A penitent who is loud

Post Amy Siskind @amysiskind.com WH press secretary Karoline Leavitt tells Fox News that a military draft is on the table. 4:19 PM • Mar 8, 2026 CEverybody can reply 276 reposts 699 quotes 685 likes 36 saves 184 ① 975 685

This is an irresponsible, misleading post that misrepresents what Leavitt said. There's enough awful stuff happening. Don't confuse people.

I mean. Had anything about the regime's activities and policy and ideological stances meaningfully changed here?

But having poked that status quo without a real plan to change things we are in the unenviable place of having revealed the tool that a bad actor has to screw us over.

I think this *reveals* the inherently problematic nature of the IRI's role in geopolitics and how it's not really that viable long term for us to have just kind of shrugged at its ability to shut down the global economy.

It was in everyone's best economic interests not to poke this one and now it's entirely possible the IRI will get a taste for it

Yes, that's kind of my point, this was safe as long as it was hypothetical (and even then it was a significant part of why the IRI was just considered untouchable).

*suffering, augh

Still thinking back to my 2024 door knocking and canvassing where left-leaning indies and even a few registered Dems told me they couldn't vote for Harris because she "didn't understand the economy" and would "send our kids to war."

"Burgers were cheaper with Trump" and "he hates war."

Fun times.

I mean I can't speak for anyone else but my entire career has been contract gigs in tech. I think you've got a point but even tech is, as you said, more precarious than before.

(Notably the biggest LLM boosters claim they want a UBI to account for the shift, perhaps as fig leaf )

That said also a not-inconsiderable part of Trump's idiotic know-nothing base were convinced he was the Peace Candidate.

I mean they were ENOUGH to discourage people from voting in key areas. There wasn't a huge redshift, there WAS a sizable third party shift in certain areas.

The problem is that American politics is tenuous enough we kind of need their votes.

Well yeah, closing the Strait collapses the proverbial waveform and requires an answer from the West.

I wouldn't say that at all, the Dems in America are like 30% pure campists, as we see with the DSA, and the Dems really can't afford to lose them.

(a not insignificant portion of the American liberal-left essentially believes in pure campism and that any and all American use of force is inherently pure evil against any target)

It's not the sort of thing you can half-ass, once you've made it into more than a hypothetical.

Ehhh, speaking personally As An American, American liberal-leftism is DEEPLY post-Iraq War 2 brained and has absolutely zero appetite for any significant military deployment. For any Dem to call for it would imo lead to their own supporters burning them in effigy in the street.

Indeed which is why you don't poke Iran enough to get it to start tugging this particular lever to the point that the West needs to decide how much they actually value their on-paper opposition to the Iranian regime.

That's not really in any way directly impacting the authoritarian policies of the Iranian regime, which is deeply ideologically committed to illiberal policies above and beyond what we would deem material self interest.

It's a moral challenge in the sense that American liberalism's general ethos these days can be summed up as "we won't need to ever go to war because mismanagement and oppression always rebound to bring down the offender, so all we need to do is gently wield soft power and democracy will just Happen"

Because the US can't really muster an army large enough to occupy Iran without a mass mobilization no one is willing to do? And even then it would be basically a primary project of any government that began it, eclipsing all other domestic programs?

(it's much like how it really doesn't matter how inept Russia is or how criminal its war in Ukraine, many Western powers hesitate to take steps to unseat the Putin regime because they have nukes and it turns out that's what matters.)

The idea that the Iranian government can just shut down the world oil supply & no threshold of civilian suffering, government incompetence or crackdowns would make the regime suffer any meaningful consequences is actually extremely morally challenging to liberalism!

Sure but that's not even the ones I mean.

(this is why we didn't want to push Iran to this point half cocked, everyone benefitted from the illusion that they weren't calling the shots)

If Iran is going to start regularly threatening to close the Strait they're either functionally a major decider in world affairs or the rest of the world has to do something about it.

Of course, but the reasons why are secondary to the problem of Iranian impunity.

As it stood we to some degree permitted this, given the total impunity of the IRI to domestic loss no matter how disastrous their governance and their free use of violent proxies across the region.

Also I just don't buy this story at all.

But the logical conclusion of "Iran is unmoved by civilian casualties or civil strife, cannot be meaningfully militarily defeated without potential casualties we don't want to soak, and can shut off the world oil supply at will" is "Iran is in charge of world affairs, and we do as they will."