SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Well you’re wrong.
The IRGC’s whole damn bit is doing what the Supreme Leader wants.
The kill list for US officials involved with the Soleimani strike is not some rogue faction’s idea.
You have no idea how to model the motivations and machinations of the Iranian regime. Khamenei loved Soleimani. Soleimani was carrying out the express wishes of the Supreme Leader in his operations.
They were quite surprised about Soleimani’s death. That was a big change for the US to do that.
The Iranians are quite often high on their own supply and don’t just consciously use lies to placate their dumb citizens (as the Russians do). They are actually religious fanatics. They aren’t insane, but they are not nearly as rational as many in the West want to believe and they really do have ideological commitments we find pretty mind boggling. (For instance, a devotion to destroying the state of Israel.)
There is a very high chance the Iranians stupidly try a major attack (for the death of a Hamas leader, not an Iranian, no less), and then Israel responds a lot stronger than they ever have before. I don’t think Israel is bluffing about their intended response and I don’t think they’ll let Biden restrain them.
Common sense would lead the Iranians to back off any large scale military attacks and merely try more of an in kind response like assassinating a Jew somewhere, but their egos and rhetoric is making it clear they want to do more.
Hopefully, the wiser more risk-aware advisors to Khamenei win the day.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
This is a dumb take because Iran launched 300+ drones and missiles in what became the first large scale test of Israel’s Iron Dome.
They did not expect 99% of those to be shot out of the sky.
That’s not a “token” or “symbolic” response just because it turns out to have been militarily ineffective. They did not use Hezbollah because when Hezbollah does decide to go all out then Israel will invade. It’s kind of a one time option.
In contrast, Israel’s response to the first overt attack from Iran was to destroy a key air defense system.
Now that Iranians know the ineffectiveness of their first try, yes, they will have to up their game to try to overwhelm the missile defenses, including coordination with a major launch from Hezbollah.
If Iran starts attacking commercial shipping then the US Navy will make the Iranian navy disappear pretty rapidly.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Don’t confuse Iran’s lack of effectiveness with the intent to be pragmatic.
They have the intent to assassinate Trump and a whole list of other people they blame for the Soleimani strike.
And if their missile attack had killed Americans in Iraq, Trump would have responded in kind and we don’t know how that escalatory cycle would have gone. (Iran believes they did kill troops, so they think they got one over on Trump.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
That is not a valid interpretation of standard procedures.
I believe you are conflating what I am talking about with metadata rules and some particular authority.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Well the main goal would be to wreck Hezbollah.
No idea how they would decide whether to occupy southern Lebanon again.
I’m guessing they wouldn’t opt for an occupation. Gaza is going to be enough of a problem.
But yeah, overall Israel knows it can’t take out Hezbollah the way it can Hamas.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
As someone who used to be one of those GS-9s, this is a pretty accurate take.
The NSA in particular takes compliance very, very seriously out of the self-interest of not losing the legal authorities granted by congress and approved by the courts.
I was once tracking a foreign target for quite some time. And then I saw she was conversing with a family member about how to get a spouse a Green Card.
Uh oh.
Turns out this lady and her sister were born in the same small college town I was, and were looking to come to America with their husbands.
At that point, we had to either delete all the things related to this person, or jump through all the hoops necessary to justify continued efforts (which in theory was possible, since she was the employee of a foreign government). But we opted to just delete all the things given she wasn’t sufficiently high-ranking to justify the effort and was clearly trying to leave her job.
(I should point out that if a US Person contacts a valid intelligence target, those comms are going to be collected by default and retained if there’s a valid reason, without a warrant beforehand [though with a shit ton of other oversight and approval]. Just ask Mike Flynn.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Well sure, war has consequences.
Consider that it might be Israel doing it and not the US. If Iran conducts a major missile/drone attack on Israel and does real damage then Israel has said they’re going to take the gloves off. I believe them.
I don’t think the US would attack non-mil infra unless Iran picked a fight with us directly and did some real damage.
Iran would be a failed state pretty quickly if its oil revenue dried up and Israel can destroy that infrastructure from the air. I’m not sure exactly how many strikes it would take to say eliminate half of Iran’s oil output for ~months+, but oil fields, refineries, and pipelines are easy targets that can’t really be hardened.
Of course, the more pressing threat for Israel is if they need to invade Lebanon to attack Hezbollah and its missile sites, in which case they’d be devoting the vast majority of their air power to that operation.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Nobody wants to mount a ground invasion of Iran because the Iranians have a large military with a great deal of ideological commitment (unlike Saddam).
However, bombing Iran’s oil industry into the Stone Age is pretty doable. Iran’s navy and Air Force would get wrecked very quickly.
What’s tricky is that Iran learned from Iraq and Syria and built their nuclear facilities inside mountains. So there’s no way to destroy the program without boots on the ground.
I don’t know what contingency plans Israel has for enforcing their red line that Iran cannot achieve a nuclear weapon.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
And they are legitimately considered very good in the industry by penetration testers.
They fucked up an update big time, but they got their market position by having a competitive product.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
How high of LSAT did Hillary need to get into Yale?
My understanding is that Dems and gov officials consider Hillary to be plenty sharp. Kamala not so much.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
K, but far from all, like the 2400 killed personnel and eight battleships that took damage.
With advance warning, the US could have intercepted the attack, which was an act of war from the get go, and simultaneously had the justification for war and started off by fucking over the Japanese. An ambush on a surprise attack is the best kind.
What’s beneath this place is conspiratorial thinking that doesn’t even make sense in the context of what the damn conspiracy theory context even is.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
(We could have moved more of our fleet out of the harbor and still let the Japanese bomb the harbor if we had in fact had advance warning. If you want to use deceit to get into a war there are far less stupid ways to go about it.)
SwordOfOccam
4mo ago
“Injectables” means botox and fillers.
A little goes a long way, but a little too much looks real bad.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Google and other sites don’t have to know the MAC itself to know of a device change (eg a hash can be used).
You can read about device and browser fingerprinting to find out more.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
We go to the ballot box with the election system we have, not the one that we might want.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
I agree the US should have had better intelligence and taken the Chinese warnings seriously. And then blasted them to hell with superior firepower.
But Korea was a sideshow during the Cold War and not sufficiently important to get a war-weary public motivated to support it.
You're making the exact same mistake that MacArthur did.
I don’t think I am. I’m a China hawk myself. There’s a lot of unknowns about how well the US and Chinese militaries would operate in a full on war. With Russia, we saw massive underperformance in Ukraine, but we just don’t really know how good the Chinese navy and military technology is compared to the US.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Man, your understanding of the Korean War is limited at best.
The US got caught off guard and nearly pushed off the peninsula, sure, but we decided to only beat the ChiComms and North Koreans halfway back up the peninsula. We weren’t willing to seek actual victory, an attitude that went on to serve us well in Vietnam too.
(I actually think McArthur was probably right and we should have nuked the Chinese to keep North Korea from existing, given how things went thereafter.)
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Well lots of people, including the mods, saw it differently.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
He would not accept that many of us are color-blind meritocracy fans and recognize the factual reality of HBD. That combo just broke his brain. Perpetually misrepresenting the views of one’s opponents when explicitly corrected is shitty and intolerable behavior.
He would avoid dealing with the concrete evidence provided for the reality and utility of IQ, and its correlation to racial groups. He would make deluded attacks on academia—where IQ is not so popular a metric—and fail to acknowledge the contradiction. This is not denying the underlying framework. It’s being retarded and illogical. Several people who don’t like HBD pointed this out at the time.
If he had been consistently retarded but polite on the IQ issue, he wouldn’t have caught the ban and his average comment quality would have been good. Civility and order break down when those with status consistently and flagrantly violate rules and norms and the mods’ hands were forced.
Personally, I don’t care whether he caught a forever ban or just a really long one. Redemption is nice when you can get it.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
He perpetually misrepresented his opponent and refused to engage with points actuality made, and he was snotty while doing it.
His average quality of engagement was low.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
Why would these methods fail now?
Sure COVID was a thing in 2020, but Trump was in power and already suspicious of rigged elections. Despite that, the rigging took place ant 10% and there was no concrete evidence?
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
I don't see a good clear line between drone striking a citizen advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government and "assassinating a political rival.
The individual in question was unambiguously working for a terrorist organization.
Foreign vs. domestic soil and organizational affiliation matters quite a lot.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
This is a hilariously weak whataboutism.
The evidence for election rigging was nonexistent.
At least Russiagate had enough evidence to put a few people in jail.
“Derail half a term”
Oh come on. What derailed a whole term is that Trump is an incompetent leader and he ran a clown show. Trump was the biggest setback for Trumpism.
SwordOfOccam
5mo ago
The man clearly falsified business records for campaign purposes.
That’s a simplification, but not hard to grok.
Nobody gets confirmed until Trump takes office…
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