Shrike
10d ago
One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).
I don't think this eliminates the chance that the right-wing counterculture suffers from victory (as seems to typically be the case!) but I do think, if successful, it makes it more difficult for the right to seize and hold the low ground of "mandatory and cringe" that typically alienates people. Banking on "diversity of thought" to skew right-wing is a bold choice that may not pay off, but if it does it is actually likely to help keep the right more diverse (and more tolerant) by ensuring that the right's "client base" (for lack of a better term) is diversified.
I realize there's a big difference between old Soviet artillery shells and modern JDAMs
Yes – JDAMs will have much more payload (a small 500 pound bomb will have nearly 200 pounds of explosive filler, while a M107 155mm shell will have around 15 pounds) and be considerably more accurate (a CEP of 10 meters versus, according to Google's AI overview, perhaps up to 250 meters at max range for an unguided 155mm shell). Not only do the bombs deliver more payload, they deliver it much more precisely. There's a reason that the Russians fielded glide bomb kids in Ukraine very quickly.
The USAF only has about 20 B-2 stealth bombers, and they all require massive maintenance. Other strategic bombers would be vulnerable to air defence and are also limited in number
Yeah, the US would likely use tactical aircraft to fly most sorties with smaller weapons such as JDAMs – the Air Force has more than 400 F-35s (if stealthier aircraft are needed and if they present an advantage – which they may not, particularly if Iran is relying on IR guidance systems) and more than 200 F-15E Strike Eagles. (The Israelis have accomplished what they've done so far with less than 70 F-15s, and about 45 F-35s, plus nearly 200 F-16s. Of course in any real war the US Navy with their 400+ Super Hornets would also contribute).
As for the rest of it, I was responding to your claim that the USAF wasn't capable of "mass destruction." I agree with your point that applying that destruction profitably would be an issue. But a single F-15E can a larger bomb load than B-17 or Lancaster strategic bombers in World War Two (more than 20,000 pounds). If we use the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden as our benchmark for "mass destruction," we will note that it was accomplished over four days in 1945, used about 1200 Lancasters and B-17s over the course of four raids (so 300 aircraft/raid on average), delivering around 4,000 tons of bombs. Even if each JDAM in the US inventory was a 500 pounder (unlikely, the largest JDAM is a 2000-pound bomb) the US could plausibly accomplish Dresden 2.0 again over the course of a week with its F-15E fleet alone and still have leftover JDAMs.
Not that it would need to, because guided munitions are much more effective than mass carpet bombing (Wikipedia reports that PGMs were 35 times [edit – originally put percent here by mistake, which is much less impressive and also wrong] more likely to destroy their targets than unguided bombs and made 3/4ths of all successful strikes on targets despite being less than 10% of all munitions dropped in the Persian Gulf War).
I'm not saying we should bomb Iran! On balance I am against it! I'm saying the US Air Force has a lot of bombs. I think this is considerably under-appreciated, people are (rightfully) concerned about American procurement but "haha tail bomb kits go brrr" is actually a thing.
Shrike
16d ago
roughly 1 bomb per 3 square miles
I just want to highlight this here – 1 bomb per 3 square miles of a country larger than Alaska is a lot of bombs (and again recall that this is just JDAM kits!)
Now – what does "destroy Iran" mean? If it means "turn the country into literal molten lava" then no, the USAF does not have the firepower to do this.
If it means "knock out their power grid, obliterate their armed forces, wreck their transportation infrastructure, decapitate their leadership and generally render them incapable of performing the functions expected of a state" then yes, the US has the firepower to do this – the density of "Iranian military/government/dual use facilities/equipment" is not going to be denser than 1 every 3 square miles.
Perhaps the user you are replying to literally means "kill all Iranians" when he says "Let them all die to defend their ambitions." But if, in context of "Kill all their scientists, all their engineers" he's advocating for eliminating the Iranian leadership and personnel responsible for developing nuclear weapons, the US doesn't lack the firepower to do this. Since we've proven capable of building upwards of 100 JDAM kits per day, we might be able to kill upwards of 30,000 Iranian scientists, engineers, and assorted staff per year assuming each guided bomb only kills one (a silly assumption) without even denting our stockpile.
The main problem for the US would be getting the intelligence on where the personnel are (and clearing the Iranian defenses). But those are primarily problems of intelligence procurement, not problems from not having enough firepower.
Shrike
17d ago
It's built for precision strikes, not mass destruction (unless nukes).
Yes, the USAF is built for precision strikes, but the US builds guided bombs the way the Russians build artillery shells. We've made over half a million JDAM kits (although of course we've used a lot of them). Assuming a stockpile of around 200,000, we have roughly one precision guided-bomb for every squad in the Iranian military. That's without getting tapping our inventories of cruise missiles, guided missiles, guided and unguided rockets, or cannon ammo at all.
The MOP is a bespoke weapon designed to fill a small niche, and the fact that it has been procured in small numbers doesn't reflect on the broader state of the USAF's procurement of guided weapons.
Shrike
20d ago
Russia has said they would use nuclear weapons if their sovereignty was threatened. While this was a veiled threat along the lines of "Ukraine and the occupied portions of it are part of Russia, so don't you dare take them back", I don't doubt it would ring very true if Russia proper was legitimately under threat of losing territory.
Yes, I agree with you there.
We rolled over then-one-of-the-largest armies in the world in a month and then immediately pulled out.
The United States and its allies did enter Iraq, but it never got within 100 miles of Baghdad. If Iraq had had a credible WMD program, it would not have been sufficient to neutralize it.
On this note, a large army would likely not be the primary thing we'd need to fight China if they up and decided a US invasion of Iran was the perfect time to strike. In the short term, it would be primarily a naval and air defense, with the biggest land target I can think of being Taiwan (who has their own army - and ideally we'd want to keep the Chinese marines from ever making a landing, making them secondary).
Yes, correct. But the US doctrine is to fight with air support, meaning that US munitions stockpiles would be degraded in an invasion of Iran (as would US missile interceptors given Iran's large stockpile of ballistic missiles). Obviously a sufficiently thorough destruction of the Iranian military by Israel makes that moot, but that hasn't happened yet.
I genuinely hope this puts a bow on the whole situation, and the US never needs to lift a finger to change this.
SAME.
I just explicitly and powerfully do not want a nuclear Iran - or any new nuclear country that has even a chance in hell of using them.
Sovereign states have the right to develop nuclear weapons, if they so choose, and invading them for doing so would be a violation of international law. Many of the next countries to develop nuclear weapons will likely be US allies (Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, perhaps Taiwan and Poland; contrast with of course Iran and perhaps Belarus). That's part of why stopping a Chinese invasion is so crucial to US defensive strategy, as a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan dramatically increases the odds of nuclear proliferation.
On the one hand, I understand the desire to limit nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, I think that the nuclear asymmetry arguably makes the world more unstable and more prone to violence.
Because nuclear weapons are, though not a magical item, a potent deterrent, the best method to prevent other countries from getting them might be to explicitly carve up the world into nuclear power blocs (US, Russia, China, India) and give the nuclear sovereigns explicit hegemony and dominion over the other nation-states. The nuclear sovereigns could agree to use their nuclear weapons against any country that attempted to develop or field any independent nuclear capability. They might even be able to develop a shared nuclear monitoring and weapons sharing framework that could gradually grow in time into the true planetary sovereign, the single nuclear monopower.
This would of course be a complete overturn of the post-WW2 global order, but under that current system unilaterally invading countries that decide to develop nuclear weapons is illegal. Doing so would freeze the number of nuclear powers at their current levels (and possibly reduce them), at the price of the destruction of the sovereignty of most nations on Earth – but you seem quite comfortable to ignore national sovereignty if weapons of mass destruction are in play.
Otherwise, if the United States wants to ensure a nuclear-proliferation-free Earth (I am not sure this is actually a good idea, but running with your goal here for a moment), it is presumably on the hook to (illegally) invade and de-nuclearize any country, which means that it is in the national interest of countries like China and Russia to proliferate nuclear weapons programs to hostile states, forcing the United States to bear the costs of intervention. (Of course the United States can play the same game, but doing so risks...proliferating the weapons!)
Shrike
20d ago
As I've discussed before, the Ukrainian hold on the actual nukes seems to have been pretty tenuous at best (and the idea that the United States promised them protection in any meaningful sense is false) – but yes, I agree that the Big Lesson of Current Era is "have nukes."
And North Korea isn’t being invaded because of those nukes.
I sort of doubt this, honestly, there's little appetite for even the conventional damage North Korea could do.
Shrike
20d ago
Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders.
They pretty obviously don't.
It's definitely true that nuclear weapons are very powerful and that having them ups the ante for an invader. But we've had a lot of experience recently concerning the limitations of being a nuclear-armed power and that's not reflected here. I agree with you about the issues with soft power but both in your original post and here you're using language that suggests that having nuclear weapons gives you some kind of immunity while Russia – the world's nuclear power – has been subjected to a conventional land invasion and have been struck within their borders innumerable times by Ukraine. Israel's nuclear weapons may have caused Iran to think twice, but it hasn't stopped them from repeatedly launching conventional ballistic missiles at Israel many, many times.
Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence.
Deterrence was invented to deal with the problem of other people's nuclear weapons. (This is an exaggeration, but it's very common to see the word "deterrence" preceded by the word "nuclear.")
I don't disagree with everything you say: yes, the US is vulnerable to internal unrest, as all countries may be, yes having nuclear weapons does allow you to use them to effectively defend yourself, thereby making it more likely that attackers will not attempt to militarily conquer you in your entirety but they're not magic.
I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat.
Presumably if the Iranians can enrich uranium once, they can do it again. Israel killing every single nuclear scientist and obliterating every nuclear facility might set them back a generation, and that might be long enough for the problem to become moot. But generally speaking, if Iran can do it once, they can do it a second time.
I could be wrong about this, but my recollection was that Iraq was never nearly as far along the "make nuclear weapon" tech tree as Iran was, and their reactor (the one destroyed by Israel) was constructed and serviced by France. I don't think Iraq had nearly the in-house expertise Iran does (Israel's campaign against Iranian scientists notwithstanding).
Secondly, Iran has relatively good relations with North Korea and might simply be able to procure functional nuclear weapons from them (I have no idea what North Korea considers sane or not).
We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.
But that's what would be required if our goal is to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear weapon using military force alone. Quite possibly boots on the ground could be avoided, but it would require, presumably, an indefinite persistent air interdiction of any nuclear capabilities.
Or how else do you propose to once-and-for-all prevent them from rebuilding their nuclear capabilities? The other paths are 1. overwhelming humanitarian disaster (such as nuclear weapons) of such magnitude as to turn Iran into a political non-entity, 2. some sort of deal, or 3. installing or allowing to be installed a new regime.
I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.
I think we're both on the same page here, but it won't be easiest for us to do it now, it will be easiest in probably one or two weeks or so.
You opened your original post saying that you were arguing in opposition to the "let the two parties sort it out" position, but it seems to me that you're happy to let Israel sort it out and your main concern is that they will be unable to "finish the job." What exactly do you think the US can do that Israel cannot?
It's true that the US has MOPs that may be able to penetrate some of the Iranian underground facilities. If they can't, we'd need to use nukes (which Israel already has). If Israel has airspace control over Iran, they can (I think) keep the bunkers closed indefinitely by bombing their entrances, so it's unclear that the US has a huge advantage over Israel in this regard. The main abilities the US brings to the table are
- MOPs (which may or may not work, but can't guarantee that Iran won't just rebuild what has been destroyed)
- A very large army (but you don't want ground occupation)
- Hundreds of interceptors (but we don't want to use them, because China)
- More air power of the sort Israel essentially already has (which seems relatively pointless right now if the Israeli air campaign is as effective as is currently believed, doesn't it?)
So what exactly do you think the United States should do?
Shrike
20d ago
the majority of rabidly pro-israel partisans I've met are republican and therefore at least defacto ukraine-skeptic
To be fair, if you are trying to prevent nuclear proliferation than you should be skeptical of Ukraine. The longer the war drags on, the higher the odds of them procuring a nuclear weapon go. (How high or low those odds are I'm not sure, but I wouldn't rule the possibility out.)
Shrike
20d ago
Nuclear weapons are a complete game changer, making your nation functionally immune to any threat to its sovereignty.
Okay, so if that's true then why do you then say in the very next paragraph
Iran already has MRBMs that could be converted to take a nuclear payload right now. Those threaten our bases and our allies. They have a functional space program, and if you have put a satellite in orbit you can build an ICBM. Those threaten the continental US. Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.
and then later
A United States is impossible to invade. A broken one is anything but.
?
It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!
Look, I actually would like to remove the Iranian regime, and I don't particularly want Iran to get nuclear weapons.
But there are (at least) three things that need to be considered. (Just going to ignore for the moment the legal problems with preemptively striking another nation, but suffice to say that as I understand it it's legally problematic, to the extent that international law means anything.)
FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.
And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change. (And even then...I wouldn't exactly consider it "reliable.") Which will either require local Iranian collaborators (in which case Israel is likely already better situated than the United States to procure them) or "someone" (the United States) to invade and pacify the country. (Or some third, arguably worse option, like creating a massive humanitarian crisis to cause the country to collapse entirely). So asking the United States to "make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon" is arguably a much more serious ask than our last Middle Eastern incursion, depending on how serious you are about it
SECONDLY, the United States declining to enter the fight may actually in some ways be good for Israel because it could force Iran to withhold a portion of its offensive weapons as a deterrent package. If the United States intervenes at a massive level to accomplish regime change, there's really no point in Iran not firing every last missile that it has. So the US standing out is forcing Iran to make choices about whether or not to empty out its war reserve. Since Israel appears to be successfully hunting Iranian ballistic missile on the ground, this hesitation likely makes the Iranian ballistic missile stockpile less effective (assuming a fixed capacity to destroy ballistic missiles on the ground, the Israelis will destroy a larger number of ballistic missiles on the ground over time if fewer numbers are ordered to launch any given salvo).
FINALLY, the strategic interest of the United States in the conflict lies, as you suggest, in removing Iranian nuclear capability. Trump hopes to do that via negotiation. Israel's actions may force Iran back to the negotiating table, in which case US involvement would be counterproductive (since it may drive Iran away from the negotiating table). Currently the good cop/bad cop (or, if you prefer, Great Satan/Little Satan) routine seems to be worth a shot.
If the good cop/bad cop routine fails, then – while it is in the interest of Israel to push for US involvement as early an often as possible in order to decrease the cost of the conflict on Israel – it is in the interest of the United States to make Israel bear as much of the burden as possible. (We've poured billions of dollars into their ballistic missile defense, it's not as if we are obliged to give them a carrier strike group, too!) If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero. While this by itself likely cannot terminate Iran's nuclear program – as they have built up nuclear capability once, we should presume they can do it a second time – it can likely scrap a lot of difficult and expense work and (presumably) set them back for a while. Kicking the can down the road, but sometimes that's all you can do – and it might be all that's necessary. The Iranian regime may not last forever.
Given the above, it seems to me that it would be unwise for the United States to do anything at this point besides let things play out. Diplomacy may still work. If Israel can actually do "everything except the MOP up" then, yeah, sending them a dozen MOPs [I think technically Israel could deliver them via C-130, which would be pretty funny] or whatever is probably a decent deal for the US. Shooting down a few Iranian ballistic missiles to test our capabilities is also probably smart. But what exactly is the US interest in intervening right now and potentially foreclosing a path to bringing Iran to the table?
Is your position here is that if we get attacked by a foreign adversary it is because we deserve it? [Edit to add – if Russia could have avoided having to worry about such things if it didn't pick fights with foreign countries, does that mean Ukraine doesn't have to worry about it, in your view?]
I don't think that can be anything but a straw man of your actual position, but – it really doesn't matter whether Iran or Russia were in the right or not, we need to pay close attention to the conflicts going on around the world or risk learning their lessons the hard way.
(JD Vance if you're reading this get Hesgeth to fire a five star every month until we have soft cover around all of our strategic bombers.)
Shrike
21d ago
Right, this is the other problem. Imagine if Rhode Island unilaterally declared it was giving residency (but not citizenship!) to everyone in India and instantly gained a supermajority in the electoral college.
This is obviously crazy and it doesn't seem like a good idea to say "well no this is fine as long as you fly millions of Indians to Rhode Island."
Shrike
21d ago
Are they upset about illegal immigrants in their communities? If so, letting California be a sanctuary could actually help them, as more ICE resources could be dedicated to their areas and some illegals would leave and go to California.
Right, but this leads to a couple of things logically
-
the states that don't want the illegals will want to cut off any potential indirect federal subsidies to the illegals, because it makes no sense for them to help pay for aliens when they aren't even receiving any e.g. tax benefits. This means fights over things like "public school funding" and "welfare funding."
-
internal border checkpoints.
Maybe this is compatible with a United States, but I think in many ways it vibes as being less "united" than the European Union.
If they're upset about illegals living in blue communities many hundreds of miles away, then no compromise is possible.
One of the things that's been proven dramatically twice over the past few weeks is that if you don't control your borders adequately then hostile enemy security services will infiltrate your country and use inexpensive one-way attack munitions to blow up your strategic assets. It's not really unreasonable for red states in a collateral security agreement with blue states to want to prevent this outcome.
Shrike
21d ago
Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln.
William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution while calling it "an agreement with hell." In many ways I think the radical pro-slavery South Carolinian Fire-Eaters gave the other side a free win by splitting from the USA first, saving the radical abolitionists from the unpopular position of "destroy the Constitution and abolish slavery by any means."
I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States.
While I understand where you're coming from (and wouldn't necessarily disagree in some respects) I actually think their position is closer to the North's in a specific aspect that is under-discussed.
A lot of the anger in the North towards the South wasn't due to the abstracted question of slavery, it was because slaves would escape from the South to the North, settle someplace like Massachusetts that would welcome escaped slaves, and build a new life for themselves...until federal officials showed up, tore them away from their family or friends, and returned them to the South, as was required by the Constitution. What caused the South to secede wasn't that the Constitution didn't favor their position, it was that they were getting locked out of conventional power by the more numerous free states (that's why South Carolina bailed when they did, after it became clear the federal government was going to be hostile to them due to a presidential election, even though the pro-slavey side had been racking up Wins like the Dred Scott decision just a few years earlier. (In this respect, I think your blue-states-as-South analogy is arguably very apt: the center of gravity in the electoral college is shifting redder and redder every census, and the Supreme Court's decisions haven't been cutting towards the blue states either.)
Interestingly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates saw the introduction by Douglas of the "Freeport Doctrine" which essentially said that even when slavery could not be legally prohibited, if the local government exercised its authority in such a way as to be inimical to slavery it would constitute a de facto ban.
It seems pretty clear to me that the blue states (or at least some of them) have been running their own version of the Freeport Doctrine as regards illegal immigrants and get upset about ICE for much the same reasons as Northerners were upset about slave catchers. And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free. Returning to your casting, it seems to me that the administration is quite content to dangle Fort Sumter in front of the other side, not necessarily in terms of secession but just in the reality that violent demonstration against the governmental authorities will radicalize reds and blues, but it seems plausible to have a net effect that favors the administration's position. Perhaps just as firing on Fort Sumter gave the abolitionists on a platter what they otherwise were arguably decades away from being able to seize by conventional political means, so too the protests against ICE in California (no matter how popular they are in California) will enable the Trump administration's previously radical push to aggressively deport illegal immigrants writ large.
Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges?
Off the top of my head, the Revolutionary War might be the best example. Unlike other examples (such as World War Two) the Founding Fathers were having to make up a lot as they went along because they had to create the institutions they needed to be a nation as they went (yes I know the state Congresses were already a thing, so there was actually less of a jump there than one might think, but still!) and from what I can tell they did a lot of it on sheer "I have read history for 1000 hours and we're remaking the Roman Republic from scratch but better this time" energy. (Back to the Civil War: the South actually aspired to emulate the success of the American Revolution and saw their secession as an ideological successor but failed in part because George Washington could afford to retreat from the British in a way that a slaveholding agrarian state fighting for its independence against a neighboring country could not.)
Shrike
23d ago
Technically noticeable, but barely! Very interesting if true.
If I had to guess there's probably better ways to make farm work attractive, too, besides that – the article says that the average wage is $28/hour right now. For instance, normalizing shorter workdays (two shifts) or work weeks and paying more might generate a lot more interest and keep costs lower than simply quadrupling wages. But I'm spitballing (and not terribly familiar with what's normal in big ag right now anyway).
Shrike
24d ago
I don't actually believe this but it definitely seems possible that the markets clear at prices that would be noticeably bad for the consumer.
Shrike
30d ago
We don't have to speculate, though, we know that's very literally an 80/20 issue in favor continuing to fund social welfare programs.
Shrike
30d ago
You can see how running for office as "that insurer who denied you the care that you wanted" might not be popular even if it is fiscally smart.
Shrike
30d ago
A lot of Americans who aren't part of those groups will be taking care of those groups if Social Security and Medicare are cut.
Shrike
30d ago
I think it's easy to see infighting and assume it's a sign of weakness. It's only a sign of weakness if it isn't handled properly. If Trump publicly "wins" the fight, it consolidates power around Trump as The Sole King. (And I think this is what will happen - Musk is definitely a live player but I don't think he has the proper levers in this situation).
Over the longer term, Trump consolidating power into the party could prove to be a weakness, simply because he's not going to be around forever, and after that the party could devolve into infighting. So perhaps the Western Right is in trouble over the long term. But this was always a possibility, and getting some of that infighting "worked through" now while Trump is still around to dictate winners and losers might actually help the right get some of that infighting sorted out before, making them stronger in the post-Trump stage.
Elon calling for a party that supports the 80% of Americans is sort of funny - balancing the budget [inevitably: by nuking Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare] might be good and necessary, but it's not an 80% position. Socially conservative and yet fiscally liberal is actually the closest thing there is to an American consensus, and right now Trump occupies that high ground.
Shrike
1mo ago
You don't think Trump v. Hawaii is instructive here?
Shrike
1mo ago
A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom
FWIW, Wikipedia suggests that the Chinese definition of 3rd generation is different from that of the West, with the Su-30 (which Nambiar mentioned) being a 3.5 generation fighter. While it's quite possible that Nambiar is making ridiculous claims, it seems a bit more likely to me that he is using the PLA fighter generation definition...although that doesn't preclude making ridiculous claims – amusingly Wikipedia thinks that the Rafale would also be a 3.5 generation aircraft under that scheme, and I personally don't think the Rafale is exactly all that compared to an Su-35, particularly not with the original PESA array, although it looks like the Indians got the AESA variant.
Shrike
1mo ago
Virtues are dead so there is no point in up holding them.
I disagree with this. It's good to be personally virtuous.
If (for the sake of argument) "the system" truly is broken and it needs someone who can operate outside of the rules, bending or breaking them at times, even getting his hands dirty, then the necessity of that is worth considering. But the aspiration behind that should be returning to an era where virtue is rewarded, not creating an extraordinary state where the system being broken is acceptable.
Shrike
1mo ago
Exploding or minimizing the definition of "corruption" largely seem like post-hoc justifications for bad behavior rather than genuine attempts to understand the issue.
Yes. As I said, it's a motte-and-bailey issue, and it is to the advantage of both sides to accuse the other side of corruption while suggesting that their side is blameless under the more narrow definition. But after decades of this, it is not surprising that "populists" think that there is a massive corruption problem. Populists read the mainstream media too.
If the valences were reversed, e.g. if Hunter Biden received a $200M jet and gave it to Joe, do you think Republicans would make a stink about it? I certainly do.
Yes. We don't have to ask this question hypothetically.
I'm not sure I actually believe this – the right runs a lot of parallel institutions that are better/More Elite than the state-run institutions. I think the actual problem for the right is a bit more subtle.
Some of it is that is because of how school systems work in the USA, local ideology often matters more than state or federal ideology – and since population centers are often leftie, figuring out ways to redistribute resources away from local school systems to the institutions (elite and otherwise) that are more right-sympathetic is a victory for the right. Uncharitably, you could argue this is school choice does (although the counter-argument it only works because, frankly, the generic-and-often-left-wing choices are often quite bad and many people would take their kids to right-wing parallel institutions if they could afford it).
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