red_giant [comrade/them, he/him]

Probably it’s a good time to have 4/5’ths of your navy in dock for repairs so Trump can’t ask you to create scuba diving attractions in Hormuz

The windows file explorer progress bar says we are 68% of the way there

The USA is legally allowed to do this because of a clause in the contract that says “what the fuck you gonna do about it?”

I wish cancel culture was real. Ostracism and exile are a merciful option.

It seems clearly to target Iran but the weird thing is that 10,000 troops is a hopelessly inadequate number.

Seizing islands makes sense but they’re in for a hell of a time.

The only plan that makes sense here, to me, is Trump wants the islands to have leverage in negotiations.

Imagine being sent to war and napping while you’re supposed to be on-call

I read a lot of Roman histories as a kid and these histories often had the most salacious stories about the emperors.

Like, “emperor x was a pedophile who trained young boys to nibble his nuts in the pool.” I think that was Augustus but I don’t exactly recall.

Anyway, at the time I thought these stories were obvious character assassination. The author of the history was writing to please the current emperor which meant trashing the previous dynasty.

Now, given current events, I think these histories were likely true. The rumors probably only captured a fraction of the depravity of the powerful.

Name a paradigm shift in technology that was truly a paradigm shift that wasn’t monetized by porn before being monetized by big enterprise

Harry Potter and the I just woke up and me not being the center of the universe was just a bad dream

Yeah. With air superiority / supremacy it seems like an easy win for US forces to take it.

What’s the next step though? They will starve Iran of oil revenue which will hurt but it doesn’t nearly seem decisive. The economic damage inflicted by the bombing campaign would already be massive so economics don’t seem likely to make Iran kneel.

Is the island an important base for missile strikes to enforce the blockade? It seems Iran could almost as easily enforce the blockade from the mainland.

It seems like an “obvious” next step that is only “obvious” when you’re not thinking about the step necessary after the next. Like, it seems very reactive.

Not many people know this but oil tankers and container ships sometimes just gather for a rave. Once the molly runs out they will start sailing again.

Having a two-party system with both parties being neoliberal and representing business interests

Dunking is a viable alternative to purges given the current material conditions.

Antidunkism is juvenile and reactionary.

If Germany / Europe dropped their Atlanticism, this would actually be the moment for EU industry to recover.

I could see Israel doing that tbh.

It could be Iran fears making too many enemies at once. They don’t want, e.g., India to join a coalition to open the strait.

If you want to pass the strait and get cheap oil, you need to tacitly state your non-alignment with the US. If many countries do this, they’ve done a lot to accelerate the decline of US influence in the Middle East because all those countries are tacitly acknowledge the US is not the top dog.

militarily…

But your honor, Israel is a western nation

So the US response to having its air defense depleted within just a couple of weeks of fighting Iran is…. Build more air defense missiles?

That seems like a losing strategy. If they can’t withstand just a few weeks of combat, then extending that capability to provide protection for months (or years?) of sustained combat seems entirely unachievable.

Surely the correct response would be to eliminate the asymmetry and redesign the military to not rely on critical points of failure that can be targeted.

Eg, in the Ukraine war, Russia responded by changing tactics and using small unit infiltration tactics.

In contrast when presented with the same asymmetry the US response is to try to spend their way out of it. It’s not gonna work. The industrial capacity that implies… the US economy will be building Patriot missiles and nothing else.