quiet_NaN
21hr ago
I think that having a leader who is not fundamentally hostile to Israel would be an upgrade, yes.
However, most of the population in Muslim countries have long expressed some hostility towards Israel, and Bibi's war/peace in Gaza has done little to win their hearts and minds.
Any leader who is seen as a Mossad stooge will start with a 50 point penalty to stability, basically.
Given these circumstances, I now wonder a bit what Mossad is playing at. If they were serious about installing Pahlavi, one would think that they would keep their involvement non-obvious. They can keep a secret if they want to, so it appears they want the world to know that the Shah has their support. I do not have the context to know what their play is here, though.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
As for the "Evil Empire", regardless of what they did or didn't do to the US, the USSR was that; ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians, and the survivors of the Prague Spring, among many others.
Oh, I am not doubting that. I am not some Holodomor denier.
I am also not saying that the net effect of the US is as atrocious as the net effect of the Ayatollah regime. FWIW, I consider the net effect of the US to be strongly positive from a global point of view. However, I would claim that if we only consider the territory of Iran, then the effect of the US seems pretty clearly net negative. The Ayatollah has certainly be worse from my PoV, but Iranians have little reason to like the US.
While I am sure that the Iranian hostage crisis was in some ways "unprecedented", I don't think it will even make the top 50 atrocities committed in the ME. Presumably the perception of the revolutionaries was that the Shah was basically a stooge, and the US the puppet masters. The people in the US embassy were working very hard to keep the Shah in power and Iran under the thumb of the US. Sure, the Shah had guaranteed them diplomatic immunity, and violating their embassy would be a defection from diplomatic norms, but it does not read to me as an act of pure evil. (With the benefit of hindsight, it was also very stupid on part of the revolutionaries. They gained nothing, antagonized a global superpower and also set themselves up for becoming a diplomatic pariah.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Given that our resident antisemites appear to be on vacation, I guess it falls to me to mention two relevant facts about the Iranian protests.
(1) Protesters are calling for the installation of Pahlavi as the Shah.
(2) There exists a Mossad operation to make Pahlavi the Shah (paywalled, Haaretz seems to be a mainstream Israeli newspaper.)
From an Israeli perspective, it makes a bit of sense. It seems highly unlikely that any democratically elected Iranian president would ever be as Israel-friendly as Pahlavi is, so why risk it?
For the West, supporting the Pahlavi dynasty over Iranian democracy is at least historically consistent. In 1953, CIA and MI6 backed the Shah's coup because the democratically elected government wanted to nationalize the oil industry.
Iran was then run for 26 years by a pro-Western autocrat until the Shah became deeply unpopular, at which point the Ayatollah took over, creating the Iran we all know and love.
Given that history, I would be surprised if Iranians wanted to go for a monarchy again. I would be even more surprised if they wanted a Pahlavi again. It would be like Germany saying "maybe we should give the Hohenzollern another chance", if the guy in question was also Putin's best buddy.
Of course, this is a result of the theocrats being stupid. Everyone knows that once you have disposed a hereditary monarch, his descendants will form natural rallying points for counter-revolutionaries. The Soviets certainly knew how to avoid having to deal with someone who would have a claim to the tsardom later on.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
hostility to the US itself ("The Great Satan")
To be fair, from the perspective of a random ME country, it is not clear to me that that assessment is categorically wrong.
If a foreign country half a world away backed a coup to install some autocrat, then a few years later offered broad support to your regional enemy while said enemy attacked you with chemical weapons, hammered you with sanctions for decades, broke treaties, invaded your neighbor and made a complete mess of things, and generally provided cover for a client-state who would freely bomb your military installations and murder your nuclear weapon scientists, then bomb your military installations themselves, you would likely also not like that country a lot.
Hell, when Reagan called the USSR an 'Evil Empire', they had done far less to the US.
major sponsor of terrorism
The price for being the biggest sponsor of terror attacks on American soil clearly goes to Saudi Arabia for their links to Bin Laden.
have long been engaging in a (mostly) proxy war against a US ally.
That conflict is very much a two-way road. My considered opinion nowadays is that the Ayatollah and Nethanyahu richly deserve each other, and there is no reason for civilized countries to become entangled in their beef.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think most mainstream media linked the Iranian regime to the Hamas attacks and the Assad regime. If I were to search for op-eds on Iran in the Guardian or the NYT, do you predict that the general consensus would be "Iran is a peace-loving democracy, and we should definitely trust them to enrich uranium as much as they want"?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
That is a bit of a vacuous definition of democracy. It is alike to asking a prisoner to pick between the noose and the firing squad, then reporting that the government granted his request to get hanged, as if it was MAID instead of an execution. A lot of countries are democratic on paper and have elections, but are effectively dictatorships. Take the former German Democratic (!) Republic (!), for example. Sure, they had elections. Perhaps sometimes the vote even decided which SED candidate would get elected. But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
I also disagree with you on basing an Iranian democracy on a continuation of the institutions of the Ayatollah regime. There is always the danger of backsliding. The theocrats had 45 years to entrench themselves. If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am fine with admitting that there are worthy human endeavors where the scientific method and mathematical models are not the best way to tackle the question. If someone wants to study fairy tales or Greek mythology, I will not insist on them adding p-values to their publications.
But if a field pretends scientific rigor while just cargo culting, that will reliably enrage science geeks like me. I do not have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be available for studying the character of the wolf in Grimm's fairy tales. I do have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be for torturing statistics to 'scientifically prove' that the wolf is a negative character (p<0.05): the amount is zero.
I will grant you that the revealed preference of the funding agencies is different, though.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Another thought:
Greenland is weird because it is very much a noncentral example of a country. It has a population density of just 0.028/km^2. (For comparison, Montana is 3/km^2, even Alaska is 0.5/km^2. A reasonably densely settled European state (e.g. Belgium) gets to ~400/km^2.)
It is halfway between a country and SpaceX placing a hundred colonists on the Moon who then incorporate as a state with all of the Moon as their territory.
In Europe, every square meter of usable land was fought over hundreds of times, most borders drawn in blood. With Greenland, it seems that most of the territorial claim is more "That icy wasteland which can not sustain human life? Well, nobody is contesting it, so I guess it is ours."
So if the US or China would build a time machine and establish undiscovered colonies in Greenland in 1900, they could likely get Denmark to cede a part of Greenland to them, because most sane people do not want to die for some icy wasteland far from their home country, and even the small population of Greenland will probably feel little patriotic urge to die to protect their inhospitable hinterlands.
That being said, "the international rule-based order results in a tiny population of some inhospitable part of the earth nobody cared enough for to even contest before the IRBO came into effect becoming filthy rich" is hardly without precedent. Some thinly populated areas in the Middle East made it big thanks to fossil fuels. Denmark, the US, Canada and Russia getting to keep their mostly unpopulated territories in the arctic seems like a small price to pay for keeping the IRBO.
Not that from a geographical point of view, the US has any good claim to Greenland in the first place. Ireland claiming Northern Ireland, Canada claiming Alaska, Italy claiming the Vatican, even Putin claiming Ukraine are all more plausible from geography.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think Puerto Rico (and the other US territories) are a bit of a cautionary tale for any Greenlanders looking to join the US. In Denmark, Greenland is represented roughly proportionally to its population (which to be fair, is rather small, about 1%).
The smallest US state by population is Wyoming. I do not see Congress granting two senators to an island with 10% of the population.
And the way the US system works, no statehood means no federal representation whatsoever. So while it would be in the interests of whomever gets to exploit the natural resources to just pay every resident of Greenland 100k$/year for their trouble, this is something which would be hard to enforce. (Of course, if the US gov does pay that, that will probably attract other US citizens. Probably half of Alaska would move there.)
Once you are a territory, your concerns are not the concerns of the US politics. Who cares about Puerto Rico? (Compare and contrast with the Cuban exiles in Florida, who despite being a smaller group have shaped US Cuba relations for decades simply by virtue of being a relevant demographic in a battleground state.)
If Trump takes Greenland, the US loses Europe, and most of their allies.
I don't think that we would get a full-on war of loyalist NATO vs US. In the end, the US has the military capabilities to conquer Greenland. I would welcome it if my government dropped a few billions on whatever people might be willing to fight the US in the arctic, though, just as I am fine with my government dropping billions on Ukraine. Paying to hurt defectors is the least we can do to strengthen the rule-based order.
But at the end of the day, Greenland is 578 times less populous than Ukraine. Eventually the US would win.
But for the rest of NATO (Europe, but also Canada), that would radically change our strategic situation. Not only could we no longer depend on the US to defend us from other large powers, we would have to treat the US as one of the conquering hostile powers itself. Step one would be to politely ask US troops to leave Europe. Step two would be to get our retaliatory capacity up to speed. This means building a lot of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, so we can credibly threaten to turn most US cities into rubble.
We probably would not want a defensive alliance with Canada or Mexico (because the risk for Canada to become the next target of Vance's territorial ambitions in 2028 is obviously higher than for Belgium), but should probably cooperate with them in developing ICBMs. Colombia also looks like a country which might be interested in buying a few nukes, personally I would take their dollar bills despite the powder sticking to them.
For the Major Non-NATO Allies (e.g. Australia, Japan, South Korea), their strategic landscape would likewise change: if Trump will attack NATO countries, he will certainly also be willing to take a slice of Australia by force. Probably all of these would suddenly become very interested in nuclear weapons programs. (The MNNA which will have to do the least updating of their strategic picture is Colombia, as the US is already the prime military threat for them. In general, in South America and Muslim countries, the US does not have the same reputation as a steadfast ally as they do in European-origin countries.)
I can not say I would like such a development over the status quo. The pax americana was a win-win-win for the US, its western allies and the world. The US became the leader of the free world. Western allies like the Netherlands gained great security guarantees. The world got some reprieve from the security dilemma as western allies were not incentivised to build their own ICBMs to keep each other in check.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Things that are safe in the parking lot of a grocery store are not necessarily safe during the apprehension of a suspect. I have seen people argue here that we can not conclude from the fact that Good was a middle-aged woman who engaged in what appeared to prefer non-violent, if annoying and illegal actions to impede ICE that she was not going to suddenly to draw a gun to kill as many ICE officers as she could.
We know from the videos that Ross shooting her did very little to slow down her car. If she had aimed for him, even if he had managed to shoot her, he would have been severely injured.
So objectively speaking, standing too close to dodge in front of suspect's car is in fact reckless, even if you do not have reason to believe that that suspect might consider you Gestapo, or might be panicking or might be distracted and not even have seen you. This is why for example the CBP has explicit rules about not doing that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I can’t see a situation where I would vote to convict an ICE agent.
To me, this is a very weird thing to say.
For me, the American I probably respect most is probably Scott Alexander, my rightful caliph. And yet I can think of plenty (if unlikely) situations where I would definitely vote to convict him of a crime. Even in the middle of a civil war (Grey Tribe versus the rest of the world?), I can still imagine a lot of possible behaviors I would not let slide.
That is because just like him, I am a big fan of civility, and breaking civilizational norms is generally bad.
I will charitably interpret your statement as implying 'for anything he did on the job', and hope that you would still consider convicting someone for killing his girlfriend or raping kids.
But even on the job, I can think of plenty of behaviors I would not want to see from ICE even if I was 100% convinced that they were doing god's work. Gunning down suspects fleeing on foot. Blowing up protesters' cars to dissuade others from blocking them. Torturing people to find out the whereabouts of their targets. Raping detainees. Like every other group of humans, there are likely people in ICE who need to be dissuaded from such defections against humanity by threat of punishment. Saying categorically that you would not punish them basically means endorsing all of that.
I have no problem with "I would not convict Ross for the shooting of Good". It is not a position I share (based on my impression so far, I could be persuaded either way by new evidence emerging in a trial), but for that case it is at least one of the positions within the civilizational Overton window.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I am sure the blue-tribers say that. Personally, I would prefer to have a gun brandished toward me or even trained at me by a cop 20 times to being shot without warning even once.
If someone is standing in front of a vehicle wants to signal "I will treat you moving forward at any angle as a deadly assault and blow your brains out", then I would very much prefer that threat to be made explicitly.
Not letting suspects know when they are one sudden movement away from getting shot will greatly reduce stress for the median case, but it will also result in unfortunate failures of communication when they try to get their papers from their glove compartment a little too fast.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
So standard police procedures are to stand in front of a car, relying on your quickdraw skills to be able to shoot the driver if she starts to accelerate towards you before get run over (which would empirically not prevent you from getting run over -- if she had aimed for him as he had aimed for her, then he would be lucky to be in a wheelchair)? Do you have any citation to back that up?
I have already quoted the CBP guidelines about "do not block the path of a vehicle with your body" elsewhere in this discussion. I see this as clear evidence that the shooters behavior is not "standard police protocols". If you want to argue that for ICE it is, please provide evidence.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
You can’t profile this woman as the average member of the general class of women, because she belongs to a very small class of people trying to illegally impede the law. I imagine those who go out of their way to impede ICE have a much higher risk of carrying a weapon.
I think that your concept of "lawbreaker woman", which includes Ulrike Meinhof, Bonnie Parker and Renee Good, does not really carve reality at its joints.
While Good was engaged in illegal activity intended to impede ICE, it is notable that her planned way of impeding them was non-violent. Anyone willing to murder a few ICE agents in the process of impeding their progress would not waste their time on non-violent resistance. Anyone planning at shooting ICE will likely not engineer a situation where their car is surrounded by ICE agents as a starting point.
I will grant you that there is a tiny probability that contrary to tribal (and gender) cultural norms, she was a gun enthusiast and a crack shot, and had also stupidly taken her pistol along 'for self defense' on her non-violent resistance, and would in a panic try to shoot her way out of getting arrested.
But realistically, the probability of her starting to shoot was still lower than for a 20yo white dude at a routine traffic stop.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I was not not saying that I did not understand it, or I thought it was bad. Obviously we allow cops to use violence which would land civilians in jail. Someone has to execute the arrest warrants, after all.
I am also fine with them getting a bit more leniency when claiming self-defense (which was what I was going for here specifically, and where cops are not intrinsically privileged over civilians as a matter of law, afaik). In particular, we can generally skip the question what poor life choices on your part may have led to you having to wield deadly force to defend your own life -- dealing with people who might be unstable or violent (so the rest of us won't have to) is their job.
On the other hand, I would also hold them to a higher standard than civilians (in pretty much the same way you would hold a physician rendering first aid to a higher standard). "I panicked, and just acted on autopilot, and was not even aware that the aggressor had long been incapacitated and the need for self-defense was over" for example is an excuse I would be much more likely to buy from a civilian.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
That is exactly my understanding of what "use their body to block a vehicle's path" means.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So you are saying that by exempting enforcement against undocumented/illegal migrants working in the hotel, gastronomy and agricultural sectors, Trump is in fact ruining the future of the US?
quiet_NaN
3d ago
It is worse that just an authoritarian inclination, Trump is full-on Simulacrum level four. A complete denial of the idea that words are pointers to concept-space and could be used to describe reality. His administration is not lying as such, because lying happens when you communicate at level 2 with the intend to being mistaken for level 1, and only the most gullible 5% would still entertain the possibility that any sound he makes might be related to physical reality.
As Zvi says:
Level 4: Manipulation and Intuition. Occasionally a strategic attempt to manipulate Level 3 dynamics. More centrally and commonly, a combination of intuitive attempts to manipulate associational dynamics and vibes, and adaptation executions that have abandoned any logic and all links to the underlying physical reality.
When he says "they are eating the cats and dogs", that sounds to the untrained ear like an implicit claim that beings called "cats" exist, but it is in fact no such thing. It is just his brain running on autopilot generating plausible sounds for the purpose of getting elected president, without a coherent world view he wants to sell his viewers. Just like a LLM hallucinating citations without even realizing that there is a difference between existing citations and hallucinated ones.
Noem was simply trying to express "bad person". 'Narcoterrorist' would have been an unlikely word to appear outside an Latin American context. 'Antifa terror cell' would have been plausible. 'Domestic terrorist' is a bit bland, but get's the vibe across.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Having seen the videos, I will say the following:
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Shooting her was utterly ineffective at saving the agent's life, because it did not stop her car from going forward.
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It appears that there was more than one agent around. My understanding is that police tactics generally involve teamwork. There is no reason that one agent should be tasked with blocking her escape path, watching out for weapons etc.
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I think that you will be hard-pressed to find a demographic less likely to shoot a person than middle-aged urban white women. Also, if a cop feel that is a threat, they should already be brandishing your weapon before they see the suspect drawing his, they are not a cowboy in the Old West who needs to rely on his ability to draw faster than his opponent so that he can claim self defense.
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Standing in the pathway of a suspect's car to impede their escape is plain stupid. This is the reason why for example the CBP has explicit rules which say "don't do that".
I see the events as a tragic tale of two fuckwits. Fuckwit A decided to play #LaResistance by using her car to impede ICE in an unlawful manner, then panicked when it became apparent that she would get arrested for he trouble, and in her panic recklessly endangered an ICE agent.
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
If one fuckwit kills another while both are engaging in fuckwittery, it is customary to charge the surviving one with manslaughter. If A had killed B by ramming him with her car, we definitely should be charging her (and her defense would try to make the point that only an idiot would stand in the path of a panicking suspect). Here, B's defense will make the valid point that only an idiot will panic and try to recklessly escape when about to be arrested for a petty crime.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The shot seems clearly more justified than the Babbitt shot.
Despite multiple warnings not to proceed,[7] Babbitt attempted to climb through a shattered window beside a barricaded door into the Speaker's Lobby, at which point she was shot in the shoulder[8] by a United States Capitol Police (USCP) officer.
Now, granted, this might be a uncharitable summary, WP is unlikely to be very sympathetic to J6 rioters.
I think that the difference of Babbitt and Good was that it was apparent that the former was in the middle of a breaking and entering mission. She was not climbing through that window because she was panicking and trying to flee, she was clearly looking for trouble.
Sure, it would have been better if a squad of cops in riot gear were in that hallway so they could stop the rioters with less than lethal methods. Or if they had stopped them well outside any federal buildings, for that matter. And if you want to argue that someone intended for that fuckup to happen, I have little to argue against that.
But I thought if anyone would be sympathetic towards a stand your ground approach, it would be Republicans.
I will not argue that Good was innocent. She had likely violated traffic rules with the intent to frustrate ICE's objectives. But from the way she steered her car, as well as her demographic group, it seems very likely that what she was thinking was not "finally a chance to kill one of these Gestapo fucks" but rather "oh my god, they are arresting me, Trump will send me to an El Salvador megaprison, I am about to get disappeared".
Which is delusional when in fact she would have gotten away with a fine and community service, but it is not an intrinsically aggressive delusion -- unlike thinking that you are meant to stop the steal, for example.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
[...] Further, agents should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle's path.
[...] Agents should continue, whenever possible, to avoid placing themselves in positions where they have no alternative to using deadly force.
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The difference between a guy standing in the door and a guy standing in front of a car is that the guy in the door has a good chance of physically stopping a suspect.
Without going all principle of a double effect on you, it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between an action which does something beneficial (physically reducing the risk of a suspect escaping) alongside with something undesirable (increasing the risk of a physical confrontation) and an action which mostly does something undesirable (turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon, which can then be answered in kind).
Some Culture Warrior has dug out rules for the CBP:
[...] Further, agents should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle's path.
[...] Agents should continue, whenever possible, to avoid placing themselves in positions where they have no alternative to using deadly force.
Now, I will grant you that ICE is a sister agency of CBP, so these rules do not apply to them. If they did apply, I think that the case would be rather clear cut: a fuckwit deliberately engineered a situation in which he could use deadly force while claiming self-defense when agency policy told him explicitly not to do that. Not so different from a cop who decides to carry a bottle of nitroglycerin on patrol so he is justified in shooting any teen who assaults him.
That is plausible. Still, what does Israel gain by loudly backing Pahlavi? Presumably, the Ayatollah regime would crack down as hard on "we want to install the Shah" as they do on "we want to install the Shah, who is btw best buddies with Israel".
Plus, there is a general value to not announcing your astroturfing campaigns because it will make people who claim that a campaign is taking place look like delusional paranoids. 'Actually, Mossad was pretty open about their social media campaign against the Mullah regime' is not an argument you would your critics for free.
Then there is the signaling aspect towards both Pahlavi and future allies. "Oops, we leaked this by mistake" is not something anyone is likely to buy from them. They can have great opsec if they want to have it.
One thing which might explain their behavior is that it might be much more expensive to run an operation with good deniability. But in a world where the Trump administration calls Good a 'Domestic Terrorist', e.g. where statements are made for the sake of the most gullible 5% of the population, one would expect that any threadbare denial would be beneficial.
Perhaps the calculation is that the regime is much more likely to kill its opponents if they believe they are Mossad agents. Opposing the Ayatollah will probably earn you a long prison sentence, but being paid by Mossad will reliably get you executed. So telegraphing "btw, the protests are our doing and all the protesters are our agents", they are egging on the regime to kill them in large numbers, which will in turn force Trump to act, as you observed.
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