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Tehran does not have the capabilities to launch a serious war against Israel. They wouldn't get an army to Baghdad, and their airforce would be lucky to get 50% of any attempted strike further than that as well.
Like their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, their entire goal is to lose spectacularly and hope American and European leftists get extra mad at Israel for being competent at warfare.
Their strategy is simple. Israel has the non ultra orthodox population of Wisconsin and the area of El Salvador. It is a tiny country with abysmal natural resources that is deeply fractured. Israel needs to be kept in a permanent state of crisis as this will effectively make the country infeasible. Israel is going to be in a permanent state of chaos.
Europe has nothing to gain by Israel creating another refugee crisis. The support for Israel is low in Europe.
Isreal is a country of neurotic people with abysmal school results. They aren't competent at war, they are just exceptionally brutal while fighting people who barely have weapons.
I am curious: who would you consider as competent at war?
Based on his other responses in the thread I’m guessing he thinks the Wermarcht was pretty competent.
What is kind of hilarious, because while they had some part of brilliance overall performance was bad. Unless you care primarily about murdering Jews.
Hmm, maybe it is actual the most important metric for functor? That would explain why he claims that IDF is not competent at war.
Let’s avoid casting aspersions. You may be correct, but it’s not really constructive.
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Israeli IQ scores are not normally distributed on a country-wide level due to ethnic diversity, so I wouldn't index on their pisa scores much.
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I wouldn't index on PISA scores too much.
National curriculums and latent interest in PISA scores play a large role. East/South Asian curriculum is STEM focused. By age 15, Asians are spending 10+hr/day studying for their standardized tests (Gaokao, Jee, Suneung ). In comparison, western students seem to be chilling. Even rigorous schools focus on students' ability to do projects and be well rounded. Also some countries care a lot about the day of the test (East Asia, some parts of Europe) and it is practically unknown in other countries.
Lastly, it can be gamed easily. PISA mostly samples from major cities. Due to the nature of the Hukuo system, urban China has a disproportionately high achieving population.
The scores are directionally correct and the quartiles won't change even after accounting for gamification. But a country's true rank can easily be off by a good 15 ranks in either direction.
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Care to explain?
Jews are famously neurotic and their school math scores are just above Turkey's in the pisa ranking.
Interesting argument. Let's see if it bears relation to reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_Nobel_laureates#Laureates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Turkish_Nobel_laureates
Keep in mind turkey has 10x the population.
Hmm, maybe there's more to the story.
Also, note how smoothly criticism of Israel has become criticism of Jews instead.
In every other situation that'd be true, but saying "Israel is a country of Jews" is hardly antisemitism, more tautology.
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I always try and avoid doing this myself, and I think that the argument here is transparently bad from a HBD perspective (those are the IQ results I'd expect from a high IQ ashkenazim population coexisting with lower average IQ sephardim and mizrahim) but I don't think you're really making much of a point here. Israel very proudly advertises itself as The Jewish State, For Jews, By Jews and frequently claims that criticism of Israel is criticism of Jews and their right to exist. It might be a very smooth transition from criticising Israel to criticising jews, but the lubrication here was actually supplied by the Israelis themselves.
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Israeli Jews aren’t like American Jews.
You’re talking about a self selected group of people who were the most martial Jews in the world in the years before its founding and most of the Jews that joined them afterwards were mostly pulled from the middle east and North Africa.
And it keeps happening. Every year a small amount of even more self selected Jews leave the countries of their birth to go live in Israel. Making Aliyah is like all that homesteading LARP you see on the DR but even more hardcore.
They are largely middle eastern jews. In other words, lower IQ than eastern European jews. A nation of bazaar hagglers isn't really that martial. Israel performs abysmally in international sport for a reason. They aren't a physical people.
Same energy.
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I have no idea how you can analyze this conflict and not see immense Israeli competence. The pager attack, the elimination of all Hezbollah's top leaders, the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, these are all impressive results.
IMO, Israel has by far the most competent military and secret service of any country. The United States? We can't even successfully fight the Houthis in the Red Sea. China? They haven't fought a war in decades and were last seen brawling against India with melee weapons. Russia? Don't make me laugh. Europe? Competent fighters but hamstrung by effete leadership.
This is just... bizarre. This isn't a math test, this is war.
I mean just yesterday former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the head of Iranian counterintelligence was found in 2021 to be a Mossad double agent (alongside about 20 others in the unit). The head of counterintelligence! Pardon my swearing, but the one guy whose job it was to find spies was a fucking spy himself! Assuming it's true, and I don't see why it wouldn't be as it's massively shameful for Iranians to admit it, it's an absurd level of superiority and dominance Israel is showing. Israeli intelligence is so ahead of them that Iranians were unable to meaningfully vet that ONE guy at the top of the pyramid.
US had something similar happen two decades ago: Ana Montes, the senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) responsible for Cuba (nicknamed "Queen of Cuba") turned out to spy for Cuba throughout her entire career at the DIA.
This situation isn't as ironic as it sounds. Cuba recruited Montes back when she was a college student, and persuaded her to go into the career that would be of most benefit. I am sure there were others, but this one happened to be the one that succeeded.
I'd bet the success rate is higher than you think, because the Cubans can feed her accurate or seemingly accurate Scoops about Cuba.
An intelligence analyst isn't that different from a beat reporter. They're examining a pile of information from different sources and trying to write a report guessing at the truth.
So much like a Yankees blogger secretly handpicked by Brian Cashman could quickly rise to the top by "correctly" predicting roster moves, a Cuban intelligence analyst working for Cuba can repeatedly guess meaningless facts correctly, showing brilliance in intuitions from limited data because she already knows the answers.
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Didn't the same thing happen with the head of British counterintelligence being a Soviet double agent? And look how that turned out.
Yes, and Soviet human intelligence was the best there was. The west kept up by dominating in turn on signal intelligence.
Israel is dominating its opponents on both.
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An aside, and I don't mean to pick on you, but I'd like to kill the trend of relying on a a single historical anecdote when making an argument.
The two biggest fallacies I see are this:
Chamberlain appeased Hitler in 1938 therefore all appeasement is bad.
Prohibition in the United States led to more crime therefore all drugs must be legalized
There are huge differences between Israel today and the Soviet Union then. Yes, the Soviet Union's secret service was elite, just like Israel's. So why did the West win despite an inferior secret service? It's simple, Russians willingly defected to the West and then just gave us all their secrets.
To make the parallel work, we'd have to see Israelis defecting to Iran or other Muslim countries. Since this isn't happening, I just don't think the analogy works.
My point is just that I don't think intelligence and counterintelligence are all they're cracked up to be. The Soviets won the intelligence war, but their little victory was swept away by the uncaring maelstrom of socioeconomic forces, along with their country and their ideology. They should have spent less on guns and more on butter.
Israel is far and away the wealthiest country in the region that earned it(Dubai did not). It's unclear what socioeconomic forces are going to get them got.
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Yeah, I heard that too. The Mossad is scary good. I'll bet that they have something to do with the recent helicopter crashes as well. If not, Iran could be forgiven for thinking so. I doubt Khameini will be hopping into any choppers for the next while.
Further speculation: Iran's nuclear program is riddled with Israeli spies and key elements of its supply chain are tainted. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an "accidental" nuclear explosion in Iran some time in the next 10 years, assuming they can even get that far.
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They fought a small town that doesn't have any weapons and still haven't really been able to win in a year. The only thing they manage to do is get weapons as welfare checks and blast large numbers of civilians.
And they have a population that is physically and academically weak.
While Israeli badassery is overstated, 'physically and mentally weak' is just not true. Israel's military is up to first world snuff and functions like it.
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Physically and academically weak? What on earth are you talking about?
Are you imagining like woody Allen in combat boots, kvetching about the quality of the food in the mess hall? Your mental image of the average Israeli is a bit off.
An IDF soldier can go toe to toe with just about any soldier in the world except the Americans and maybe the British on a good day. They’ve been actively waging war for large portions of the last fifty years and are an actual developed country with a martial tradition that is as hardcore as any of the advanced war fighting nations.
I’m having a hard time explaining this level of copium outside of a dose of anti-semitism that could kill a horse and which subsequently leaves the taker mentally retarded.
Where is the evidence that the Americans or the British are particularly effective soldiers? They haven't fought a war that didn't amount to clicking targets on a screen in a context of absolute air superiority for over half a century. In a 1v1 setting like paintball with real guns, I'd bet on the average Russian, Ukrainian or even North Korean (assuming they get to eat full meals for a month prior) soldier, and, yes, of course on an average Israeli one, over the average American.
Time on task.
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Frankly if a country gets sneak-attacked twice on the same religious holiday within living memory they have to give up the mantle of super high-IQ warrior nation. You would've thought that after Yom Kippur the Israelis would've learnt something but apparently not!
This is a nuclear level cope, I have a hard time taking this seriously. Sneak attacks work, that’s why people use them.
If Israel had even close to population parity in any of those wars some of the nations that had waged war against them in the past likely wouldn’t even exist today.
How hard is it to keep up military readiness even on a religious holiday? This does not happen to proper armies, they don't lower their guard in predictable annual patterns.
The Israelis have been fighting this war in frankly amateurish ways. They keep clustering up in ways that would get them massacred on a real battlefield in Ukraine - fortunately for them their opponents don't have much in the way of artillery or heavy equipment. Israeli urban combat performance has been pretty poor, they've failed to take and hold ground. They go on these glorified chevauchees into Gaza and Hamas just sweeps back in once they leave. There doesn't seem to be any real plan for victory, only (impressive) tactical ploys like the pager trick.
If the US weren't constantly bailing them out with weapons shipments, diplomatic and air cover they would be in a very unpleasant position.
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Are we talking about the Gaza Strip?
Yes, it is abolutely tiny and they haven't been able to properly take it in a year despite exceptional brutality.
Gaza is not a small town, it's a city. It has a higher population than Phoenix, AZ.
I don't think your point is entirely well-formed. This isn't a game of capture the flag, it isn't enough to just "take" Gaza. They're looking for insurgents who are hiding among the general population. It's naturally time-consuming. They could just bomb all 2.1 million civilians into smithereens in about a week, but if they did I doubt that would satisfy either you or the American government.
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They are barely fighting that war. Again, they have to take into account the opinion of American leftists who view military competency as evil and think hiding rocket launchers in hospitals and preschools are legitimate tactics.
They are commiting war crimes on a regular basis. They have fought with exceptional brutality.
They also have to deal with people who are sick of AIPAC influencing the US, Europeans who don't want Ben Gvir to move the population of Gaza to Europe and those who dislike Israel when they are ethnically cleansing christians.
Specify the war crimes. I am unaware of any Israeli strikes that were executed without reasonable suspicion of combatants or assets being in the area.
The population of Gaza should obviously stay in Gaza and be annexed by Egypt. This is the common sense solution. The Egyptians will then execute a repression of the population dozens of times harsher, but without people complaining about it in the US/Europe.
All of the middle east, minus Israel has already ethnically cleansed their Christians. I am unaware of credible accusations of such in Israeli territory.
I think the argument that Israel’s offer to the Maronites being rejected by the Maronites constitutes ethnic cleansing of Lebanon’s Christians.
I find your articulation of the situation a bit confusing. Are you saying Israel ethnically cleansed Christians in Lebanon?
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War crimes, yes. Deliberately attacking humanitarian relief convoys, yes. Cruelly doing their utmost to starve the Gazans to death while still maintaining some level of deniability, also unfortunately yes. But given the relatively low fatality rate, can you really say that the actual fighting has been all that brutal?
I’m no fan of Israel’s behavior, but let’s be clear about what heinous actions they are and aren’t committing.
A bunch of inaccurate statements. No war crimes , no DELIBERATE attack of relief convoys , and nobody is starving. Absolute hamas propaganda by you.
Israelis were literally protesting for rapists in their military to be freed. There was a televised scene from the Israeli cabinet where somebody asked 'how is it appropriate that we are shoving metal rods up the anus of prisoners' and this other guy shouts 'they're Hamas, we can do anything we like to them'.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
Members of their cabinet are practically shouting 'I love war crimes' and enjoy a significant following amidst the public but a good chunk of the media is persisting with the whole 'most moral army' routine, it's laughable.
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I would consider killing uninvolved civilians to be a war crime, and I believe that triple tapping a convoy is pretty deliberate. As for starvation, I defer to the humanitarian organizations and foreign governments that have been involved in relief efforts, who almost unanimously agree that Gaza is on the brink of famine.
Edit: Oh, and as to the last point, let’s not forget that at least one member of the Israeli government has gone on record that it is “just and moral” to starve the entire Gazan population until Israeli demands are met.
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As I was saying. An iranian bot
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That is the craziest and most nonsensical thing I have heard in a long time. Are you an Iranian bot or something? Maybe you can read up on some history.
While @functor's arguments are not, shall we say, well-formed, it's okay to point out motivated reasoning (in his case, it's actually a seething hatred of Jews - he's been very explicit about this), but not to accuse people of being "bots" or agents of some other power.
I assume it's fine to report a spotted bot (e.g. "As a large language model, I can't...") as "bot", as long as it's only in the report function rather than a public accusation?
We would prefer such accusations be made in reports rather than in public, though strictly speaking it's not against the rules to say "This looks like it was written by ChatGPT." Note that we won't necessarily mod someone for using an LLM, depending on the context and how certain we are that it was written by an LLM. We don't want people spamming the board with bot text. We also don't want people spamming the board with accusations of being a bot. Nor do we want to waste our effort judging whether someone used a bot.
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You keep saying "just keep harassing Israel and they'll crumble any second now", but that looks more like wishful thinking than anything. How does this square with the recently discussed observation that Israel is currently the second happiest country among the youth and 18th among the old, 5th averaged? They're up there with European countries where nothing is happening.
My guess is that winning a war actually increases happiness. Many people who lived through WWII in the US and UK report it as the best time of their lives.
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