FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
I'm not sure if I'm kidding around. It seems more likely than any of what appear to be the plans for the end of the war by the participants involved, which are some mix of "and then the people rise up" and "and then the Zionist conspiracy collapses" with a dash of ”Jesus Christ returns (and is on my side)."
I'm starting to think this ends with oil royalties being spread around to make it look like everybody got something.
So our argument in favor of sane war planning is that it incorporates an idea our 80 year old president first fixated on 40 years ago, when he had no military experience or advice. Gotcha.
I doubt 1 in 10 of our soldiers would tolerate fighting like the Taliban did, without medivac, without armour, without sophisticated training, without airpower, without all our advanced technology.
Certainly not for Aghanistan.
Sure but at some point, whether it's a week from now or a year from now, ships will try it again en masse, and either Iran will hit one or they won't, and then either the Strait is open or everyone goes back to their corners.
For a while during the Ukraine conflict, Ukraine was still getting royalties on Russian pipelines running through Ukrainian territory.
Imagine a goof-ass future where the United States occupies Iran's export terminals and charges Iran royalties to export oil, while the Gulf states pay bribes to Iran to keep Hormuz open. Everyone hates each other but can't afford a war anymore. Trump gets a nobel peace prize, but whines that it should be called the Donald Strait.
I appreciate your response but I won't be engaging with you on this.
Then don't reply.
There was a plan back in the Kennedy admin to drop leaflets on Cuba warning the men that the presence of nuclear weapons on the island would cause so much radiation that it would make them impotent.
The new Supreme Leader is rumored to have been impotent.
Why do you think that press releases are a reflection of the true plan?
Because that's been the expectation of every American president in wartime basically forever. That the president and his administration would clearly communicate the causes of the war, the motivations behind the actions of the war, the aims of the war. To do otherwise is morally unacceptable to me.
To accept that Trump has a plan but is lying to us about it repeatedly is to accept the status of subject rather than citizen, to be a slave rather than a man. "L'etat? C'est lui!" You seem to draw some line that Trump is lying to the press, he isn't lying to the press, he's lying to us.
I'm not anti-Trump or against regime change in Iran in principle, but I'm not going to "trust the plan." That's un-American.
Because we have 4% unemployment, so every soldier payed to go overseas vacates a job in America, which will then need to increase wages to attract workers, which will then lead to increased bribes to attract soldiers. I suppose in the short term one can outrun the wheel of inflation, but not in the long term.
I'd imagine most oil tanker crewmen are braver men than me, but if they told me I was sailing through there... I'd hop out and swim to shore.
I highly suspect the few ships that have transited are paying bribes in crypto to IRGC grand poobahs. Which might be the ultimate result of the whole thing.
Bribes won't work in a prosperous capitalist economy, you can't just pump money into the demand for young workers without driving the price up prohibitively.
If pure manpower is a concern for the USA, the best route would obviously be the Roman one: we've got millions of able bodied men dying to become American citizens at the border.
The problem for the American military is that the all volunteer army is what makes the army so damn effective. Once you start impressing low human capital into the army, you lose effectiveness in a hurry.
There's some wiggle room when hegseth says that it's not closed, and there's also no oil going through it. At some point ships are going to try it in volume and that's the test, isn't it?
Insurers still won't cover it, but supposedly the federal government is working on backstopping losses to get it moving again.
It's probably the case that in a military conflict shipping could pass through it. What won't go through is ordinary commercial shipping, because it isn't worth it. It's the difference between "Iran can get almost every single ship passing through" and "I'm not risking my oil tanker for no real reason."
The government has been very explicit with stated public war aims and reasons, and has a number of private elements that are easily guessable.
Which time were they extremely clear?
Was it when Rubio said we didn't really want to do this but we had to because the Israelis were doing it either way? Was it when Trump said their nuclear program was completely eliminated a few months ago? Was it when Hegseth said there would be no ground troops involved? Was it when Trump said that the whole thing was pretty much wrapped up last week?
imagine what an Iranian operation would look like if it was planned to take five weeks and we were only halfway into it.
I like this game we're playing where there's definitely a plan that's been clearly communicated, if you ignore half of what POTUS says, a third of what the SecState says, and two thirds of what the SecWar says.
Alternatively, the conflict never really ends and it's gitmo east.
A shattered Iran in civil war would have to be terrible for sea traffic right? I mean there's always going to be one faction shooting at tankers.
Maximally cynically: brave dead Marines coming to grips with the enemy will produce a greater rally round the flag effect than high oil prices and the occasional air accident. The scenario where we bomb Iran and kill 14 copies of Muhammad Al Unpronounceable while Iran blows up oil tankers will produce few of the political benefits of a war; the scenario where Iranians are killing American soldiers will have some purchase with the public.
What's the difference?
Yet detentions are down nationwide. We're not seeing the same tactics used nationwide.
I think when we have posts like this where a poster calls a series of broadly successful politicians uncharismatic and/or stupid, we should make it an expectation that the poster cites some examples of politicians they do think are charismatic. Somebody has to have charisma and intelligence to have reached the top in a cutthroat hierarchical game filled with competitors. They didn't all luck into becoming senators and governors and vice presidential candidates.
This place is feeling like one of those barbershops where every modern athlete sucks and couldn't carry the jockstrap of [guy from when the barber was a kid].
So where does their good reputation come from?
Propaganda. Iran, for all its faults, is a reasonably functional nation with a well educated population. Iran has a similar HDI to countries like Brazil or Mexico. Iran has the ability to put out propaganda about the IRGC, and does so.
That said, there's basically no country that could stop the USA from bombing the piss out of them if the USA wants to. China and Russia could nuke the USA, but it's not clear if they could actually protect their airspace otherwise.
Rather, and I'm going full Philly here, we need to realize that effectiveness for Iran (and for their proxies) is like the movie Rocky. Not the later sequels where Rocky Balboa becomes champion, beats Mr. T, wins the cold war, etc. But the gritty, original, actually good version of Rocky, where the story is just about this big palooka taking on (fake) Muhammed Ali. And he doesn't win. He doesn't even really get close to winning. But he goes the distance. He doesn't get knocked out. He takes it to a decision, he takes it to the closing bell, and at the end of the fight he's beaten all to hell, but the champion has to go to the hospital too. Rocky endures.
If the Iranian regime comes out the other side of this without being removed from power, the regime will spin it as a credibility win because they held together and the United States couldn't dislodge them. So hopefully there is an effective plan in place to dislodge the regime because the alternative is much worse.
How does this explain the increase in protests following the shootings, which were largely reported in the leftist press as "fascist cops are just shooting protestors completely at random," if they thought it was risk free wouldn't they have stayed home after that?
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