Derridon't

I think it can be both

What it feels like our pundit class can’t grasp is, the war will continue to strangle the economy until the Iranian government is replaced with a friendly government. Simply destroying it won’t work. Now, quick: name one bombing campaign in history that flipped a government from hostile to friendly.

Rogue states can't be trusted with military power, especially things like nuclear weapons, because they may decide to use force irrationally - erratic leaders lashing out in a fit of pique.

WE can be trusted, we tell ourselves, because WE have regular processes to prevent such things.

to be fair this also seems to be what the entire senior leadership of the executive branch of the United States government also believed, so hard to blame someone for thinking it

Honestly the key to making good predictions isn’t being especially smart but understanding that there isn’t some kind of invisible fencing around outcomes that prevents them from departing from the familiar. A car accelerating at a cliff edge will go over the edge if it doesn’t stop or turn

The U.S. made this class of stunningly stupid, pudding-soft MAGA parasites who have managed to move through life without ever encountering genuinely meaningful pushback. This led them to starting this wildly dangerous war in Iran - and looks like their reality distortion field is no longer working.

Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent.

With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

"The Department of War, (that recently gave themselves that name on purpose), has made it clear that we are not, will not be, and have never before been at war"

But this gets it backwards, right? The challenge of the strait is not that you can’t get ships through, ships are going through right now. It’s that you need a ton of ships to go through and pretty much 100% of them need to make it, because no insurer is going to gamble on a billion dollar loss

Funny you should mention February 2020 because ummm... the United States kind of started a war with Iran in January 2020 and then COVID got so out of control so quickly even belligerents decided "let's just do this later!?"

Extremely extremely evocative of early COVID where the experts were saying “the doomsday scenario is underway” and everyone else is like “bad things don’t happen! normality persists! I wonder what next week’s issue of the week will be :)”

I’m a little confused because the economists on my timeline are like “oh yeah we’re facing a generational energy crisis because Trump is a madman who started a war he can’t control” while the politicians are like “it’s important to make clear we support the troops until it all blows over next week”

"the distribution of word forms in text" is an important component of every job that isn't manual labor

I think a very large number of americans imagine the rest of the world as being either Neuschwannstein, Tokyo, or some biome-appropriate version of a Maasai village. Iran, being middle-eastern, is presumably a collection of Maasai villages full of dusty bedouin jihadis with bad teeth and AK-47s.

It's hard to convey how nuts it feels when just about every few weeks to a month tops, some perfectly acceptable research establishes LLMs can do mental reasoning/metareasoning tasks critics say are impossible, and not only does it fail to register - it leads to increasingly aggressive dismissals

This was clear from the jump, but the Venezuela invasion going as smoothly as it did, from a pure operational perspective, is going to prove catastrophic in the long run.

"Plucked it from the Library-Of-Babel-esque probability manifold of all plausible strings by describing it to the Chinese Room in sufficient detail" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue but it is more or less accurate

It's a gamble, but I think it would be good for everyone if he tried it.

And not because it'd work

I went to Delphi, strange place... smelly, place, [wafting gesture] smelly, and they told me... You know what they told me? They told me that all I had to do was invade Persia, and a great EMPIRE, an EMPIRE, would fall. Would you believe that folks? Would you believe that?

Remember when words communicated concepts which could be combined to express ideas? Those were the days. I miss language.

Except that we're not even officially in a state of hostilities. The official position from the sinking of the Dena is that you can randomly just start shooting at a state and suddenly all of said state's assets become valid targets wherever they may be in the world.

That's a fair argument to make, and fair to say not all of them due to Trump policies, though I'd also say that I think the guardian might even be underselling it because there was vastly more repeated infection spread than necessary thanks to the "let it rip" policy of repetitive mass infection

I'm sure the Doctors without Borders staff and patients in the Kunduz hospital took a lot of comfort in their final moments from the fact that the service members conducting the multiple air strikes didn't face legal jeopardy and didn't have an ethos that would be consistent with those actions

America has a long history of pointless and wasteful military adventurism. And in our quest to normalize Trump we’ve stuck his Iran war in that box: “another war, just like the rest.” It’s not like the rest. It’s an act of insanity, rogue state behavior. Don’t know how this ends until we admit it.

Trump has fully shattered the world we all grew up in. It’s a dramatic break from how things worked before, even compared to the Iraq War and other misadventures - the United States abruptly tumbling over a cliff and becoming literally more reckless and domineering than Putin’s Russia.

The American political class is utterly delusional, adrift in a dream of normality, unable to process the actual reality of events on the ground, where the US just launched a completely unprovoked war against a massive country, murdered its leadership, and demanded its conversion to a vassal state.

there's a thing I like to call "load-bearing assumptions", that you don't notice until they're suddenly gone (e.g the air you breath has oxygen in it).

the post-ww2 order is a load-bearing assumption for basically the entirety of american life. trump took a sledgehammer to it in the last 90 days.

A million plus in the U.S. alone from COVID