Trump begging for help against a military he claims is 100% defeated and from allies he has spent a year insulting.
It’s over.
Not yet officially but politically, Trump’s Presidency died this week.
Why did anyone look at Iran's BM production and assume they weren't preparing for a long, drawn-out, multi-stage conflict?
I've been talking about this since the first BM exchange, when a lot of people were gloating about the interception rate - the math looked terrible, and that hasn't changed. It only ever looked good for short-term, limited exchanges - and that's clearly not what Iran's missile forces were built for.
I understand where you're coming from with that, but there should also be consequences, including demonstratively for Israeli voters who keep choosing this. I don't think any of this leads to less bloodshed, unfortunately, but all of it being so one-sided is really unsustainable.
I know it sounds like sour grapes, but the guy blocked me for agreeing with him about the horrid US/Israeli use of precision weapons, while qualifying the strategic uselessness of accuracy metrics - literally something I studied and wrote about as part of my thesis research two decades ago. Ah well!
Just a heads up for Canadian politics bsky folk: T Ryan Gregory is an asshole crank who mostly wants a soapbox and will not engage even with those agreeing with him in good faith. I actually agree with most of his criticisms of the current gov't, but take anything he says with a big grain of salt.
I was not suggesting it needs changing, I think you were correct. I was merely adding some additional context, based on my own past work on the subject of military accuracy.
Sorry if the pro-Carney trolls have been getting to you - but I absolutely meant no disrespect or disagreement here.
For context - I'm a trained military historian, and part of my academic work was examining and deconstructing myths about US/Western "smart weapons" in previous Gulf Wars.
It's not that the weapons are inaccurate - it's the we've constantly been fed lies about what accuracy can actually accomplish.
I think you misunderstood what I'm trying to say - I meant that the technical concept of accuracy (which the US and Israel excel at) is largely useless and inapplicable when there is nothing to be achieved in the war except deliberate, brutal violence.
I'm otherwise fully agreeing with you there.
A lot of it actually boils down to "accuracy" being a slippery and largely useless concept. It doesn't really matter how accurate one is in hitting anything, whether it's schools or ayatollahs, if it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
On the US side, this seems like a war for the sake of war.
My spouse with the Unlucky Organs just got approved for permanently (and voluntarily) deactivating said Organs yesterday, and we are both so relieved.
We really don't have to be flesh factories to help make the world more full of better humans.
my take on birth rate discourse: If the only way our species can keep going is by forcing the half of the population born with Unlucky Organs into reproductive slavery, we should go extinct, and good riddance
It's fascinating that even today, the mythology around Vietnam being a pure proxy war persists - even though there is ample evidence that DRVN's politburo had a firm grasp of strategy and deftly played Soviet and Chinese interests in the conflict to advance their own needs, not vice versa.
Yeah I'd say that's pretty significant.
Also, damn, I wonder how they got it.
wow, I came here to post the exact same sentence!
At what point do they just drop pretenses and start doing naked land grabs?
(Not that it's any more likely to be successful, but it feels like Israeli politics has reached that point)
And they didn't exactly cover themselves in glory when they tried this in 2006, either.
And at the same time, also gangster rhetoric - really sounds like racketeering-as-geopolitics. Which they also have been doing.
Somebody ran the Make it a Quote bot on it and, for whatever reason, it adds a real foreboding Fukuyama: "end history, I am no longer asking" energy.
They're going to send that MEU to Kharg Island, aren't they.
(That would be the stupidest thing possible, but totally consistent with "we'll take their oil stuff" approach we've seen with Venezuela)
They're going to do the idiot thing and send that MEU to Kharg Island, aren't they.
So we're doing Da Nang (long haul edition) now?
The only party here that is clearly flailing is the US. Israel, though not exactly helping matters, are being pretty consistent with the way they've been conducting themselves since 2023. The Gulf states are mostly just at a loss, but I don't think anyone realistically expected more from them here.
It's been very clear for a few days now that Iran know very clearly what they're doing, and what variables they know they can and cannot rely on. They are carrying through with a pretty disciplined -though not exactly savoury- way of conducting this war. I don't think they can be easily coerced now.
Man, "Santa Barbara" is such a Slavic thing to say, it's great!
(nobody remembers it in America but Eastern Europe on the other hand...)
They don't even need to build them, from all the tracking I've seen Iran have almost exclusively used their older and less capable missiles so far. They've kept back almost all their newer ballistics and used no cruise missiles at all - and I really doubt 100% of them were destroyed on the ground.
Even from a purely aviation point of view, RIVER VISUAL RWY 19 is still the most exciting (and arguably dodgiest) approach to landing anywhere in North America!
Also, these briefings make it very obvious that they're actually losing and panicking very badly.
Felt cute today, might delete later. 💅
#OmArt #art
Over the past decade, I've just had to come to terms that somewhere between a quarter and a third of voters in any Western democracy are awful, bigoted, worthless people. This doesn't mean we need to give up on democracy, but we do need mechanisms in place to make them completely irrelevant.
