quiet_NaN
11hr ago
Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to be non-cis
I would imagine that there is a correlation with r=1 between the two. SCNR.
I know you meant "victim of CSA and non-cis", which would be weird. But then again, quite a few things could are both weird and true. Generally, everything is correlated with everything else, mostly through boring confounders (perhaps the size of the town one grew up, or absent parents could be a risk factor for either).
I mean, it is also possible that child abusers in aggregate have some preference for victims which are less gendered than their peers, and that being less gendered as a kid also makes one less likely to be cis. But I don't think that is a big effect either.
...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Personally, I don't think it is worth worrying about very much. There is a sure-fire way not to have trans kids, and that is not to have kids. I see being trans as a minor medical annoyance for the patient, less severe than diabetes and a bit more severe than Hashimoto. I mean, if we had total control through magical genetics, deliberately making someone trans would be a bit of an asshole move -- like using CRISPR to give someone color blindness so that they can continue to carry on the legacy of color-blind people or some bullshit.
But of all the medical conditions a kid could have (and which might be avoided through embryo selection to some degree), being trans does not feel like a very big deal. (Of course, I say that as one who is happily cis-by-default. OTOH, I have been on antidepressants for more than a decade and would probably trade them for hormones if some fairy offered me the deal.)
Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.
Yes, but it is also not meant to be productive, it is performative, signaling. You might as well try to raise non-alcoholic kids by pretending that booze does not exist. Or try to raise abstinent kids by not teaching them about sex, which commonly results in teen pregnancies.
Unless you ban kids who are openly non-cis from schools (which would be problematic), kids are going to get exposed to other kids who decide that they are trans. Of course, talking about how brave they are will lead to more kids deciding that they are trans. A better approach might be to offer them your condolences for them not having the chromosome set they would like to have, use their preferred name and continue with the lesson plan.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better.
I would wager a guess that this includes the Trump administration.
For the most part, war is not 5d chess, where apparent blunders can be actually brilliant strategy.
I doubt that Hegseth and Trump were rubbing their hands when Iran closed the Strait. "So they have fallen into our trap, just as predicted. Now let's do press conferences where we look like fools to foster their beliefs that their strategy is working. They will never realize that we have learned of a Babylonian prophecy that whoever closes the Strait will have their country devoured by the Elder Gods after a fortnight."
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Which is actually the right way to wage war.
If it achieves your objectives, very much so. The problem is that so far it does not seem to do that.
they don't have a single trick up their sleeve so far
Their trick is to close the Strait. So far, they are succeeding with that. If they can keep it up, I think that Trump will run out of popular support before the IRGC runs out of leaders.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
They pay Hamas, which is very much pure evil, along with Hezbollah and the Houtis.
However, the original claim was that
Iran has declared war on the west without declaring war on the west since I’ve been alive.
If Hamas has the priority of waging war against the West in general, they are doing a piss-poor job of it. And we know that they can conduct complex operations when the goal is to kill Jews. It is reasonable to conclude that their mission is to destroy Israel, not the broader West.
Al-Qaida had some modest success killing Westerners, and a tremendous success is goading the US into costly wars which ended in defeat.
If Iran was funding a Shi'ite equivalent, then there would be some substance to the claim that they have 'declared war without declaring war' against the West. But simply calling the US the Great Satan is not declaring war against the West.
This is what I tried to point out with my original comment which was criticized by @Shakes. I concede that there are non-terrorist avenues which might be called war in hyperbole. However, it is not feasible for me to iterate through all the woes of Western society and point out that Iran did not craft COVID, it did not cause the Ukraine war, it did had little if anything to do with the opioid and obesity crisis, is below the US, China and Russia in per-capita CO2 emissions, does not cause modern Western dating dynamics, had no hand in crafting the later seasons of GoT and so on.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
So Brett Devereaux has also published his opinion on Trump's Iranian adventure. It will come to the surprise of exactly nobody that he is not a fan.
(Lots of quotations, scroll down to the bottom for a few thoughts on Israel's strategy.)
He starts by pointing out that Iran is significantly larger than Iraq in both population and area, which is true but not very original. Then he continues:
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. [...] But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. [...]
The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. [...]
Of course, before Trump attacked the oil was flowing just fine.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. [...]
The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from [fossil fuels], whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
It is, as Clausewitz might say, a difference in will.
He then goes on to describe Trump's plan, e.g. Venezuela 2.0:
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant [...] By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States
And why it would not work:
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime
If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
He goes back to the origin of the war:
Administration officials [...] have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.
And why would Iran believe such a thing?
Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. [...] But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
[The] Trump administration created a situation where [...] Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
He then goes on to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, which allows Iran to throw a spanner into the machine of the global economy by blocking oil tankers.
once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime [...] have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy [...]
“If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
He then describes this as a trap situation, where neither side can deescalate for domestic political reasons, and points out that neither side has much hope to secure their objectives through military means. Iran can not stop the US from bombing them, and the US will probably not be able to secure the Strait against Iranian attacks.
He discusses escorts and why he does not find them feasible (too many ships, Strait too long)
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf
He then discusses the other US strategic interest, dismantling the Iranian nuclear program:
Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
On Iran's strategic objectives:
This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.”
There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.
As a historian, he draws an analogy to WW1:
Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
He again hammers on the lack of success at achieving any strategic objectives:
it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
Something which was new to me he mentions in passing is that the Strait is also a significant source of fertilizer, and a lack of fertilizer might increase food prices which will lead to all sorts of bad things in poor countries. According to him, this was a major source of the Arab spring protests and the Syrian civil war, for example.
Having argued persuasively that this war was a terrible decision on part of the US, he then considers the position of Israel.
Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – [caveat antisemitism] – is now openly discussed in both parties. [...] more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time [...]
And how Israel would fare without the backing of the US:
On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s.
Economics:
Economic coercion is equally dangerous [...] [T]he USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. [...] A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory.
He finishes by pointing out that wars are not zero-sum:
Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
While Bret is certainly seen as a woke academic in these parts, I find his text not particularly dripping in SJ. Mostly it is a few caveats (yes, everybody is important but we here we are talking about being strategically important; antisemitism bad). He certainly does not strike me as a radical pacifist who wants to abolish the US military.
One of the less pressing issues of the Iran war is that it is hard to say anything insightful about it. Yes, it was an immense strategic blunder, but that has been noticed by one or two other persons by now.
I think that Bret's prediction that the US-Israeli relationship might turn sour is perhaps a bit optimistic (even if that is not the word he would use). I do not want to go "the evil Joos control everything", we have other posters for that, but AIPAC has a rather good grasp on Congress and it seems like a lot of media (including new media like TikTok) is in the hands of Israel supporters.
This does not mean that Nethanyahu coaxing the US into fighting Iran is in Israel's long term interests, though. For example, if Iran establishes that bombing them is a presidency-ending mistake, even a pro-Israel president might be reluctant to walk in Trump's footsteps. The gulf monarchies who bore the brunt of Iranian attacks will probably not be too happy about the whole situation either, and might come to reconsider the tradeoffs of US airbases, which would limit the ability of the US to project force, at the behest of Israel or otherwise. And some European countries might decide to push for economic sanctions against Israel eventually.
I am also wondering if Israel might not lose support among the liberal Jews in the diaspora, given that they are drifting to the right and are closely allied with MAGA in the US. I mean, there are probably some billionaires who are true believers in Greater Israel, but I imagine that the perhaps lukewarm "it is a good thing that my ethnic group has a state where they are safe from further persecution" support of many Askhenazi professionals might be different in kind to the billionaires'. In the last decade or so, I imagine that things have changed as Israel drifted to the right. After all, the die-hard believers in Zionist expansion likely immigrated to Israel to settle in the West Bank, and an Israel defined by the religious crazies murdering each other will have little appeal to the liberals.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Iran has declared war on the west without declaring war on the west since I’ve been alive.
This. Remember 9/11, London, Madrid.
Oh, my mistake. Turns out that most of the terror attacks on western countries are actually Sunni attacks, not Shi'ite.
I do not like the Iranian regime, but if their 1985 bombings in Paris qualify as "continuous state of war", then we might as well claim that Saudi Arabia pursues a relentless war of extermination against the West given 9/11 etc.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If you think American aggression against Iran is unjustified you have absorbed far too much third world propaganda. Do you think it would be good if Iran got nuclear weapons too?
Israel and the US have long tried to kick that can down the road (sometimes brilliantly bloodless like with Stuxnet, more often through bombing and murder), but don't tell me that killing their supreme leader was about preventing them from gaining nukes.
I would prefer if Iran did not get nukes, but even if Trump's plan (add scare quotes to taste) prevented this, it is entirely possible that the price for it is too high. For one thing, even with nukes Iran is not a threat to North America any more than North Korea is.
Of course, if past bombings gave good reasons why Iran would want nuclear deterrence, the present war gives them excellent reasons.
Sure, perhaps their plan is to mutually annihilate Iran and Israel the minute they have enough nukes, but with Nethanyahu in charge I simply find myself not caring much. If the religious crazies really want to murder each other, that is not sufficient reason to drag civilized countries into it preemptively.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
But I’m filled with a deep sense of disquiet and defeat.
It is beginning to look like the previous US presidents who for the most part did not bomb Iran were not just bleeding heart pacifists but had sound strategic reasons not to bomb them, and that attacking Iran was a mistake.
There is no quickload button in chess or international politics. If you make a mistake, you will find yourself in a worse situation than before.
Some strategic blunders come from noble motivations. For example, a (debatable sized) part of the motivation for the US-Afghanistan war was that the Taliban are terrible and nobody should be forced to live under their regime.
With Trump, there is not even a pretense of noble motivations. He was pretty open that the Venezuelan adventure was simply about securing their oil for the US, otherwise he does not give a fuck about who is in charge over there. Iran was just a desperate gamble to win the mid-terms.
Does the Iranian regime deserve to win this conflict? Fuck no.
But the US most certainly deserves to lose. Unlike Iran, their population had the luxury to elect the one who calls the shots. They picked Donald Trump out of all people, who turned out not to be a good steward of the American hegemony.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I stand corrected.
This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.
Agreed.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I have to say that I have some sympathy for the Clinton administration position on land mines, which is that the real problem is not anti-personnel vs anti-vehicle but persistent vs short-lived, and that the US will not use persistent mines.
Incidentally, this is why I find accusations US does not care about international law, within the context of Iran War, false.
There are different norms in international law. I do think it is fair to say that the US is not deliberately targeting the civilian population. Nor are they using perfidy against Iranians, nor shooting with JHPs. (Though we could argue if the institutional failure around the school bombing amounts to what one could call a depraved heart war crime.)
But the understanding of the rule-based international order is very much that you do not start a war for a bad reason, or no reason at all, which is where the "crime against peace" comes in. Typically, leaders try to find at least a flimsy pretense. For Iran, Trump is not even trying to sell a narrative like GWB was.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Goddamnit, these people have no business discussing the laws of my country.
That is a new low. I mean, even our resident antisemites will rarely dismiss an argument outright for being made by a Jew. I mean, I am a Kraut and I still reserve the right to have opinions on every legal system between the US constitution and Sharia law.
Of course, denying that an Indian-origin American can be a "real" US citizen makes this extra charming. If you feel this way about random bloggers, I can only imagine how you felt about Trump appointing Kash Patel to head the FBI.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I agree with your assessment. Of course, what the constitution says is what the SCOTUS says it says. And while I do not like the current SCOTUS much, I do not expect them to rule that black is white so that Trump gets his wish.
We might as well discuss if a hypothetical liberal-leaning SCOTUS might set aside centuries of jurisprudence and decide that 2A only applies to flintlock weapons.
If SJ wants to get rid of guns or MAGA wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, the process is the same for either: repeal the amendment. I doubt either will manage that.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
While I do not know if this is what they did, an obvious solution would be to mine the far side of the Strait and keep open a lane close to their coast. Allied tankers could still use that, but enemy tankers would be under threat from short-range missiles. From the WP map, it seems like the Strait is deep enough for tankers perhaps 15km from the Iranian mainland. There is a difference between coming within 50km of Iranian mainland at the closest and having a mine-enforced lane running for 100km closely to the Iranian coast.
While sea mines are not land mines, they are both indiscriminate area denial weapons that have significant risks of civilian casualties that can last long after the end of the conflict that caused their emplacement.
This sounds like "both beating and maiming are widely considered unacceptable ways of disciplining children" -- one seems clearly a hell of a lot worse than the other.
The humanitarian problem of land mines is mostly anti-personnel mines, which is why the Ottawa Treaty bans them specifically. (Not that the US or Israel or Iran would care. Though the US is at least committed to only using mines which would become inert after a while. Or at least it was before Trump took over.) They are dirt cheap -- so you can spread them widely -- and more than enough to kill or maim kids playing in the wood.
Anti-vehicular mines can still end up blowing up school busses, but are a lesser problem because their higher costs makes it less likely that parties will distribute tens of thousands per square kilometer. I think typically you would target roadways and not place them randomly in the forest on the off chance that a tank wants to drive through between these two trees.
Sea mines are a different story again. Iran wants to deny oil tankers, so they need to be big enough to cause catastrophic hull failures. These tankers have drafts upwards of ten meters, so there is not really a point to anchor them too close to the surface.
And of course Iran also has the tech to make them smart (and become inert after a period, for example), but I don't know if they bothered.
Personally, if I were crewing an oil tanker, I would rather hit a mine than get hit by a missile. After all, there is no point to make the mine so big that it will sink the tanker in seconds. I imagine that typically, you hit the mine, take water, decide that your ship is lost and head for the lifeboat. A missile might kill you before you even know what is happening.
Even if Iran does use dump mines, I imagine the civilian QALY costs will mostly stem from the secondary effect of oil pollution from sinking tankers, though it might kill a few fishers (if there is anything to fish in the Straits). Seems still less troublesome than the attacks on oil infrastructure committed by both sides.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If we accept that countries that host US soldiers are fair targets
I would say that allowing your allies to stage air attacks from your country is as good as a declaration of war.
If Mexico's federal government allowed Iranian drones to strike US cities, the US would likewise not buy their claims of neutrality.
Not that it matters, because neither side cares very much about international law.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
An interesting question would be how much of your self is stored just in the neurons themselves, as opposed to particular electrical impulses which travel on them. For example, anything in short-term memory can obviously not be stored on neuron connections -- if you spot a tiger and within 100ms think the "oh shit, a tiger", then that is not enough time to form a new synapse between "stuff in my vicinity" and "tiger".
Naturally, people won't care about their short term memory specifically, but is seems plausible that larger parts of our selves are just the signals on the hardware. Consider LLM partners created by users. They do not exist as weights (which might be vaguely analogous to synaptic connections in a meatbrain). They are entirely an LLM dealing with a few kilobytes of prompt in its context window.
And of course there is a difference between having the graph of a neural net and actually getting the weights. Which depend on stuff which effects neurotransmitters, such as drugs. After all, it would be fair to say that people display a different personality when drunk than when sober. Imagine waking up from cryodeath into a post-singularity world and no longer being depressed because the conservation method did not conserve neurotransmitter information. The horror!
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I mean I don’t think he’s going to TACO there.
Update: he did chicken out again. Mimimi, productive talks, mimimi, five days extension. Nobody has reported that Iran opened the Straights, the deadline is past, so his threat was clearly not serious. Which is a good thing for the world.
My estimate is that the productive talks have mostly been with gulf monarchies. "Wise king Donald, are you enjoying the plane we gifted you? Please have mercy on us and do not escalate in Iran, lest we lose our infrastructure and can not keep sending you gifts."
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I had firm belief that Ukraine would sue for peace after they weathered the shock of the initial attack by Russia. But it turns out you can just ignore the obvious disaster on the horizon and condemn hundreds of thousands of men to their useless deaths.
The problem with your preferred strategy, which I might paraphrase as "surrender immediately when it becomes obvious that you will lose in the long run" is that it is not a dominant strategy. If your medieval city surrenders to every approaching army which could lay siege to it, then expect every general to sack your city at every opportunity he gets at no cost to his army.
I would argue that Ukraine has had a tremendous success in one key military objective, and that is to inflict costs on their enemy. Now, this does not help them in this timeline (though it does help other countries at the risk of Russian aggression), at least not while the war is going on. However, if they had not had that pre-commitment, if instead it had been common knowledge that Ukraine's plan for a Russian invasion was unconditional surrender, then they would have been annexed by a single Russian tank in 2014.
By contrast, Venezuela might as well have pinned a sign "please kick us and we give you oil" to its back. I am clinging to some slim hopes that they will somehow manage to extract costs from the US for their aggression, ideally timed to mess up the mid-terms (not that Trump needs more help with that), but otherwise they will be a US colony for the foreseeable future, with every US president considering a quick military strike followed by even more lopsided conditions from now on. At least there are no other superpowers in the Atlantic to take their turn with them.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Really should have just declared victory after week 1, and then if Iran kept retaliating and closing Hormuz it would be Iran's belligerence and not Trump's bellicosity.
It does not work like that. Bin Laden could not have declared victory after 9/11 and expected the US to consider the conflict over. From the perspective of the Iranian regime, the killing of the Ayatollah is alike to what 9/11 was for the Americans, something which has to be answered.
And of course, merely closing your national waters (though not all of the straight is Iranian, so that might not be enough to matter) to innocent passage would be a very low form of aggression, unlike bombing a head of state, for example.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The big red button is generally not labeled "I win".
"They nuked us, so we surrendered" might be a plotline which was swallowed by the Imperial Japanese forces (who had lost a conventional war in any case). "The Great Satan decided to martyr 20k of our citizens, so rather than face further losses, we decided to pledge allegiance to them" is not something the Iranian theocracy could sell to the grunts in the IRGC.
Few people doubt that Putin has nukes, and few people think that NATO would start WW3 if Putin nuked Ukraine. Yet Putin has fought years of a very frustrating conventional war against them. If you are right, he is stupid to do that, he should just nuke them a bit and watch them surrender. Personally, I do not think that he was simply to stupid to consider nukes, but rather that he correctly concluded that they would not secure his objective.
Of course, even if Iran after a nuke turned into Venezuela, this would establish a precedent. At the moment, few middling military powers pursue nukes because they do not significantly improve their security situation. If nuclear powers use their nukes offensively to miraculously force surrenders, then that changes. After all, you do not need to win a pissing contest against the US to make nuking you unappealing. It is enough to be able to kill enough Americans so that whoever attacked you will lose the next election.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
oil takes 3 months from well to tank so any shortages and price rises are artificial right now.
"Artificial" seems a strange word for a market. Typically, economists model market actors as rational. But rational people have a conception of the future, and how events in the present -- like an oil tanker stuck due to Iran blocking Hormuz -- will influence prices in the future.
Basically, if you own a depot full of crude and anticipate that supply will be tight in the future, you might decide to hold onto your oil -- unless you are offered a higher price than usual.
Now it is certainly debatable if markets are prone to irrational behavior, but a model of the world where the oil price does not move for three months until the tanker fails to arrive strikes me as naive in the extreme.
With Qatar gone Europe will import more LNG from the states.
Qatar is a US ally. Throwing them under the bus is not the typical behavior of the US, and will severely change the tradeoffs of a US alliance.
And if Europe is left without oil - it is their own fault for antagonizing Russia.
This is actually not how the chain of causality went. When Putin invaded Ukraine, both the US and EU agreed that Europe should try to avoid buying fossil fuel from Russia to limit the cash flow for Putin's war. For the most part, we did. Now Trump became profoundly disinterested in Ukraine when he finally noticed that it was not an easy Nobel for him.
If the US plays "fuck everyone else as long as our needs are met", others will too. For Europe, Ukraine is a lot more relevant than Iran having nukes. Personally, I would just make a deal with Iran to keep the Straight open for ships to Europe in exchange for gas centrifuges. It would be the same "fuck everyone else" attitude you display. Why should we care about US interests in the ME if the US is unwilling to care about anyone's interests there?
quiet_NaN
7d ago
What I don't get is: what is the purpose of having a judge sign the warrant if you do not name and shame judges for signing a bad warrant? If a warrant bears a judge's signature, then the buck stopped with them, and in the default case they deserve blame for it.
Of course, they could pass the blame by pointing out that given the evidence in the warrant application, it seemed justified. But then they need to throw someone else under the bus. "Actually, we had a witness who had made a sworn statement about kidnapping victims in a basement dungeon, and he was just found guilty of perjury and got a year of prison for that" would in fact absolve the other actors of most blame. Bonus points if they go after a cop for making a false sworn statement.
But if they say "Oopsy daisy, sometimes a warrant I sign is just bad, shit happens, nobody is really to blame for that" then you might as well replace them with a rock saying 'the warrant is probably fine'.
I mean, there are probably oops cases -- if a guy is caught on camera with a blood-dripping roll of carpet, that might justify a warrant for suspicion of murder, and if it later turns out that he merely buried his dog killed in a traffic accident then you say oops and move on. But in that case it would be easy enough to point out that of the last ten cases of blood-dripping carpet rolls, eight turned out to be homicides, and that it is better to raid one innocent than to let four murderers go free.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
It's good to destroy evil and it's evil to destroy good.
This is an overly simplistic morality, the real world does not work like forgotten realms, where you have always chaotic evil races which can be slaughtered by good characters as an act of faith.
At best, you get ingroup moralities, where you support your country for the same reasons that a German in the 30s might support the Nazis.
A more universalist morality would start by recognizing that there is no group of school girls -- not American, not Israeli, not Iranian or Gazan or German or British or whatever who are intrinsically evil and thus deserve to be killed by air raids.
The key insight is that most people you are killing with bombs are actually closer to the school girls than to war criminals.
Take Nazi Germany, which established a new standard for evilness. In the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials, a few dozen people were found to have committed acts so irredeemably evil that they deserved death for it. Now, I will be the first to point out that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and perhaps hanging every concentration camp guard as an accessory to mass murder would have been closer to justice. If you also count the Einsatzgruppen and everyone who knowingly enabled the genocides, you might make a case that a decent fraction of the German armed forces deserved death, but I would claim that it is still a minority.
The median German soldier killed by the Allies was not killed because his death intrinsically made the world a better place, quite the opposite. Instead, his death was justified merely instrumentally -- he was part of an army which was preventing the liberation of the death camps, and defeating that army so one could liberate the camps had a higher utility than protecting the lives of the soldiers. (Note that this reasoning does not extend to Harris' morale bombing, though.)
Under a universalist morality, the best you can hope for is not that most of the opponents you kill in a war will deserve to die for their crimes, but merely that killing them is the lesser evil compared to letting their state continue with its crimes.
But for that to be the lesser evil, you actually need a plan to put a stop to their crimes. Soviets killing German soldiers in combat was the lesser evil because the Soviets made a ground offense which enabled them to liberate Auschwitz. By contrast, you could bomb Tehran until you only had a few thousand people left without removing the capability of the surviving IRGC members to slaughter civilian protesters.
Now, I will not claim that killing the Ayatollah or his generals is not intrinsically good. The problem is that for a consequentialist, one evil man getting his just rewards is dwarfed by the indirect effects. If we could turn Iran into a democracy just by murdering the Ayatollah, we would have done so a long time ago. Instead, what Trump accomplished was granting an aging old tyrant martyrdom, while replacing him with a guy whose father, wife and sister were murdered by the US. How is that an improvement?
Well I'm not moving to Iran but you're welcome to if you don't see a difference.
All things being equal, I would prefer not to move to any nuclear armed state, perhaps excepting the UK and France. (Not that this is a unique property of nuclear states -- I would nope most non-nuclear states as well.)
My point is that I am rather indifferent between Iran and say North Korea -- both seem about equally terrible in my opinion. And yet we allow one to have nukes but try to prevent the other from gaining them at large human costs.
Are you of the opinion that Iran is a much worse place than North Korea? Would you trade a 1% chance of having to move to Iran (current war aside) against a 10% chance of having to move to North Korea?
As someone who has recently posted about Israel, I agree with your first and second point.
Regarding your third point, Rabin was a bit before my time, but he seemed like a decent guy. My problem with the present government of Israel can be summed up in that they seem to share Yigal Amir's regard for the Oslo accords and civil conduct.
Oct-7 showed that Hamas was pure evil. If Israel had decided to occupy Gaza and deny them the right to self-determination for a generation or two, I would have been fine with it. Instead, the IDF used bombs to go after Hamas with complete indifference to civilian casualties. Obviously they did not go for an Endloesung.
But apathy to civilian casualties is its own kind of evil, and they certainly had plenty of that. Killing 50 bystanders to get one commander might be acceptable if that immediately ends the conflict (e.g. the commander is Genghis Khan), but the IDF did accept that collateral damage ratios for minor victories which did not change the strategic landscape.
Likewise, we can debate if the IDF used hunger as a weapon in Gaza. I doubt that many Hamas members went hungry, and as you point out if their intent was genocide they did a terrible job of it.
However, I do believe that feeding hungry kids in Gaza -- whose government can not be trusted to do so because they very much prefer them killed by Israel to score propaganda points -- is a collective responsibility of the civilized world. I am sure that some food trucks were smuggling in weapons for Hamas. If the IDF wanted to sift through every pack of flour, I would understand that. But by simply stopping the trucks from entering Gaza altogether, Nethanyahu defected from civilization.
Hamas did not achieve any strategic objectives on Oct-7, nor was that ever their plan. Even if they managed to pull that off a hundred times, they would not make a dent in the Israeli population.
The path to Hamas victory is paved with the corpses of dead Gazan kids killed by the IDF, resulting in the loss of international support and isolation. Nethanyahu's government strode proudly along that path.
And I find Hamas strategy working on myself. I was very willing to stomach some dead kids while the IDF rid the world of Hamas, but what I got was long on the dead kids side and rather short on the wiping out Hamas side.
I would like to think that my attitude to Israel is based on their behavior. If the Troubles had flamed up again in 2023, and Boris Johnson had responded to the IRA killing a thousand protestants by killing 70k Catholics in Northern Ireland through bombs and deprivation, I would likewise stop caring about the fate of the UK as a state. (Obviously I am a utilitarian, so I care about the fates of humans anywhere, but currently I also consider the UK to be a net positive, and would support defending it if it was attacked by vikings or whatever.)
You are right that there are certainly worse regimes than Nethanyahu's in the world, but I would not feel obliged to defend Russia or Iran or Saudi Arabia either if they came under attack.
Nethanyahu's latest attempt to set the ME aflame together with Trump is basically just the icing on the cake at this point.
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