Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
I have to wonder why the Trump administration's foreign policy leadership thinks they can compel a regime that just killed 20-30k of their own citizens by hitting civilian infrastructure.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10hr ago
If by 'retreat' you mean 'responding to a different claim', then sure.
You said (emphasis mine): "That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives'"
My point is that Actually Existing Trumpism isn't defensible even by the principles Trumpists claim to support, and they usually don't try. This is not simply a matter of only using progressive yardsticks. Trumpists don't generally, for example, publicly support corruption. They don't even say "I'm willing to tolerate corruption as long Trump puts the boot into the immigrants and trans people." They dismiss critics as some combination of hysterical and dishonest. They do this even when critics are mounting arguments that, if they were intellectually consistent, Trumpists ought to at least entertain.
So, yes, I feel very comfortable with the "TDS is an intellectual escape hatch" theory.
Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here.
This is literally a demonstration of my point. JTarrou isn't seriously entertaining the idea that Trump could be wrong; he's saying that if Devereaux's analysis is right, it would be pure chance. Not through any direct response to his arguments, but because "Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
It is never 4D chess.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
The chart at the top shows 70% very unfavorable and 20% somewhat unfavorable (90% total). The 79% is the average across the countries surveyed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
The neocon dream was a quick, decisive war to topple the IRI and replace it with a pro-American democracy. The specifics of how that was going to happen were probably pretty hazy and involved both underestimating Iran and overestimating the US, but I really doubt they envisioned an intense-yet-noncommittal air war with no meaningful ground element. As I will never shut up about: this war looks like a failed attempt at gunboat diplomacy with seemingly no plan if Iran didn't immediately cave.
The bombardment of Tehran, Isfahan, and IRGC infrastructure looks a lot like 2003 "Shock and Awe" in Iraq.
Not really. The point of "Shock and Awe"-style tactics is to disrupt enemy command and control so your ground forces can overwhelm theirs with limited organized resistance. There was no ground component to Operation Epic Fury.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
I think this gender abolitionist framing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem with the gender abolitionist framing is that when push comes to shove virtually no one actually believes it. There are a lot of culturally contingent ideas about femininity and masculinity and associated gender roles and there's some heated disagreement over how much the behavioral differences between men and women are rooted in biology(/natural order) vs indoctrination, but the number of people who think we should actually get rid of gender distinctions is close to zero. What is passed off as gender abolitionism tends to merely be a rebellion against perceived male supremacism and heteronormativity. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of women like being women. When they chafe against the strictures of womanhood, they're not (generally) saying "I wish I could be a man," they are saying "I wish I didn't have to put up with all this bullshit."
All of which is to say, I don't think hostility to the development of any sort of masculinist/male-specific movement descents from a serious belief in gender abolitionism. Rather, there are two main motives:
a) a zero-sum view of gender relations, under which any sort of men's movement is a problem because men's gain is women's loss and vice versa.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
However, you can't just come out and say "men shouldn't be allowed to advocate for their interests because they'll inevitably become a threat to women." That sort of gives the game away. Instead the issue is dressed up in gender abolitionist rhetoric wherein men's interest in masculinity is held to be illegitimate/mistaken in and of itself (as illustrated in the quoted excerpt). However, this doesn't get great traction with men because it's transparently one-sided (and also bullshit). You can't make a big deal about the importance of representation for women and then turn around and say it's not important for men.
(There is also the separate reality that modern liberalism is very hands off on the question of what it means to live well, which makes it averse to highly prescriptive social norms. This includes strongly defined gender roles.)
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default.
I can't speak from firsthand experience due to not being a woman, but from what I can observe and have been told, this is very much not true. Girls have their behavior policed from a young age, and while the framing (and content) may be different across social contexts, the basic idea of needing to learn feminine ('ladylike') behavior and skills is omnipresent. Even in the purely physical domain, feminine beauty is, while helped along to a great degree by genetics, heavily artificial. Often in ways men are hilariously blind to (e.g. many men are comically bad at noticing when women are wearing makeup)
Good thing that's not what I meant. Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
The US can shoot down drones and ballistic missiles relatively effectively at existing installations with reliable supply chains and stockpiles of air defense munitions. A dig site in the middle of Iran is going to require flying in all the air defense equipment, all the necessary ammunition, all supplies for the security force, supplies for the engineers, excavating equipment, replacement equipment when the initial stuff gets damaged... And then at the end you have to fly everything out again (you can ditch the heavy equipment, but not the soldiers or engineers or uranium).
The US military has immense operational competence, but this would be an incredibly delicate operation with numerous vulnerabilities.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Do you have to be deranged to make anti-Trump claims? Sometimes the guy makes bad choices.
I have a thesis for you: "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters. There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate. TDS sidesteps that neatly. Instead of trying to rebut criticisms, you simply dismiss them as irrational and hysterical (and thus not worth considering) and never think about them again.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
What OP is describing as "respectfulness" strikes me as being primarily about having a legible social hierarchy, and an extremely idealized one at that. The reality is that, far from noblesse oblige being the norm, abusing your inferiors was frequently a prerogative of status (patriarchal cultures take this to the extreme). This isn't necessarily going to be obvious if you're viewing these societies as a ground-level tourist (especially a western one), since you're unlikely to be exposed to those social dynamics.
By contrast, the social milieu of the US is often remarkably flat and divided more horizontally than vertically. It's not easy to identify who is on top in any given situation, and even when you do there's a strong measure of performative egalitarianism where people in positions of superiority downplay it. OP is not wrong to note that there is a measure of falsity here - the boss might wear flip flops and a tshirt and insist you call him by his first name, but one of you has the power to fire the other - but the pretense has value in terms of how elites behave.
This is the first war in which one of the adversaries is going strictly after the elite
Estimates are roughly 1000 Iranian civilian casualties and similar numbers of military personnel. The US and Israel are going after air defense targets, missile launchers, warships, economic targets, etc... Decapitation strikes are not new, and this is by no stretch of the imagination a war of assassins.
If ukraine and russia could reasonably kill each other's key people - there would have been peace years ago.
This is a far too personalist view of politics. Putin might be genuinely load-bearing, but the people under him are replaceable. Zelensky has largely played his part, and if you killed him he'd simply be replaced.
It's never 4D chess. Events just aren't predictable enough for that kind of strategy to work. If you can pull off a simple misdirection, you are doing well.
Deliberately inflicting pain on your allies isn't a clever move, it's a great way to stop having allies. If there was a buried intention here (there isn't, because it's never 4D chess, especially with Trump et al), it's that someone in the administration skimmed The Accidental Superpower and decided to become a Zeihanist accelerationist.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
It's certainly not unique to the United States, e.g. there's a good argument that Prussia and its successors had the same basic problem, though there it was more that Prussia overestimated the ability of tactical prowess to paper over fundamental material disadvantages. Thus getting into deep shit and having to be bailed out. The same could be levied against Japan during WW2. The distinction I would draw is that these people generally had straightforward strategic goals, but their egos were writing checks their armies couldn't cash.
By contrast, I think where the US stands out is the combination of conventional dominance and confused, facile, or overly ambitious strategic thinking. America, like Prussia, keeps convincing itself it's going to get a quick decisive war. But Prussia's problem was biting off more than it could chew, while America's problem is that we have no idea what we're doing. And I don't mean that in the sense of 'incompetent'. I mean it in the sense that we think we're doing one thing when we're actually doing another.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
I don't think the counterfactual of a more distributed insurance market (or no insurers) changes things. Any way you imagine slicing it, someone is on the financial hook for these ships.
Wars are not a tally of losses on either side. The US inflicted incredibly lopsided casualties in Afghanistan and Vietnam and still failed, because confusing tactical brilliance for strategic success is a perennial failure of American military thinking.
Also, the US hasn't destroyed the Iranian military.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
It should be noted that traffic through the strait is a small fraction of its pre-war throughput even with recent 'upticks.' Whether or not Iran can properly close the strait, shippers clearly think the risk is high enough that they're not willing to risk it.
A couple of thoughts
-
Assuming they are even honest, the negotiating points seem to far apart to mean anything. Like, the US is not paying reparations to Iran, Iran is not going to become a de facto US protectorate, etc... Iran is also clearly concerned about bad faith negotiations. All in all, it seems like we're nowhere close to progress on this front.
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This conflict seems to break a certain kind of person's brain, including a lot of people inside the Trump administration. They look at the raw power differential between the US and Iran, the difference in scale of destruction meted out on either end, and are simply baffled by the idea that Iran could still be in the fight or even in an advantageous position. It has a whiff of "that's not blood in my mouth, it's victory wine." What this fails to grasp is the difference in what this war means for the belligerents. The IRI has far more to lose and gain than the US does, far greater ability to make its populace accept suffering/losses, and an asymmetric need for force (simply put: the US needs way more force to achieve its goals than Iran does, and is operating much further away from its military base). Might-makes-right thinking habitually overestimates the efficacy of raw power and underestimates the importance of intangibles like morale and wanting it more.
-
A number of people have observed that it now seems the goal of this war for the US is to re-open the strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war. (Realistically, the goal is to extricate itself without looking stupid/weak, but that ship has probably already sailed). It's still conceivable that the US is going to try some kind of special operation to seize Iranian uranium, but I'm going to hazard to guess that US military really doesn't want to do that. I am still left with the impression that the administration really thought they were going to pull a repeat of Venezuela (we also have some indication that Netanyahu thought kicking in the door would bring the whole rotting edifice down) and all the people saying "trust the plan" are huffing pure, unfiltered copium.
-
I have to wonder about the wider long-term impact of this conflict. There's going to be a lot of uninvolved countries suffering the economic consequences of the strait being closed, and I predict they're mostly going to blame the US for that. When you're global hegemon, they let you do it, but I can't help but suspect that the current administration is blindly drawing down US soft power without even realizing it.
- Sidebar: short-sighted belligerence makes the US dramatically less safe, contra the instincts of the terminally thug-brained. It riles up new adversaries and hardens old ones as well as alienating allies. More importantly, it undermines the trust of the public in US foreign policy. Huge swathes of the American public start from the assumption that whatever justification is offered for US military involvement is bullshit. This is endurable in the context of minor counterterrorism operations where the US doesn't have anything more significant than a few SpecOps on the ground and Trump can get away with a lot because of his cult of personality, but the time is going to come when the US actually faces some critical security threat that requires real cost and commitment. And we're pay a far heavier cost than we need to, because the public trust has been so thoroughly abuse that we won't be able to summon the will to act until after disaster has already occurred.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Nothing to do with cosmopolitanism and more to do with the fact that Britain just isn't a society divided like that. The idea that society is three meals from barbarism is not, in general, true. It is especially not true when it is coming under external attack.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I don't think I've seen a single woman in real life who fits this description. It's entirely reserved for elite conservative women in media/media-adjacent positions. All the normie-lib women I know wouldn't be caught dead getting cosmetic surgery (not saying they wouldn't get it, but it's sufficiently stigmatized that it would have to be really subtle), while all the conservative women I know are midwestern housewife types who would find cosmetic surgery to be absurd vanity. Also, regardless of orientation, a lot of them are too fat for that kind of cosmetic surgery to be credible.
(For reference, I live in Maryland and my family is from the Midwest)
Does anyone actually like this?
To me the look you are describing has extremely strong Aging Trophy Wife vibes. My gut says that this is probably the intersection of wealth and vanity. The artifice is the point - anyone can go to the gym and get fit, but not everyone can shell out a small fortune to have a doctor rearrange their face.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The actual answer is that you're not. Iran is not Afghanistan. Destroying critical infrastructure in Iran isn't going to turn it into a bunch of warring tribes any more doing the same in Britain would. It's just going to lead to a lot of avoidable deaths of Iranian civilians.
Are you denying that Trump I was basically a Lame Duck president
Yes. If this is a load-bearing belief of yours, we have nothing to talk about.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
What is your standard for democracy that this system as written fails?... Iran is an illiberal democracy. They don't have free speech or freedom of expression. They have a significant dead hand problem of an entrenched set of interests which steer the country through approval of candidates.
I think the combination of the influence of the IRGC and centralized approval of candidates by a functionally self-selecting body goes beyond the dead hand of the past. Like, if every candidate for federal office in the US had to be approved by the Supreme Court (with informal but significant input from the military + IC), I would be happy to say that the US was not a democracy under those circumstances. The fact that the Iranian government is regularly required to put down massive protests with violent force that utterly eclipses any comparable measure in the US or Western Europe is strongly suggestive of a basic legitimacy problem.
(Also, the US is increasingly illiberal in its governance, so v0v)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
That seems like an extremely tendentious interpretation of that article. Trump associates with a bunch of Russian assets -> gets accused of collaborating with Russia -> Trump becomes obsessed with a Ukrainian conspiracy -> tries to extort Zelenskyy -> gets impeached for acting corruptly.
"Why would Hillary Clinton do this?" Donald Trump is a grown man with agency.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
I trust the people in this forum more than I do of other forums
You shouldn't. This forum self-selects for people with outsider right-wing beliefs. This means you get exposed unusual perspectives relative to, e.g., reddit, but a lot of those perspectives are crankish or blinkered.
It's very hard to keep the lights off to that degree. Also unclear how bombing a public health institute is going to help.
These types of campaigns have been ineffective against governments less willing to inflict hardship on their own citizens, and yet there remains an irrepressible constituency for the idea that the core issue with American foreign policy is not lack of public trust or coherent strategy, but that we're too squeamish.
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