dominant cultures. (Possibly coming soon if you believe Ray Dalio’s model). And after having experienced both the rise and fall, we’ll end up being a somewhat wiser or at least more mature culture which might naturally temper subsequent bouts of mania.
Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it
Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.
We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.
But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.
I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.
We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.
I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.
There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.
We did. Then we stationed American soldiers in Afghanistan, gave them rules of engagement that prevented them from killing anybody, and spent billions of dollars on liberal NGO projects that did things like feminist opera in Kabul. We're not doing that anymore.
The taliban reconstituted itself and asserted control immediately after the US left 20 years later. They would have done the same if the US had left after one. We didn’t win, we just went and fought an entrenched enemy until deciding to leave, and they just endured another empire dicking around before going right back to the pre-war status quo.
Jesweez
10d ago
I am no expert but if there are some committed fanatics for Shia Islam the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is exactly where I’d expect to find them.
Jesweez
10d ago
I think all Iran needs to do is slip enough attacks on boats through to meaningfully disrupt the calculus of getting an oil tanker through.
Maybe the US has advanced enough operations to be able to take away that threat, I don’t know.
In the end who ‘wins’ will be decided by who is better at that asymmetric cat and mouse game over the next weeks to months.
By mountain fortress, I mean Iran itself, not actually going out to the hills. The cities might actually be the best cover. Either way it’s probably quite hard to figure out where key people are after the initial round or two of bombardment.
Also I’m not sure being a very functional state matters all that much to them while at war. A dictatorship should just need to knuckle down and keep up supply of weapons to its soldiers.
What matters is likely just simply continuing to broadcast that we’re still here while mustering enough attacks on the shipping lane to keep the snake more or less coiled around the neck of the global economy.
Good question about funding, I don’t know enough to answer it. That might become relevant but a war of attrition to see whose finances break down first isn’t ideal for Trump et al. If I were Russia I’d for sure funnel some cash in in that scenario.
Jesweez
10d ago
After decades and trillions of dollars with a country that doesn’t pose any real risks to the global economy while the turmoil goes on.
Nobody creates a quagmire consciously, every war is conceptualized at the outset as a quick in and out affair.
Just like the Iranian regime can never just ease up about being the vanguard of Shia islam dedicated to thwarting Israel, it’s in the very DNA of the US’s position that we must dedicate our military to ensuring safe passage on global shipping lane choke points.
Thus we are now fundamentally committed to ensuring the total destruction of Iran’s capacity to choke off shopping in Hormuz, in a similar way that Israel is completely committed to wiping out the ability of Hamas to launch rockets from Gaza. But on a vastly larger scale.
The Iran before the full scale attack may have been an entity that could be negotiated with, and perhaps I’m wrong, but I think this headless group of martyrdom and honor culture infused bomb survivors is now going to hole up in the mountain fortress and commit to fighting until they cannot any longer.
As long as they continue to fight, the US cannot decide to back down. The ball is simply not fully in our court anymore.
Jesweez
11d ago
Trump was the one who decided to do this, not some faceless artifice you can conveniently point to. He’s been very publicly suffering from some sort of war mania for quite some time now.
I’m sure some deeper figures in the war and Israel lobby apparatus talked him up a great game of how easy and great it was going to be. But the one who has been obviously giddy about blowing things up in foreign lands is the guy at the top as well as all of his top advisors.
Jesweez
20d ago
Good article exploring how Iran is a key geopolitical chess piece regarding China: https://open.substack.com/pub/zinebriboua/p/the-iran-question-is-all-about-china
Jesweez
20d ago
It isn’t clear why negotiations failed with Iran.
Who can say for sure, but I’m sure Israel smelled the abundance of blood in the water and after having laid the ground work of dismantling the proxy network and showcasing the lack of relevant defenses over Iran, they knew a joint hit with the US could deal a near deadly blow. The negotiations might have just been for show in the end.
Israel is also the reason that this isn’t likely to be another Venezuela situation. While that was the Trump admin acting on whims and under constraints of how much engagement the US populace will allow, there’s no doubt that the whole of Israeli intelligence and military assets are going to be dedicated that this biggest break they’ve had yet is going to go their way.
Jesweez
1mo ago
Oh hey! It’s the signs of snowflakery:
- Perpetually offended
- In need of safe spaces
- Apt to shut down free speech
- Embrace culture of victimhood
When the hell did Bad Bunny do or say anything about replacing you? Is someone singing in their own language really that extreme of a threat? Get a grip, man.
I was born in Poland
Oh no I’m being replaced! Your comment is genocidal towards me, trying to replace me and speak for me as someone who was born here
It seems that you Poles need to stick to your own country and stop trying to be Americans
Jesweez
1mo ago
"The only thing stronger than hate is love" is a slogan popular among people who take pleasure from publicly contemplating the violent death of my children
Gonna go ahead and click X to doubt
Jesweez
1mo ago
Yeah I worked on a sugarcane farm in Florida. The whole center of the Florida peninsula from lake Okechobee down to the Everglades is a massive sugarcane plantation.
That stuff is brutal to work in. Once it gets to a certain stage of maturity it develops all these glass-like spines in the leaf margins and it loads you with spines as you walk through it.
Geography nerd mode activated…
North: wealthy, whiter, cowboy ranchero types, eat wheat tortillas and burritos, weak central control, rampant cartel violence. Dry and hot cactus landscapes. What American media typically represents Mexico like.
Center: highest population and the core of Mexican culture, heavy Aztec and other indigenous cultural influences, core of imperial Spanish influence, more mestizo, corn tortillas, nobody eats burritos, more state capacity and presence. High elevation valleys with cool climates and dense colonial cities in between volcanos. Looks kind of like Colorado but with more agaves.
South: much more indigenous, Mayas and Zapotec, poorer, quieter village life, less violence than the north and center, lots of culinary and cultural differences from the rest of Mexico, the center’s pine forests and cactus valleys start to grade into true tropical forests. Not only eat corn tortillas but were fashioned by the gods themselves out of corn masa.
Chhht chhhht… This just in… Getting a live report from the motte… Conservatives now hate it when people romanticize manual labor and farm life in their music. I repeat, farm labor is now backwards, cucked, and liberal. Over.
Jesweez
1mo ago
The idea that kids are interested in farming feels refreshing and wholesome in the context of this whole debate
Yo I bet they’d be even more interested in farming if they saw what kind of girls hang out in the sugarcane fields
Jesweez
1mo ago
That’s probably true. But guess I don’t think it’s as big a part of our culture as what I was comparing to in the respective cultures.
Jesweez
1mo ago
I was talking about the conservative reaction generally. Thats why I framed it as old men yelling at clouds and called them pobrecitos plurally! Not just old man.
Idk why the southern cone is mentioned specifically as if Chilean and Argentinian kids don’t listen to reggaeton too.
Jesweez
1mo ago
You just saw a show where an American citizen sang about stuff like getting drunk with his cousin for the Fourth of July, and pointed at the camera and told people stuff like you can achieve anything you dream of, believe in yourself and keep working for it. He even celebrated the family unit and marriage, having a couple get married during his show! You just didn’t realize that’s what was going on.
Jesweez
1mo ago
Old men yelling at clouds again. You just happened to watch a reggaeton show for the first time probably. The US has rap music which features girls shaking their asses, that just how it is. Puerto Rico, part of the US, happens to have the world’s biggest reggaeton star, which is a musical style where people grind on each other.
Latin America has some classy as hell music and dance. Actually a lot more so than the US does. I’ve never been in the US and seen an old couple dancing salsa outside of a cafe. We could never, lol. There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here, just like we’d struggle to do so you put us up against Italy or something.
But the youth tend to listen to songs about sex. Or violence. They’re just crazy fools who like to dance with their underdeveloped PFCs to stuff that shocks stuffy older people from whatever culture. You’ve got no room to talk, being from a culture that has a moral panic every decade or so about what the kids are listening to. Most of what we consider classic Americana music was considered devil worshipper music by the conservatives of that time, and people freaking out that the Super Bowl show was too sexual has been happening for decades now. Come on, you grew up here, you knew that.
In the end, the difference is that conservatives just don’t like Spanish and get frustrated by it. Their blood pressure tends to rise if they hear Spanish on the street, pobrecitos.
This statement and this thread more generally is the biggest “we’re watching two different movies” moment I’ve ever had.
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