Nathan

However, Russia did not commit ground troops and withdrew. Would you now rally around the Lowe regime? Do you see it surviving for long?

I think Russia is a poor analogue for a multitude of reasons but I’ll indulge. Say that a Russian attack to “liberate” us from Farage left much of our armed forces (incl. the nukes) destroyed, Farage himself killed, and Rupert Lowe as his hardline successor.

Right, I am not surprised that there’s no popular movement to collapse the government while the bombs are still raining down and the guy who told them to go out and protest in January is telling them to hang tight at home.

No, but for the hypothetical to be truly analogous France already has overwhelmingly superior capabilities and the British armed forces’ counterattack seems to be weakening without my help so I’d stay at home.

And I think that’s the issue. I simply find the suggestion that the bombing of the school would make me suddenly become pro-concentration camp nonsensical.

I would not cheer the death of the school girls but I would pray for the end of the regime. I would certainly not suddenly become a Faragist.

I simply disagree that there is a significant rally behind the flag effect going on, and find much of the purported evidence spurious. I suppose the best we can do is come
back in 3-6 months when it will become clear whether “this regime can easily outlive the US”.

You can find plenty of videos of young Iranians yelling “Javid Shah” while they watch US-Israeli bombs get dropped but neither of these things are indicative of much.

Are the ultra-religious Shiites of Iran the only people with true agency? Is that the take?

Well that’s an entirely different discussion, but was there a pre-existing highly organised and armed opposition in Yugoslavia?

Even until November of 1978 there was a remarkable level of elite cohesion, the security forces still obeyed the Shah even after the Black Friday massacre for months more.

I thought I made it clear that I don’t think elite defections within the first two months of a conflict are a necessary precondition to regime collapse but I suppose I have spelt it out now. During the Islamic revolution they didn’t happen until almost a year in.

Look I would buy this model of Iran’s regime being similar to Ukraine if every Ukrainian had either a relative or a friend or a friend of a friend who had been murdered by Zelensky’s government two months prior to the Russian invasion

They did! Two months ago! Because help was promised to be forthcoming, but in the end turned out not to be, and tens of thousands were massacred. You spell out exactly why the regime clamped down so hard, they took it seriously as an existential risk.

Yes there is an ultra-religious Shia segment of the population, but they make up well under half the total population.

I find “zero elite defections” rather implausible given the rather overwhelming successes of US-Israeli actions over the past year. Besides, Iran is a heaving bureaucratic state with a large educated urban populace, I am simply not convinced that an unpopular elite can just carry on indefinitely.

I think the pain absorption capability of the Iranian regime is quite up for debate to be honest. This whole thing started with them massacring a five digit number of people over the course of a few days.

Americans refrained from a lot of things CENTCOM wanted to do due to risk aversion and those calculations are upended by having President Lunatic in charge.

I think artillery is a lot less mobile than missile launchers and drones are, and eg. counter-battery radar tracks the shell back to the gun almost immediately and you can go and destroy it. You basically see this play out in Ukraine.

Can they effectively operate shore based artillery when the US seems to have air superiority over Iran?

I know he just says stuff but this isn’t in theory an empty threat. 90% of Iran’s oil exports and thus an overwhelming chunk of their finances come from one island in the Persian gulf that’s very easy to either bomb or capture. If they capture it, that’s immense leverage over any Iranian government.

Unfortunately I think Russia manufactures those on its own now

Claude and GPT are both just LLMs, Claude Code is an agentic harness for them but OpenAI have their own in Codex. In many ways it's just as good.

Yeah the voices on here saying “who is this for, why are they doing this” should clearly take a cursory glance at the engagement

I double checked its figures and 61% seems right - it found them on Wikipedia (after failing to navigate the BLS website) and then summed them with Python

60.6%

chatgpt.com/share/69aa25... chatgpt.com/share/69aa25...

Depends on manufacturer, Apple will not give them to you for free. It's reasonably simple though, any good quality USB PD power supply with enough wattage will work fine.

Isabel oakeshot, andrew tate, who knows what other horrors beyond my comprehension

This one's surprisingly enough down to EU rules mandating that power bricks are optional. They don't do this in other regions.

lol have you spoken to the Iranian diaspora in the west at all? they're overwhelmingly pro-war shahists cheering Trump on