> It's possible that they unconsciously believe war is something they bring to others, never something others bring to them
Spot on. As an American who is quite critical of the imperialist dynamic, I still catch myself thinking this way. Like "what if Iran actually attacks something around me?" But it's war, shouldn't one expect that an enemy might attack at any point?! Except, we just don't think of war as something that might have direct repercussions for us personally, which is why most of us vote for chucklefuck leaders who start them so readily.
> The big mistake was underestimating the appetite for rebellion
I'd frame it as the biggest mistake was underestimating the work required to facilitate a successful rebellion - you have to be ready to go to support the people rebelling. Form support networks ahead of time, airdrop supplies, supplement with small but crucial boots on the ground, etc - all things the domain experts of the "deep state" would classically do [0] before it got smashed under the banner of doggie, anti-woke, juche, or whatever the rallying cry is this month. These chuds thought success and praise would just automatically occur by virtue of them having some innate special quality, like every one of their "plans".
[0] note that I'm having to suppress a bit of a gag here writing sympathetically about the military-industrial complex that foments regime change in other countries. but if we're being honest about what it took to pull off the American-exceptionalist thing we've become accustomed to, this is what it took.
It is great that this is happening now. The optimal strategy would have been to do this right before the elections. By making this known so far ahead of time, there is plenty of time for secretaries of state to adjust to postal mail being attacked, and at the very least widely suggest citizens use drop boxes instead of relying on the mail.
If you're in a contested state, worried about election day interference/intimidation from ICE (SS) or the Poor Boys (SA), and really want to mail in your ballot, you could do so and still show up a the polls on election day to make sure they've got you down as already having voted.
A good thing for states to do would be to revamp their systems a little bit such that a person can mail in or dropbox a ballot, but still vote at the polls anyway and have their poll vote counted instead of what they've already mailed in. That would protect against outright tampering.
Had COVID not happened, Trump might not have gone batshit crazy with a vendetta against the entire concept of independent federal agencies. Actively rejecting the advice coming from Fauci et al would seem to be a large part of what sensitized him to the larger pattern rather than just writing each instance off as an interpersonal issue.
(by "Trump" and "him" I mean the person himself plus his symbiotic ecosystem of enablers and followers)
Depending on how you measure, not as bad as the one we had a few terms ago. There was a pandemic, which should have been a unifying event the president just had to straightforwardly lead us through while letting the domain experts at agencies handle the details. But instead he must have thought he was still campaigning or something, and staked out some edgelord position that we should just ignore the public health emergency. Predictably, this caused a lot of societal chaos from people who weren't good at thinking for themselves following nonsensical direction from an authority figure. I'm sure glad that guy was only around for one term. I remember him being a pretty sore loser too.
Did you mean to take that course on human sarcasm?
I can understand how a one or two sentence comment that is wholly sarcastic is readily misinterpreted, ala Poe's Law. But my context should have been pretty clear.
I don't see how talking about abject failures of leadership and policy response in the first term is "outdated" when the second term is essentially a doubling down on these derelictions of duty.
Are we just supposed to forget those past failures in favor of focusing on the current catastrophe? What tariff tantrum? What Greenland treachery? Don't you know we've always been at war with Iran?
Idk. That loser still had guardrails on for 80% or his term. He might have even been re-elected if he didn't use his election year to pretend millions weren't dying.
A morbid part of me wonders if hisnl "advice" literally killed off enough of his voters to swing the election.
I personally think he would have had a shoe-in second term if he had simply led through Covid. Got on TV, told people things were hard but we'd get through it, then spend the rest of the day playing golf or hanging out at whatever the new spot is after the island got shut down.
Conversely, arresting people going paddleboarding and filling skate parks with sand was a totally sane reaction. Good thing we didn't overreact to Covid and completely fuck up the economy and the education progress of millions of children.
Your "domain experts" are often chronically incorrect sociopaths.
Let's not even get into the categorical and coordinated censorship campaign.
Shocking that people even support the covid response that happened. Much less make light through smarmy sarcastic shitposting.
I'm a libertarian, but you've got to be honest with yourself about how much nuance you can actually expect from bureaucrats. If we didn't have a large contingent of social-media fueled rebellion against the idea of any sort of restrictions, there would have been more regulatory bandwidth to spend making exceptions for privately-owned outdoor establishments like skateparks and paddleboarding (which included the need to figure out things like equipment rental/cleaning protocols).
Note that only half of US states had any kind of "lockdown" (ie stay at home order with the force of law), and they were predominantly red states. I'd say that bigger crowd control problems caused larger overreactions. The state I was in merely had a firmly worded suggestion to stay home. I'd call that the sweet spot.
> St. Patrick’s Cathedral used the new [air rights] system in 2023, selling some of its rights in a deal worth as much as $164 million to fund its maintenance
I don't see how this creates a sustainable dynamic, rather than merely making a more comfortable journey to that same financialization attractor (ie Moloch). It's easy to feel good about this church (or that farmland) was given a cash infusion and could keep on running its same cute bespoke non-IREAM (inflation rules everything around me) operation, but what happens when that bolus of cash has been inevitably spent and they need another one?
It feels like this is the fundamental problem with every heady touting of market-based reforms. Of course the initial trend is consensual and both parties benefit (positive sum) - otherwise it wouldn't happen! But then as the feedback loops from market optimization set in over the longer term, those positive qualities gradually disappear in favor of a dystopian nonconsensual dynamic.
(FWIW I'm personally undecided whether the root problem here is that capital inevitably coalesces and therefore government intervention is required to keep it distributed, or whether the agglomerating dynamic stems from the centralized money-printing fountain that flows to the politically connected. But there is enough dumb money sloshing around these days that the distinction is probably moot)
Means the same thing as when Trump claimed the war was won in the first hour and that Iran's nuclear program was "obliterated" during last year's strikes. Which also means the same thing as Iran being an "imminent" threat to the US.
It's a direct quote from Trump's recent State of the Union speech[1]. Here's a more complete quote:
Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Mister President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore,’” Trump said before introducing the team. “‘We’re not used to winning in our country until you came along.’”
The main divide and conquer I see are my fellow countrymen still transfixed by the con artist's cult of personality, thinking that all of this must be 17-d chess with some underlying goal that might end up benefiting them.
Unilaterally starting an elective illegal war (for which there is no win condition) goes to the exact point of "no kings" [autocratic authoritarian strongmen]. Even the traditional US military intelligence agencies thought attacking Iran was a poor idea, and that's saying something!
As for the name, I've certainly got my own qualms with it. But I'm not going to let that distract me from supporting the organization we do have.
> US can't do much due to internal politics (well a lot of people don't like Trump...)
I don't know why you're throwing this out casually, like the difficulty is merely due to political dissent? People "don't like" Trump precisely because all of his policies are exactly like this idiotic attack on Iran - poorly thought out, and inevitably end up doing the exact opposite as what he claims they will do. Trump's whole modus operandi has always been aggressive escalation against other parties, then making negative-sum "deals" to extract wealth. This half-works in business but absolutely fails in international relations (why all of our traditional allies are sitting this one out, at best).
You keep attributing these actions to the "US", but the truth of the matter is that the competent people at the top who was coming up with options like "here is a plan but it requires hundreds of thousands of US troops for years" would have been sidelined and replaced with a Party loyalist sycophant who said it would be easy. For further reading, see this HN thread on the Military Failures of Fascism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523207
You're saying that you personally wouldn't complain if it were Biden sending 100,000 troops, or Obama sending 500,000 troops?
I certainly would.
But the fact that the US doom industry has been beating the drum at Iran for years, while the US military intelligence community has still held back on actually attacking speaks volumes about what a poor idea this was.
Spot on. As an American who is quite critical of the imperialist dynamic, I still catch myself thinking this way. Like "what if Iran actually attacks something around me?" But it's war, shouldn't one expect that an enemy might attack at any point?! Except, we just don't think of war as something that might have direct repercussions for us personally, which is why most of us vote for chucklefuck leaders who start them so readily.
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