When I was in 12th grade in Ohio in the early eighties, my Comparative Political Systems teacher (whom I liked) had made an effigy of Iran’s Ayatollah and hung it from the blind support bar at the window.
He could go on for hours and there might have been spit flecking (I DID say I liked him, right) on the subject of why the Ayatollah needed to die. He was right, of course. And it was both baffling and puzzling to me why we hadn’t done it yet.
It’s been puzzling or infuriating, depending on how you look at it, to me for 47 years. I understood marginally, maybe, why we didn’t bomb the living daylights out of them until they surrendered when they were holding our hostages. But why stay our hand after they were freed?
Oh there were reasons and due to our apparent wild overestimation of Russian capabilities, the first stopping point was probably “if we attack Iran it might precipitate WWIII. Which is why our overestimation of their capabilities, based on obviously faulty intelligence is a crying shame and evil and cost in human lives and suffering, because we let the USSR get away with many things and stopped ourselves from taking needed action for fear of starting WWIII and the “end of all life on Earth.”
Fine. We didn’t know it was faulty and we were trying to be the life-preserving humans in the world. And yet–
The USSR fell how long ago? And we kept tolerating a country that not only horribly mistreated its population, but which financed terrorism against us, and which routinely shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” We just pretended it was a rational author and sometimes — Obama — gave it pallets of cash.
It is a mark of historical illiteracy that — though I think the polls are (duh) manipulated — around half of the population think we just attacked Iran out of nowhere, not that this should have happened almost half a century ago.
I think the final trammel that gave way was Trump realizing that no, Russia can’t retaliate even if it tried. Their three day war on the Ukraine that has turned into the tar baby for Russia and a graveyard for Putin’s dream of reviving the USSR, was clear as print on that. If Putin could we’d already be nuked and Ukraine for sure long ago. Therefore, he can’t.
So Trump decided we could just do things and did them. First with getting Maduro out of Venezuela (Henceforth referred to as Demadurizing Venezuela.) and then using extensive Ayatollah be gone on Iran. Which is still ongoing.
The left losing their mind explains that there was something holding our — particularly democrat presidents’ — hands before this than “fear of retaliation.”
I honestly think — PSYCHOLOGICALLY — the left has convinced itself it is illicit for the US to lose force to defend its own interests. The left is chronically addicted to getting us involved in war on behalf of other people: Somalis, Balkan people, etc PROVIDED we have nothing to gain from it. Remember when their big accusation against war in Iraq was “No War For Oil.”? This is exemplary of rats in heads. After all, given that industrial civilization can’t subsist without energy, why not make war for oil? If in addition to that one has a legitimate beef against the country, why not take the oil for our trouble?
But in the left’s mind even if the war were licit, our PROFITING from it would make it wrong.
The truth of course is that for most of human history nations have fought exclusively for their own interests or what they perceived to be their own interests. (Sometimes they were very wrong.)
But now we’ve done it. I am relieved on behalf of the people of Iran who have suffered enough. And my dream for them is “No more Ayatollahs”. Is this likely? I don’t know. Sometimes when people have been crushed for a long time, they have trouble coming back from it.
Which is why the reasonable thing is to get rid of their awful leaders, let them figure it out, and if they get another set of awful leaders get rid of those, rinse and repeat.
The point being that we’re not obligated to nation build. We’re not obligated to make sure the people are okay. We’re not obligated to export democracy.
Yes, we’ve done it in the past, kind of, but — glares at Europe — with indifferent success. Culture is something we don’t fully understand and old cultures tend to re-emerge.
There is only ONE way to make a country in your image and semblance. Invade and stay there for generations, heavily punishing those who don’t get with the program. (Tips hat towards Rome.)
But I don’t want America to do that, and if we did it would change us as much as we change the world. I like America as America (I’d like it to be even more America.) It just wouldn’t be a good idea.
Barring that nation building is just an illusion.
So, in this era when we can just do things, we are allowed to use our force for OUR OWN INTERESTS. Which means we punish countries and leaders who do things against US interests and keep doing so until they stop getting up our nose.
And that’s enough, in this era when we can just do things.
According To Hoyt 
Yup, Just Do It!
I’m sending strong Universe Shaking Vibes toward the Iranians that they should find their cultural souls and let them bloom once again. Not those from the time of the Shah, but in the blosoming time of Omar Khyam the Persian poet. (interesting that with that name Siri popped up a blurb about the plot to blow up Parlement in 1982). How soon AI forgets…
The Shah was not a really nice man, although most Iranians lived much better under his regime. I was walking on the street of Tehran in 1972 with my BIL, about my height, 6’2”, Iranian, built like an offensive guard for a college football team, both of us wearing trench coats as it was cold in January, when in front of us a pedestrian coming toward us, walked out into the street to avoid coming close to us. I thought it strange at the time, years later I realized an American with an Iranian looked like CIA and Sawak (the Iranian secret service). Creepy!
After the fall of the Shah, the BIL’s parents learned that a neighbor, who fled Iran, had been not the bureaucrat everyone believed him to be, but in Sawak, and who had a torture chamber in his basement.
I hope they can find their cultural souls!
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I’d rather they find their inner Rustom (preferably accompanied by Rakesh the wonder horse) myself.
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Part of why we didn’t in 79, was Carter was a symp to the Ayatollah and helped some to allow him to come to power. Sure, he allowed the Shah to escape and didn’t turn him over for “crimes” (that the replacement régime made look mild and pleasant with what they’ve been up to), but the Ayatollah’s folks hates Jooos as much as he did, he thought. So going back on that was part, and he really didn’t like that they made him look bad by attacking us. To him it was better to not obliterate and be rid of the Shah, and think he’d negotiate a way out to save face. Reagan didn’t because they released everyone, and he wasn’t going to be able to drum up support for obliteration, especially after Carter’s failures. Politically we were close to the Paper Tiger it was claimed we were. Now, some of the body politic is even more the Paper Tiger, but the other part is now inclined to just ignore them and do what needs doing, for the most part.
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Not to mention that Reagan had bigger fish to fry at the time. His actions greatly hastened the fall of the USSR which, at the time, was a larger threat.
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And he had more international help to do so, as well.
And it weakened the support for folks who hated us.
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tis true
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As you note, America is unique. Unlike even South & Central America, we had a 150 years of being left on our own. England wanted colonies to bring them gold and instant wealth like Spain’s colonies did. But there was no existing wealthy civilization to loot in what became the US. All we had was timber and, eventually, tobacco, but that took years. The English colonists did everything wrong at first from importing the idle spawn of the aristocracy to whom personal labor was vile, to even trying collectivism (see Puritans in Plymouth), but we learned. We had to or die (and many did die). Help was a couple of months away at best. With nothing to exploit from the colonies, except to use us as a bulwark against Spain and, eventually, France, the English Crown left us alone until they noticed that their neglected colonies finally became prosperous enough to be a source of tax revenue in the mid 18th century. But, by then, we were used to having those who worked for a living rule themselves, and we deeply resented England’s attempt at micro-managing from afar.
If America’s experience is to be duplicated, it will likely be on the Moon (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), or, even more likely, Mars (many, many SF stories).
Meanwhile we fight our own self-grown entitled class of the rich spawn who grew like weeds in the fecund fields of the Ivy League and the fertile money-spewing swamps of DC, and have never learned the harsh lessons of self-sufficiency. Once again we must rely on class traitors like Donald Trump just as we had to rely on the class traitors George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et al, until we matured enough to have leaders who rose from nothing like Lincoln and Grant.
Go USA-ins!
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Firstly, politically (as my drill sergeant so cogently phrased it) Carter was a dishrag whom the ayatollahs had cowed, Reagan was a cowboy and they had no idea what he’d do. Thus, on the eve of his inauguration they sent the hostages home. And as JP said above, with that casus belli off the table there wouldn’t have been much support for a conflict.
Secondly, it’s possible our military couldn’t have done much. Looking at it from my admittedly severely limited viewpoint, it was fundamentally broken. After all, the end of the Viet Nam war was just five years past, and we were still trying to find our footing again. Look at the Desert One debacle as one example, and those were our *elite* troops. The successful intervention in Grenada a couple of years later showed what could be done under a competent CinC.
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I worked with a Marine who was on a ship in the Gulf during the aborted rescue. He was assigned to Intelligence. He, and every one of his mates, wanted to go ahead and were still of the belief that it could have succeeded. You expect the ground pounders to believe that, of course, but when an entire boatload of analysts say “GO!” , well, Carter was a dishrag.
Nice guy to have a sweet tea on the porch with, but that’s about it.
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I don’t believe Operation Eagle Claw was ever intended to succeed. If you start looking into it, the plan didn’t make much sense. There were too many handwavey points, even skipping past the “and then a miracle happens” part where they somehow get the hostages. Then look into the troops they sent – we were still flush with Vietnam vets with combat experience, but way too many of them were newbies, some barely out of Basic. And the more you look into it, the worse it gets.
My plan, that I heavily promoted at the time, was to tell the Iranians to have all the hostages at a designated pickup point within the next 24 hours. If that didn’t happen, erase a city. And do that every day. If they kill all the hostages out of spite, send the B-52s out in successive waves until we were out of bombs or out of targets, whichever happened first.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were willing to do what it took to deal with Middle Eastern kidnappers. And that’s the official reason we went to war with Britain in 1812. But somehow Iran got away with it and even schmoozed US support and the occasional pallet of cash later.
I don’t even care what Uncle Don’s reason for smacking Iran was. “Hey, remember 1979? Here’s the ‘FO’ part. Kiss your asses goodbye” would be perfectly fine with me.
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It’s been quite a while since I read the late Col. Charlie Beckwith’s book (he was the founder of Delta Force and OIC during Eagle Claw), but IIRC Delta’s original plan was solid…and then The Generals got involved. Bigwigs in the Navy, Air Force, and Marines found out about the operation and got all butthurt that their favored units from their particular branch weren’t involved. And Carter, while he (per Beckwith) wanted Eagle Claw to succeed, didn’t have the backbone to tell the bigwigs, “No, this is the plan, you’re not part of it, too bad, so sad, sit down and shut up.”
So different units who’d never worked together before, using different and (in some cases) incompatible equipment, were all thrown together and forced to Make It Work, which added an order of magnitude of complexity to the plan, not to mention made the chain of command rather murky.
That said, I’ve heard from other individuals that the original plan and intel were hot garbage (no real thought or planning into actually infiltrating and exfiltrating Tehran or the Embassy grounds; using civilian tourist maps for recon and navigation, etc.) and the political shenanigans just made things worse to an absurd degree.
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Note that the demudurofication maneuver was pure Delta and their usual preferred bands of merry men. Whatever otehr units participated, were because the ODDfellows said “have so and so do their thing here and then, in thus way”.
Unity of Command is an essential thing.
When it gets to be an all hands (richard) waving and measuring contest, the results are less than optimum.
Another example – Overlord versus any number of Pacific theater invasion events. Command in the Pacific, despite pure navy, was fragmented such that the invasion fleet could decide it was “low on fuel” (or whatever – sheesh) and thus OK to abandon the Marines to their own devices. The Navy in Overlord was on a tight leash to Eisenhower. Any number of COs took their commands in to the freaking surf to kill Kraut gun emplacements. Bravo! He was willing to expend the whole of the assigned fleet to keep that beachhead open and expanding. Thus “one and done”.
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I expect it helps that the guy in charge of the DOW is not only fully on board with the CiC’s viewpoints and goals, but was also himself a grunt and has no use at all for the political generals and admirals and such…and has made that abundantly clear, to their faces, with a side of “and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
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“I honestly think — PSYCHOLOGICALLY — the left has convinced itself it is illicit for the US to lose force to defend its own interests.”
Of course. And I don’t know, nor do I wish to contemplate, where this all begins. Intellectually, I know it begins with Marxism. Psychologically, what came first? Self hatred? Guilt for success? Fear of freedom and desire for paternalistic care? I regard theses things as mental illness. Man was created to strive for and to love his family first, then his tribe, and nations are a very recent development.
Or perhaps it’s *all* demonic. I’m sure some of it is. No person who believes in a Good Creator would also believe some of (most of) the insane things the Loud Left professes. Whether psychological or demonic, I fear that attempting to understand would lead MY mind/soul down dark, dark paths. I had an experience of living with a mentally ill person which caused my own psyche to – go bad, bad places. Folie a deux is real.
The good thing is that there are many fewer of these asylum refugees/possessed souls that the media believes. The bad thing is that madness can be catching, and demons recognize the spiritual weakness that is in self hatred.
Someone stronger than I can analyze them.
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And of course, like all Marxists they are also howling hypocrites who PERSONALLY profit a LOT from any wars they manage to get started.
I think their issue here is a.) they didn’t start it, b.) America as a nation profits from it (in greater peace, if nothing else), and, possibly the REAL clincher here c.) they aren’t personally going to make money, power, or favors from it.
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I long ago gave up on the idea of exporting democracy, as if democratic election of representative government functionaries was what made America great.
IMO, it was and is that our Constitution was designed to make our government so inefficient that it was unlikely to become tyrannical, and more than that, our stability of law and property.
Derived from English Common Law, the law at our nations’ founding was stable, predictable, and slow to change. This and a predictable set of laws relating to real and personal properties allowed people to plan, develop, and invest for the future, in the certainty that the world in which they worked would not change dramatically.
Contrast this with Canada, where their Court has just set aside 150+ years of property titles in BC, and given the land ownership to an Indian tribe who used it occasionally as a fish camp.
All existing land sales, development, financing, and ownership interests are now gone / uncertain / of no known value.
We are no longer blessed with a judiciary willing to self-limit within the Constitution, nor with Presidents like Coolidge, who declined Federal aid to a state which suffered a natural disaster, reasoning that insuring against such was not a Constitutional function of the Federal Government, and would be an unfair burden on the other States.
I’m out of coffee, and this is too long already. Thanks, John in Indy
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Most of the native tribes of America long lost their right of ownership of the land due to adverse possession. I think the longest period of exclusive use required is 30 years, the lowest supposedly 3 years (I think NH is 7 years.) Stolen land? Not anymore.
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Conquered, not stolen.
Same way the prior owners (my kinfolk) acquired it. So folks can quit whining.
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I long ago gave up on the idea of exporting democracy, as if democratic election of representative government functionaries was what made America great.
IMO, it was and is that our Constitution was designed to make our government so inefficient that it was unlikely to become tyrannical, and more than that, our stability of law and property.
Derived from English Common Law, the law at our nations’ founding was stable, predictable, and slow to change. This and a predictable set of laws relating to real and personal properties allowed people to plan, develop, and invest for the future, in the certainty that the world in which they worked would not change dramatically.
Contrast this with Canada, where their Court has just set aside 150+ years of property titles in BC, and given the land ownership to an Indian tribe who used it occasionally as a fish camp.
All existing land sales, development, financing, and ownership interests are now gone / uncertain / of no known value.
We are no longer blessed with a judiciary willing to self-limit within the Constitution, nor with Presidents like Coolidge, who declined Federal aid to a state which suffered a natural disaster, reasoning that insuring against such was not a Constitutional function of the Federal Government, and would be an unfair burden on the other States.
I’m out of coffee, and this is too long already. Thanks, John in Indy
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I long ago gave up on the idea of exporting democracy, as if democratic election of representative government functionaries was what made America great.
IMO, it was and is that our Constitution was designed to make our government so inefficient that it was unlikely to become tyrannical, and more than that, our stability of law and property.
Derived from English Common Law, the law at our nations’ founding was stable, predictable, and slow to change. This and a predictable set of laws relating to real and personal properties allowed people to plan, develop, and invest for the future, in the certainty that the world in which they worked would not change dramatically.
Contrast this with Canada, where their Court has just set aside 150+ years of property titles in BC, and given the land ownership to an Indian tribe who used it occasionally as a fish camp.
All existing land sales, development, financing, and ownership interests are now gone / uncertain / of no known value.
We are no longer blessed with a judiciary willing to self-limit within the Constitution, nor with Presidents like Coolidge, who declined Federal aid to a state which suffered a natural disaster, reasoning that insuring against such was not a Constitutional function of the Federal Government, and would be an unfair burden on the other States.
I’m out of coffee, and this is too long already. Thanks, John in Indy
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Coolidge? I read about Cleveland doing that. Haven’t heard it about Silent Cal.
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Well, obviously the Left supports the Ayatollahs. [Very Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
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I mean, an actual, less corrupt and representative government in Iran isn’t going to bribe them, so of COURSE they preferred the mullahs!
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A part of the issue for the ‘Desert One’ failure was Carter’s determination to have all four branches ‘equally involved’. Our impression was he was too worried about pissing anyone off or offending any branch. I know the recon teams worked for months studying a bunch of desert area; we weren’t supposed to know what was going on ( I suspect the rumors of an incursion into Afghanistan were planted to keep everyone guessing ). And we clearly didn’t know how to forecast weather in Iran. What info leaked out from the choppers that got back to the ship doesn’t jive well with description hinted at in the article about the upcoming movie. So, I really don’t know, either.
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You fear that after forty-seven years of crushing tyranny, the Iranian people won’t be able to find their way back to a decent government. This puts me in mind of eastern Europe, which suffered under the Soviet bootheel for roughly that same amount of time (and large swathes of it after a preparatory phase beneath the Nazi bootheel that extends their period of suffering). Several of those countries are now arguably the most level-headed and freedom-minded, or at least freedom-tolerating, on the continent.
If you want to take encouragement, there’s some for you.
Republica restituendae. (I’d say more, but I don’t know the Latin for “Burn, ayatollahs, burn!”)
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I once read a book about the Latvian Legion of WWII. The theme was that the Baltic states had suffered under the Soviet bootheel long enough pre-war that they welcomed the Germans as liberators(?!?), and many of them formed an SS-affiliated military organization.
Granted, I was loaned that book by a raving Holocaust denier so YMMV.
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The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, at least until they learned their expected place in the new Greater German Reich and started fighting back. But Stalin had been enraged by the initial reports of Ukrainian population and ordered them all deported to Siberia and replaced with ethnic Russians. But the USSR simply didn’t have the transport and manpower to do that, and after a while the order was quietly ignored.
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Latvians and Estonians did much the same, but as a Latvian said about sealing with the Nazis “We knew we could kick them out eventually. We knew kicking the Soviets out, alone, was less likely” (proven by only being free after the fall of the Wall) and many who’d have gotten the same treatment from Stalin left (many ending up in the UK, where relatives of the quoted ended up)
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My stepfather was Ukrainian and was captured by Germans. Those captives were supposed to be unpaid (and un-fed) farm workers, but the farmer (I think in Czechoslovakia) wanted live workers, so they got food on the quiet.
Post liberation, Stalin made it clear that any Ukrainian (perhaps all Soviets) who surrendered were “untrustworthy” and would be killed off. Thus, Stepfather went the Displaced Person route and ended up in the Midwest, working at a locomotive plant. (He married Mom my last year in college, so I missed more of his story.)
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Sounds like it was interesting story, to say the least!
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Prior to the “Great patriotic War” (WW2) Stalin tried his level best to genocide by starvation the whole of Ukraine. “The Holdomor” as the Ukies call that era killed anywhere from 8 to 30 -million- Ukrainians.
Which is why Ukraine aint going to surrender to Putin. No chance.
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It is true that in the beginning, populations absorbed into the USSR after the 1917-1920 civil war did originally greet the Germans as liberators. That didn’t last long though after they got their bellies full of the self appointed “Nazi super race” that viewed everybody else including them as useless inferiors.
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Finland did the same. They’d fought the USSR in the Winter War, and the Germans were absolutely the lesser evil.
The Baltics … yeah. Fight the Germans? If we must. Fight the Russians? That’s survival.
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Reminds me of the punchline to the joke about the old Polish gentleman who found a genie, “Ah, but in order to reach Poland, they have to cross Russia twice!”
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Democracy, or in our case, a Democratic-Republican form of government, requires several things to be successfully implemented. First, the people need to understand and support the concept. Sure, Iranians know the U.S. exists, but do they really understand how we exist? Second, that has to be their primary preference. Are they more interested in living under a Democratic-Republic or living under Sharia? If the latter, then they aren’t ready and trying to impose ‘democracy’ won’t work. Third, they need a common, universal morality that supports it. Not necessarily a complete belief set, but enough commonality to establish a culture of high trust. Again, Islam isn’t tolerant of others (religions or other forms of government), so either the entire nation has to be Islamic, or they need to purge Islamic influences that push Sharia on the rest. Fourth, and I’m guessing here, there needs to be enough prosperity and opportunity that everyone has a chance to succeed, based on their own efforts.
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The Reader thinks that the outcomes in Eastern Europe after a similar period of crushing tyranny offers reason for hope.
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Maybe. except it was oppression from abroad….
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A fair point, with two possible counters. One, the Warsaw Pact nations had enough home-grown Communist apparatchiks and nomenklatura that it wasn’t all, or even mostly, foreign oppression. Two … I do recall that Ayatollah Khomeini arrived from France, something like the way Lenin was shipped back to Russia from Switzerland. You could call that foreign oppression in a sense, though it would involve scapegoating the French. Your call.
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I have absolutely no issues with scapegoating the French. 😛
———————————
“France is miserable because it is full of Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.” — Mark Twain
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Oh, come on. Scapegoating the French is what I live for. After all they kicked my (distant, very distant) ancestors out of power! :D
On the serious side, since the French revolution, the French have been looking to export neurosis.
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They certainly have a plentiful supply to draw from. 😛
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To be honest the current state of Europe makes me wonder what type of government would be best for each country. Of course, that question is way, way, way, above my paygrade.
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I’m mildly optimistic, but we’ll see. Eastern Europe had a long tradition of Christian individuality to culturally oppose Communist Collectivism and reassert itself. Islam is not a religion that values individuality, so we’ll see.
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Many folks like having the super strongman on their side, because no one foreign/worse will eff around with them. A whole bunch of Russians who lived under Stalin, and suffered accordingly, miss him because the world -feared- (thus respected) Stalin’s Russia.
“Yes, he is a scary monster, but he is -our- scary monster and you are thus afraid of -us- and no threat.”
-That- is basic Human tribal thinking 101.
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90% chance the left has trained itself to think in certain ways.
Specifics is more open to debate, but that the perception patterns are not entirely natural, and are also maybe deliberate is less so.
The whole of Marxist, etc., theory is broken down into blinders, hobbles, and straightjackets. (Okay, this statement is a little strong, and it is early morning for me on choice of metaphors.)
Right now, the American Democrat left is stressed, and is maybe gambling to lose their shirts and go out of business. This is not because they are happy, mental models are functioning for them, and they are making good decisions. It would be because they have attached themselves to patterns so deeply that those are the ones they double down on when everything seems to fail them.
Using the Ayatollahs against more ordinary Americans seems to strictly parallel using domestic criminals against more ordinary Americans, etc.
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Hell, the Demokrats are using foreign criminals against their domestic enemies. 😡
While trying to prevent us from doing anything about it.
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Jobs that they cannot find enough Americans wanting to do.
See also Shaun King, for when the idjits cannot find enough dishonest lunatic black men.
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The Left is suffering from a number of decision biases.
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The people who have stayed on the left, have done so because of…
There has been a slow distillation over time.
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:musing:
You know, maybe they’re kind of honest.
Just on insane things-we-know.
Like….
How do you get peace?
People stop fighting.
Except…they don’t have the idea that people are actually people. There’s very few people they admit can make choices.
And while “people stop fighting” is required to have peace– it’s not sufficient, not in the least.
So they invent nonsense like Vision’s line in the MCU about how the bad guys existed because there were goodguys fighting them.
Because if there’s no overt conflict, it’s peace, right?
….there is no way that can match with reality.
And the “they’re too scary, I won’t fight them” is also not peace. Can grow into peace, like with Japan, but it’s not enough.
Of course, a crud-ton of the left are abusive line crossers, so they’ve got a strong interest in saying that resisting aggressive/transgressive actions is the violation of peace. Not the actions that folks are resisting.
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Rather like “There will be no crime if we don’t arrest criminals”?
As I always say: “It takes two to make peace. Only takes one to make war.”
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John Brunner wound up being uninvited to various SF conventions after haranguing other attendees that the West ought to surrender to the USSR to save the world from nuclear annihilation. He had apparently bought completely into the “we’re all going to DIE!” propaganda and had to try to spread it along.
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Not a big fan of his work. I didn’t see anything in his military service mention that would explain such an attitude.
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I read a few of his books, and found Shockwave Rider to be tolerable, at least when I harbored certain liberal attitudes. Reading the others helped cure me of that… :)
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Sigh.
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“We’re all going to DIE!” is not a very convincing argument. On the one hand, of course we’re all going to die, that’s what being mortal means. On the other hand, people saying that about humanity as a whole and not a group at a specific time and place are just panicking.
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One of the schools I was in liked to declare that there was no fighting in school.
…Which, technically, if a bunch of students are beating up another student who’s prevented from fighting back? That’s a beating, not a fight.
Yeah. That kind of logic.
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Bingo.
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Yes– well, kinda backwards, there’s no arrests if there’s no crime, but you can’t GET there by not arresting folks!
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“In a Perfect World nobody would need guns, so taking everybody’s guns away will make the world Perfect!” 😡
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People who are well off and have their lives together own a home, so we’ll make it so everybody owns homes!
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Also, “If crime is so low, why are there so many people in prison?”
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Paging Fox Butterworth…(NY Times op-ed writer If I recall correctly. He made exactly that point).
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PEACE, n.
Maintenance of a state of tension short of actual conflict.
— the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne Dictionary
— Keith Laumer, “Galactic Diplomat”
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What is peace?….On historical grounds I could argue that it is no more than an ideal whose existence we deduce from the fact that there have been intervals between wars. Not very many such intervals, or very long ones, either – Jerry Pournelle
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You summed it up perfectly – that is how they think. I also cannot recall if it was you or someone else who said we basically adopted Japan and that’s why they have improved, but I like that image and I’m keeping it, because I think it works. It also explains Europe, since we did not adopt Germany (kind of difficult to adopt a parent country, now that I think about it…).
But that is how they think: Bad guys exist because good guys fight them. Never mind that bad guys pick on anyone too weak to fight back, once someone fights back the “peace” is lost. Which is where Ultron gets his line: “I think you’re confusing peace with quiet.”
If there are no people but Ultron, then it sure is “peacefully quiet,” isn’t it?
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Wasn’t me, but I may pass it on, since it goes well with the anime trope of “adopting someone who Went Wrong and rebuilding them better.”
I still get warm fuzzies about the realization that the shonen trope of “defeat means friendship” is a way for Japan to recover and go forward.
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Oh dear. As no animeniac I didn’t realize I’d bought the trope in Noah’s Boy.
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It’s a founding trope for actual progress!
It’s the Roman Trope!
…ok totally needs a better name. But conversion to our side is good!
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“Peace” is “The absence of opposition to Worldwide Socialism”.
…
Consider well the implications of that. It is textbook Marxism.
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Replace ‘Socialism’ with ‘Islam’ and it also works.
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That in fact seems to be the Muslim definition of peace. The parts of the world that are not Muslim are the dar al-harb, the house of war. Peace = submission.
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So long as you understand that ‘submission’ == slavery. ☹️
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Hell, some of those enemies pay the Democrats good money!
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Come on now … “Putin’s dream of reviving the USSR” … seriously … in no time or place has Putin talked about reviving the USSR … he has talked about mother Russia … which is not even close to the same thing …
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Well, some folks would say that the USSR was nothing more than the Russian Empire under a different name. So, saying Putin desires to revive Mother Russia could equate to his saying he wants to revive the USSR. TBF, I don’t think his original goals for the Ukrainian conflict are working out. It hasn’t unified Russia behind him, and it’s gone a long way to proving the world what a paper tiger Russia really is.
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The Reader believes Putin wants Russia to have the Soviet Union’s boundaries and Catherine the Great’s government.
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He’s an old KGB hand, and intel squirrelly to a degree that it would influence his POV on what that means, even if he had not inherited all of the peculiarities of the traditional Russian foreign policy perspective.
It is definitely reasonable to consider Putin’s mother russia words to be the same as ‘reviving the USSR’.
His actions prove what MOs he prefers.
There’s basically an objective reality outside of his mindgames. That objective reality tells the tale. Said tale is distinct from what he claims it to be.
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Precisely. Only more oppressive.
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BBC has the easy to find quote:
Vladimir Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.”
Note, the Russians knew very well that Russia ran the Soviet Union.
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We’re allowed to notice he’s pissing on our leg, even if he insists it’s rain.
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Mother Russia filling the borders of the former USSR. Bah. Changing language doesn’t change the KGB man.
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Yeah, Vlad does not want to sign over his personal power to a Politburo, nor reconstitute the Communist Party as the sole source of authority over everything, but he wants to “restore Russia’s greatness” and bemoans that the USSR dissolving into separate countries each with it’s own local government was “…the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
But note according to him that was because that dissolution stranded ethnic Russians outside of Russian governance, and instead of, you know, anyone who cares moving back to Russia, those stranded Soviet colonists really needed the Formerly Red Army to drive to those other countries and impose a new government by, for, and of ethnic Russians, no matter what any local majority might want.
So a fair paraphrase would be “restore the USSR borders but with Vlad and his ex-KGB mafiocracy in charge.”
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Off topic. has anyone else seen “Professor Jiang” in their feeds. I know most of the English language China sources, but I’ve never heard of him and now he’s all over the place. I know he’s “Canadian” based in Peking but can’t find much else. It’s all straight up CCP propaganda.
Feels like the tubes of you algorithm is being manipulated. THe ultimate answer is China, of course, but I’d be curious to know the mechanism.
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That (jiang) was one of my indicators from the other day.
So, one, there is a context window (I think metaphor) to what videos and ads youtube feeds you. (Take this with salt, this is my own observation, with no addition of technological info or insider info. I have not researched.)
The videos on front page are mostly context from the browser tracking, like cookies. They will also (depending on what they know about you, and how hot things are), put up a selections of breaking news/propaganda.
The ads, if they don’t know you, may correlate to other people on your IP or ISP service point.
In 2020, the ‘selections of breaking news’ were where they did a lot of the BLM and maybe covid stuff. Which was later shown to be US government intervention.
The key detail is that the parent company is deeply profiting from ad sales. They would have tools internally for manipulating content suggestions to maximise ad profits.
PRC maybe doesn’t have the funds to buy propaganda slots. They maybe don’t have the leverage to pressure compliance from Alphabet, Google, or Youtube. What they do have is the slave trade in H1Bs, and leverage over the people it trained and exported to US tech companies.
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Yes, but China has the “water army” of Chinese functionaries in offices, sock-puppeting hundreds of thousands of accounts.
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He got noted on Insty, with deep skepticism. https://instapundit.com/780587
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Thank you, I saw that after I wrote my note. I’ve been studying the pattern of Chinese propaganda as it’s developed since the Iran operation started, at this rate the algorithm will be entirely filled with Chinese propaganda pieces by the end of the week. It’s really bad. They must be terrified. Good.
We need to note who said what when since this is the WuFlu operation all over again. Thank God Elon bought twitter. The Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.
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I’m in awe of how many things have tumbled with just His thumb on the scale now and then recently.
Fools, drunkards and the United States of America. Thank G-d. Thank G-d indeed.
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I’ve been a user of a lot of different janky browsers for years.
I also have several computers, and use browsers in different local accounts. Currently a lot of my youtube MO is using private windows in Vivaldi (which is a less janky browser).
I have text files full of URLs/links. If I copy a channel link (Forgotten Weapons or What’s Going on with shipping have a lot), and watch one video and turn off autoplay, that gives me a fresh browser context, one that is where a lot of the chinese propaganda is aimed.
Then I can tune it for my preferred context, lots of AMVs, by searching or copying links.
But, I had a look at a browser where I have some years old browser contexts of 80% or higher music stuff, and that front page is very little of the crap. (Ad wise, that one I am still getting graingear ads on, relating to an order many years ago.)
I don’t have a youtube log on, and so I am not using a youtube log on. Sopme of these browsers may well have tracking data associating me with a google account, so…
In conclusion, if you are not ‘breaking your trail’, youtube will feed you more of what you watch, as you watch it. Which is probably not going to be an apples to apples estimate of changes.
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I get my channel links mostly by searching in duckduckgo with the javascript off.
This seems to strip off the extra parts of the link where additional details about the user can be stored.
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Maybe it’s because I’m having my first case of full-blown influenza in decades, but darn if it doesn’t seen like this wave of flu has already been worse than what I saw of Covid. I guess the wannabe PtB don’t see a way to exploit it.
(My beloved is in the hospital. He’s sounding better but they’re concerned about his blood oxygen levels – doesn’t that sound familiar. I’m feeling a bit better, but very aware that I don’t need to be pushing things).
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feel better
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I am praying for your husband, and you, Dorothy. (As well as Sarah’s DIL). As for me, my fever broke last night. I just love waking up drenched in sweat! I am just feeling very very tired right now, although I am going to try to do some more edits on book 5, so I can get it to Amazon. The cats want me to nap, so I think I will take a pre-dinner snooze.
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I am, shockingly, still not ill. Again, I think the really awful allergies by making me so exhausted I spent half the con in my room might have saved me. Saw Morrigan today. She doesn’t look well.
HOWEVER just the allergies and not sleeping much (like in 1 hour increments) while at the con still has me, as the regency people would say “Very pulled down.” So a nap in the afternoon helps.
Praying for your beloved. We like him a lot and worry.
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He’s sounding a lot better. I would have stayed with him in the hospital but had two nurses give me, “You can’t look after him if you don’t look after yourself,” lecture.
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They’re probably right, but I imagine how you feel.
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“Canadian based in Peking” describes the current Canadian government.
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A good twenty years ago, I did a detailed study of the Canadian property market. Since China owns most of Canada outright, the behavior of its “government” is easily explained.
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The China Show guys got invited onto a China Uncensored livestream yesterday, and the five of them discussed China’s reaction to the strikes on Iran. The concensus was that China has been awfully quiet since the attacks started, and appears to be trying to figure out how to respond. It wants to firmly condemn then and attack the US (verbally). But Xi and Trump apparently have a meeting scheduled for a month from now, and they’re probably worried about losing any ability to get concessions from Trump if they anger him too much before the meeting.
So they’re cautiously testing the waters via cut outs and Chinese citizens posting on social media to see what might play well. This “professor” is likely a new arm of that campaign.
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I don’t think I’ve seen him on my feed.
I did note the news China has put a, “dont sell our diesel,” order up.
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Somewhat more on topic. China has suspended exports of gasoline and diesel and the best estimate I can find, and I’ve been looking hard, is that they have about 50 days supply “in reserve” before the refineries start to shut down. The new wild card is India, who are also scrambling since they’re the other beneficiary of the sanctions regime.
Oil is up sharply today, but still not critical. More importantly for US, gas prices are up to (average) $3.251. $4 is a critical value. That said, just a few months ago oil at $75 per barrel was being touted as a great triumph so the rhetoric is mostly just rhetoric,
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As of Tuesday, gas was up $0.15 in Oregon, for a nominal price of $3.66. Yeah, we get some of the fallout from the California and general Left Coast insanity.
OTOH, the Fred Meyer (Kroger affiliate) is offering 4X fuel points from Feb 1 through the end of March, so my monthly stockup shopping got me a $0.50/gallon discount on their gas.
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We are at $3.79, here in the valley at Fred Meyers.
4x all February? Only finding that for specific items we do not buy (like the pre=paid cards), sigh. Oh. Well. Friday it is.
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[i]More importantly for US, gas prices are up to (average) $3.251. $4 is a critical value. [/i]
The answer to complaints about gas prices due to military action is “Yeah it’s almost as high as it was under Obama and Biden when they weren’t bombing anyone.”
I remember 18 years ago when gas was $4.50 a gallon [i]just because.[/i]
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There is only ONE way to make a country in your image and semblance. Invade and stay there for generations, heavily punishing those who don’t get with the program. (Tips hat towards Rome.)
Which, in bitter irony, is effectively what’s been done to us…
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yes. To an extent. BUT never completely.
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Should be noted that ‘just do things’ is not a recipe.
There’s some invisible work in Trump and his collaborators and staff selecting actions to do, that we definitely don’t fully understand from open sources.
What isn’t necessary are the parts of the cookbook that the established wisdom had decided were vital. We may have confirmed that there were a bunch of ‘magic feather’ steps that were consuming myriad manhours in the old status quo, that were wholly useless, and at the same time important tasks or analyses were shortchanged.
See also environmental compliance in industry, or the labor relations board and stuff.
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I don’t think exporting democracy is such an American thing to do. Madison’s writing in the Federalist warns against the perils of letting the majority do anything it wants, and looks for a way to balance things so that minorities are protected. And the Bill of Rights went even further in that direction. Unrestrained rule by the majority is just as capable of being authoritarian as unrestrained rule by the few, or the one.
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Unfortunately, we have a so-called Elite (a minority) trying to run the US.
And yes, they don’t acknowledge any limits to their power.
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From Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one. How’s that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that over again, too. Who decides?
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Right. I’m not fond of it. Exporting a democratic republic, maybe, but….. the other culture has a say.
I think the “exporting democracy” was given a push by FDR. So I think we just need to keep the guys we don’t like from power, and go on.
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There’s a basic numbers problem, including with some of my own (1) proposals.
We did fight the indians until the survivors learned to like living in relative peace.
If you squint the indian reservations and occupation of nations could look similar. But, there were a very small number of indians, and they had an influence on our culture.
This is a basic thing that the English, French, and Germans don’t understand about our mindsets in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. We look at how the other party fights, adjust our expectations, and get onto it without might angst.
This is different from international harmonization, which is in treaty spacec or academic space. We work off of rumint, rumor space, or evidence about what was actually done.
But also, when the other guy stops fighting, and we decide it is done, it is done. (We do hold grudges, but the saner Americans do not go forward with violence on grudges, they stick to looking at actions.)
Anyway, a few indians left us with a mental legacy alien to Johnny Sandhurst, Hans Goettingen, or Pierre Ecole Polytechnique.
We shouldn’t just assume that we can just kill off the bad Swedes, or stick the population of Brussels in a reservation, and problem solved at no long term cultural cost to the US. Whatever happens will probably change us, and I do not have a perspective to judge how in advance.
There are a lot of bad habits in the rest of the world, and if we go live cheek to jowl with them willy nilly, we will learn some of those.
(1) crazier
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Funny how the same folks declaring that Trump is a Putin stooge because he won’t send US troops to Ukraine or give Ukraine a blank check, are the same people denouncing his taking out the Mullahs. The same Mullahs who have provided fuel, raw materials, and weapons, to Putin so that Russia can sustain continuing its attacks on Ukraine, which resources Russia has now been deprived of.
Of course their desire for war in Ukraine is not to actually help Ukraine per se, but to help cover up their long time money laundering that was being done through Ukraine. Their desire for Iran to survive is because they support Iran’s goals of “death to Israel” and “death to America” and with Israel making peace with many in the Arab Sunni-Muslim world, they view Iran’s Mullahs as the mechanism by which Israel can be made Jew-free.
The same reasons, along with self-enrichment, is why Obama and Hillary took out Qaddafi who was actually playing nice and dismantling his weapons programs, and let a Jihadist regime take over. Just like the left thought the Soviets and Mao were the good guys, they think the Jihadists are the good guys, and pretty much for the same reasons.
Blue Oyster Cult said it best about Khomeini (and the rest of the mad Mullahs) way back at the start of Iran’s reign of terror, when they sang “if he really thinks we’re the devil, then let’s send him to hell”
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Part of the problem was that certain anti-American powers like Russia, China and the Obama Administration wanted Iran as “balance” to the US. What the Iranian people wanted was completely irrelevant.
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Because they think the US is evil, ultimately…
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Because they can’t steal too openly (especially now that they’ve been uncovered, for all that it is still a shallow uncover, a long ways to go), unlike Iran, Russia, China, former socialist S. American countries, etc.
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You can not live with another nation, or party that wants to enslave you. Or that believes murder is the right way to win an argument, religious or otherwise. You can only defeat them and leave them in the ash heap of history. They, the enemy gives you no choice in the matter.
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I think this is simpler than most of us on the Right think.
The Communists (Left) are convinced they will win, dominate, and rule. Islam will succumb, and of course the Right will be disposed of.
Islam is convinced it will win, and all else will be disposed of.
China is convinced it will outlast all this foolishness and rule. All else will be subsumed.
Hard to defeat an enemy that is convinced of its ultimate victory.
Against the Left the ultimate weapon is truth. Oh, and then force, since they will indeed resort to force when they see their lies have failed.
By now it should be obvious that Islam can only be defeated by force. Exclusion is a necessary first step, and if they are sufficiently entrenched, as in England, force will become their tool and the necessary response. There will be blood.
Against China the best approach is economic resistance. Ultimately they will figure out how to stand on their own and challenge western civilization also, but before then we need to defeat the other two great enemies of western civ.
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I remember being in college and watching the Iranian students march around with their heads in sacks, to protect them from the Shaa’s secret police.
I also remember the day the Jewish students took over half the lawn in front of the library and the Iranians took over the other half. Each group marched in a circle, until the Iranians uncoiled there and went out to march on the street.
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