by liberal japonicus
This Graniaud piece caught my eye.
A group of men removed from the US to Djibouti, in east Africa, are stranded in a converted shipping container together with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers sent to supervise them after a deportation flight to South Sudan was stopped by an American court.
The eight deportees and 13 Ice staff have begun to “feel ill”, the US government said.
Eight men, from Latin America, Asia and South Sudan, and the Ice staff have been stuck at a US naval base since late May. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that the Ice officers began to fall ill “within 72 hours of landing” in Djibouti, and continue to suffer from suspected bacterial upper respiratory infections.
[…]
Mellissa Harper, a top official at the DHS and Ice, said in a court declaration that the detainees are being held in a shipping container that was previously converted into a conference room. The Ice officers are “sharing very limited sleeping quarters”, Harper said, with only six beds between 13 people.
In the declaration, Harper said burn pits in Djibouti have led to Ice officials experiencing “throat irritation”. She said the outside temperature frequently exceeds 100F (38C) in the daytime, and said Ice officials were at risk of malaria because they did not take anti-malaria medication before arriving in Djibouti.
“Within 72 hours of landing in Djibouti, the officers and detainees began to feel ill,” Harper said, but they were unable to obtain proper testing for a diagnosis.
Harper added: “Upon arrival in Djibouti, officers were warned by US Department of Defense officials of imminent danger of rocket attacks from terrorist groups in Yemen. The Ice officers lack body armor or other gear that would be appropriate in the case of an attack.”
I'd like to think that guys in ICE might rethink their career choices seeing how little thought goes into their safety. More importantly, why does the Guardian write it as Ice rather than ICE?
“why does the Guardian write it as Ice rather than ICE?”
Because they’re melting? Because they should be liquidated?
Because it’s pronounced “ice”, rather than I.C.E.?
Take your pick.
Because it’s the Grauniad?
Isn’t it obvious to bring them all back to the USA while the legal issues get sorted?
Isn’t it obvious to bring them all back to the USA while the legal issues get sorted?
Better yet, just slap a 150% tariff on the Guardian. Including, natch, electronic versions. (Never mind that there is no practical way to implement tariffs on electrons.) That will force them to chance their policies, and write stuff in English!
Guardian style guide entry for acronyms and abbreviations:
Ice, Nato, UN, US, EU…..
Not saying I approve of it….. 😉
ICE agents are bringing in a new Ice Age. No surprise since their masters do not tolerate the idea of global warming. On the other hand they produce so much hot air that the effect of their agents is partially compensated – and they are already compensating for so much.
The Ice [sic] officers lack body armor or other gear that would be appropriate in the case of an attack.
And whether the prisoners might be at risk of a rocket attack without any protective gear is not even worth mentioning.
Not worth mentioning because what else would anyone expect from these scum?
Also this: The Ice officers are “sharing very limited sleeping quarters”, Harper said, with only six beds between 13 people.
Gee, I wonder how many beds the kidnapped people have to share… If any.
Drumming up sympathy for the poor, put-upon, mistreated kidnapping thugs of I C E…….hell of a prestigious job she’s got there.
Thanks Janie. I know it’s not great to worry about acronyms while Rome burns, but not capitalizing them obscures where they come from, which I do not approve of.
lj — totally agree with you.
The Guardian’s style guide is nuts (which should be “NUTS” if it stands for “Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics”). But credit to JanieM for looking it up.
Concerning worrying about acronyms while Rome burns, a memorable exchange from Crooked Timber from long ago:
Henry: ‘reticence’ does not mean ‘reluctance’ – I admit that I am losing this linguistic battle and am likely irrational on the topic, but am going to hold out as long as I possibly can).
geo: Fight on, Henry! As Karl Kraus observed during the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai: “If those who are supposed to look after commas had made sure they are always in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning.”
Not at all sure I agree with geo, but the comment has stuck with me for all these years…
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-first-5000-years-reply/
I tried, and failed, to find some specifics of Musk’s objections to Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill. There seem not to be any available. But the indications are that he objects not to the suicidal tax cuts for the megarich, but to insufficient cruelty towards the poor. He’s not personally quite as vile as Trump, but he’s at least as wrong about everything.
I note that whereas he’s now calling Trump something equivalent to “pedo guy”, he didn’t seem to mind that while he thought he might be able to get Trump onside with his budget views.
Pro Bono:
From here, for what it’s worth.
Thanks. Excuse me if I’m sceptical that this administration could GAF about the appearance of a conflict of interest.
I don’t buy the conflict of interest stuff either, but the question was what pissed Musk off about the bill.
It’s pretty plausible that what pissed him off in a general sort of way is that they failed to hand him everything he wanted wrapped up with a nice bow on top, and I would assume that they did that because he was getting too big for his britches and needed to be taught just who was in charge.
I’m sure you’re right. I want to make the point that there is no sense in which Musk is on the side of right. D’s should absolutely not see him as any sort of a potential ally.
I agree completely. In fact, as to this from your previous comment: He’s not personally quite as vile as Trumpg — I’m not entirely convinced that that’s true.
I agree that Skummy is at least as wrong about everything, but in some ways he seems to me to be even more vile, because he’s more soulless. To treat people as badly as he does, Clickbait has to at least, in some sense however elementary, realize that they exist. I don’t think Skummy has any clue that other people are real, or that it might matter in any way to him that they are.
It doesn’t matter; it’s just a thought game on my part, and most of the time I try hard to think about something else instead.
Along with those poor put-upon agents in Djibouti (who put it upon them, I’d like to know…), there’s a press release about those poor put-upon agents in the LA area today:
DHS Releases Statement on Violent Rioters Assaulting ICE Officers in Los Angeles, CA and Calls on Democrat Politicians to Tone Down Dangerous Rhetoric About ICE
“Democrat politicians” — maybe this immature playground jibe is as trivial and useless as concern about acronyms, or maybe it’s just one of the many tiny bricks that helped them build this edifice in which we’re all now living.
“DHS calls. . . to tone down dangerous rhetoric”
As so often, every accusation from these lowlifes is a confession.
posted without commment
https://www.thedailybeast.com/musk-hit-rival-like-a-rugby-player-during-infamous-white-house-fight/
I guess this fight with the Treasury Secretary establishes that Musk was wise to avoid the bjj contest with Mark Zuckerberg.
We are all living in Joe Rogan’s world now. ( I like Rogan when he is just talking about fighting— nowadays that would give him expertise as a pundit in a situation where infighting between Washington bureaucrats literally means infighting.)
Is it worse to treat people horribly because you don’t acknowledge their humanity, or because you do?
My answer: they’re both worse, each in its own way.
What’s the current odds on Fox running commentary about LA over footage of violent riots in Venezuela or Syria? You know they aren’t going to show any footage of crying abuelas being peaceful.
Also, I’d like to see the left shift away from comparing ICE to brownshirts – not because it’s not an apt historical comparison, but because the public has been rhetorically prepared to reject those comparisons. Instead, I’d prefer comparisons along the lines of ICE = KKK focusing on the faces being covered and the intimidation tactics. The US has seen this before, and its history here predates the Third Reich. It’s a fully homegrown hate.
Trump want his Reichstag Fire.
I hate to be alarmist but this could be a tipping point.
And he actually calls the governor “Newscum”.
I don’t think it’s prissy to remark on the complete deterioration of any kind of propriety in the communication from the White House. Can you imagine any other president in recent memory (not sure about the 19th century) talking like that?
And the language is not an unimportant aspect, it’s a major part of the dehumanization of political opponents and out-groups.
This has been long in the making:
Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants
shared link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/politics/trump-2025-insurrection-act.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NU8.yOqF.HtoQfkx4EVYE&smid=url-share
Instead, I’d prefer comparisons along the lines of ICE = KKK focusing on the faces being covered and the intimidation tactics. The US has seen this before, and its history here predates the Third Reich. It’s a fully homegrown hate.
Excellent point, and good suggestion.
ICE = KKK
ICE = orcs is how I think of it.
It’s horrifying, but not surprising. I wonder what it will take for the kind of people who thought people like us were being alarmist to become sufficiently alarmed themselves. The marines, as Hegseth posited? Or, God forbid, some (how many?) deaths…
The marines, as Hegseth posited?
Who are going to be in a mood after having their weekend disrupted.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/presidenting-is-hard
I don’t want to makes this a ‘if the Czar only knew’ kind of argument (which I think a lot of MAGA types use to explain away their support of the Orange shitstain) but it would not surprise me if he was unaware of the order. Which suggests that the way to stop it is to explain to him that there is no way he gets the Peace prize if this explodes
Trump may not have known about the order, but if so it didn’t seem to bother him. Miller and Trump are on the same page with this strategy where Miller does the heavy lifting while Trump, well, Trumps. Most of the White House minions are various types of idiots, but Miller seems very focused and careful as he goes about cleansing the blood of the Homeland, He likely has some milestones to meet before the Insurrection Act is invoked. They need a big, splashy riot.
Regarding Stephen Miller, his uncle’s article is priceless, though of course it has fallen on deaf ears:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351/
This is also good:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/stephen-miller-hatemonger-biography/
I generally feel empathy for poor whites who are embittered and support Trump, but this article, which is intended to produce that emotion, had the opposite effect in my case. I understand the exhortation at the end, but I also think these people are choosing to be mean spirited and their hurt pride has become a twisted poisonous thing. Of course my attitude towards them is precisely what the author warns against, but their own attitudes are not good either.
Free article
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/opinion/trump-supporters-kentucky.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Nk8.a0Ip.8fbql8Cqzl_u&smid=url-share
Well, these people are not just going away somehow, so the intent of these empathy articles is “what do we do about them?”. Understanding a problem is supposedly the first step in solving it, but these articles all have the unspoken assumption we must “reach out” to them to change their minds, after documenting in painful detail that they are not remotely interested in being
“reached out” to. They want Yesterday back, and are settling for a promise of Yesterday that is always coming tomorrow, because it is backed with an enthusiastic acceptance of their resentments and grievances. That acceptance means more to them that promises of Democratic help that deny those resentments. The Centrist solution is to not inflame those resentments by supporting the targets of that resentment, but replacing resentment with nothing isn’t going to help.
From the NYT piece, my bolds:
It’s a cliche now to talk about rural red state folks “voting against their own economic interest”. And, it’s fundamentally true.
Why? I have no idea. And whenever I read stuff like this, I walk away feeling like these people are more attached to their feelings of self-pity and victimization than they are to doing anything whatsoever to improve their situation.
Coal is not coming back as a regional economic anchor, and it shouldn’t, which is why it isn’t. That sucks for a lot of folks whose identity is connected to that, who feel a sense of pride in having done (or whose forbears did) a difficult, dangerous, and necessary job. And the loss of that has hollowed out many areas.
I get all of that.
This is not a phenomenon that is, remotely, unique to rural red states. When I first moved to Salem MA back in the early 80’s, it was a run-down sort of depressed place. The factories had long since moved on to places with cheaper labor. Perhaps ironically, many of those places are now hotbeds of “forgotten man” “stolen pride” Trumpism, because the same industries have since followed the promise of even cheaper labor overseas. Plus ça change.
And all of the old school blue collar townie factory worker folks – children and grandchildren of immigrants from Ireland and Canada – spent their days complaining about the new wave of immigrants from the Dominican Republic who were moving into the triple deckers that had been built as factory labor housing.
Little by little, things turned around, as other industries – tech and medicine mostly – took the place of factory work. It took something like a generation, and investment, and mostly sane governance.
The old school townies are still here, but now they complain (with justification) about gentrification and the cost of housing.
I sort-of understand the sense of resentment – the feeling of having been left behind by forces beyond your control – that the folks in the article talk about. Because I’ve seen it in places I’ve lived. It hasn’t touched me, directly, because I somehow stumbled into a stable career, for which I am grateful. But it’s been part of my environment.
I sort-of understand it, but my empathy is kind of limited, because the response of people like the folks in the article is to embrace policies that will only do them harm, and political actors who basically don’t give a shit about them and exploit their sense of abandonment for their own ends in the most obvious ways.
Donald J Trump does not give one single flying fuck about Roger Ford. The “red version” of Biden’s clean energy initiative is not going to happen, ever. Because there isn’t enough money in it for (R) leadership and their patrons, full stop. And yet, Roger Ford will be damned if he will give any support whatsoever to folks who actually will make at least some effort to turn things around for him and his community.
If they can’t tolerate the (D)’s helping them, there are a wide variety and number of organizations rooted in Appachia that are working to build a decent future there that are not specifically affiliated with the (D) party. The Roger Fords of the world could consider working with them. Whether he does or not is on him, (D)’s and “liberals” and “coastal elites” have nothing to do with it.
Apologies for the long post, but I am heartily sick and tired of the NYT and their periodic safaris into the “red heartland” in an effort to understand the beating heart of Trumpism. It’s not helpful, and in fact is condescending and offensive. Not to me, to the folks they are “analyzing”.
This stuff is not mysterious. We used to have useful work to do, now we don’t. We used to have enough money to get by, now we don’t. There used to be something here to hold our young people, now they can’t wait to get the hell out.
Totally easy to understand why that would make folks sad, or angry, or depressed. Or all of the above.
But you can either nurse your anger and resentment like some kind of petulant child, or you can try to find a constructive path forward. Or, at least, not hate the people who are trying to help you do that, however clumsy or ineffective their efforts might be.
Industries come and go. When they go, people and places organized around those industries suffer. New England and textiles, Detriot and cars, the Rust Belt and manufacturing in general. Lots of places have been through it, and it takes time and constructive effort and investment to turn it around.
But if you’re gonna basically hate the people who are actually trying to help out, it’s gonna take a lot more time, and be a lot harder.
If that feeds your sense of resentment in some way that weirdly floats your personal boat, then I have no idea what “people like me” can do or say about it.
Might be a long comment from me lost in space out there somewhere…
Lost comment rescue service came along….
There used to be something here to hold our young people, now they can’t wait to get the hell out.
It would, of course, be too much effort for the NYT reporters to go and ask those kids who are leaving: Why? And, answers in hand, then ask the folks upset about that what they are doing to fix that real, identified, problem. Besides voting for Trump, who didn’t even start to change things last time around.
For example, if the kids complain about no good jobs, start by finding out what they, not their parents and grandparents but they, think constitutes a “good job.” But the folks who feel abandoned by the kids apparenytly aren’t interested. And, no surprise, the media aren’t either.
Thank you Janie!
In other news, Sly Stone has passed, at age 82. Kind of a miracle he made it that long, to be honest, but it still makes me sad to see him go.
Many musicians my age point to the Beatles on Sullivan in ’64 as a life-changing event – the thing that made them want to play music.
For me, it was Sly. Funky, slinky, shiny, Sly and the Family Stone.
Just the hippest thing in the world to little white suburban kid me. It’s really just in retrospect that you see how far ahead of his time the man was.
I don’t know about Kentucky, but in the UK aspiring young people leave home to go to university, then, if they don’t become academics, they get jobs in London. There’s no expectation that politicians will change that.
There’s a general question: what can a politician do to persuade people to vote for them when they prefer the lies the other lot are telling to a fact-based narrative? Not much, unless it’s to compete to tell more attractive lies.
I am heartily sick and tired of the NYT and their periodic safaris into the “red heartland” in an effort to understand the beating heart of Trumpism.
A couple of months ago while I was updating my cartogram and prism map software, I ran it on new data for Appalachia and the Great Plains. I often mention that the NYT would be well-served to visit someplace that has been in decline far longer. The Great Plains’ population peaked in the 1930 Census and has been declining for 90 years. Today, population density in Appalachia is a bit more than 10x the Great Plains density. Crowded :^)
A half-century ago, while I was a student at the University of Nebraska, I knew a fair number of kids from the Great Plains portion of the state. All of them were there to get a degree and find a job anywhere other than home (or places like it). Still going on today: outside of Omaha, Lincoln, and their suburbs, the state is shrinking.
But if you’re gonna basically hate the people who are actually trying to help out, it’s gonna take a lot more time, and be a lot harder.
I’m just utterly bemused by this phenomenon. I cannot get my head round it at all. If it is a matter of deep identification with “people like us”, on cultural wedge issues, to the extent that it trumps any actual chance of bettering your lives and circumstances, I cannot imagine how one can change that. If Ubu’s Big Beautiful Bill is going to result in your losing your Medicaid, while billionaires get tax cuts, and you’re still supporting Ubu and his project….how? what? why? OK, I know they never thought leopards would actually eat THEIR faces, but what does it take to change that support?
And now we actually have to listen to them talking about insurrection? Jesus F Christ.
I’m interested in the title of her book, which is ‘Stolen Pride’. Thanks for sharing that. I found the Guardian review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/06/arlie-hochschild-pride-paradox-appalachia-politics
which mentions that the author’s notion of a ‘pride economy’, so the question presumes that some undefined liberal/progressive agent reached out and stole something and that some sort of restitution needs to be made to make them whole.
I am heartily sick and tired of the NYT and their periodic safaris into the “red heartland” in an effort to understand the beating heart of Trumpism. It’s not helpful, and in fact is condescending and offensive. Not to me, to the folks they are “analyzing”.
Mind you, I don’t think I agree with this. Unless you talk to people who feel like this, against their own interests, I can’t think the Dems will ever find a solution to getting their message across to the people whose votes they need.
That’s if votes are even going to be relevant in 2026, and 2028.
Mind you, I don’t think I agree with this. Unless you talk to people who feel like this, against their own interests, I can’t think the Dems will ever find a solution to getting their message across to the people whose votes they need.
The Dems get their message across to many. They lost in ’16 and ’24 by a a combination of slim margins and electoral flukes…a mere whisker. This whole line of argument I find baffling…why, when Clinton and Obama each won twice, did I not see anybody at my door asking me what it would take to get me to vote for the thugs who call themselves republicans.
There are leaners of all types, no?
Now ask yourself, why no “cletus safaris” in ’92, ’96, ’08, ’12, and ’20 going deep into the recalcatrant voter areas in the black heartland of Missippippi, or urban San Franciso?
Thanks,
bobbyp said something related to I would try to say if I weren’t in babysitting mode. But I can drop a quote from Children of Dune here that seems relevant:
The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance.
Thinking of each voter as a “whole system…” and Dems trying to tailor their message to MAGA People as “an assault on … conscious elements”* — whether it could work any time in the next several millennia who knows, but it seems to me that Dems’ energies would be far better spent figuring out how to talk to fence-sitters, non-voters, younger people who haven’t gotten stuck in any particular political space yet … pretty much anyone but the hard-core MAGA voters that the cletus safari people love so much.
Here’s a link relevant to, among other things, how many eligible voters there are who are not hardcore MAGA types (I think this link came from bobbyp….?)
https://www.weekendreading.net/p/the-re-emerging-anti-maga-majority
*This goes for efforts like “white fragility.” Directly telling people they’re “bad, stupid, and/or wrong” [as a workshop leader once phrased it] seems to me to be the best possible way to cement them in their positions immovably.
PS: 2026 elections? Ha ha. And once we miss one….
Separate but related thought train: In moments of discouragement long ago (long before Clickbait ran for office) I used to muse on the possibility that this country is actually too big and diverse to govern effectively. Now I’m wondering if it’s too big and diverse to take over / obliterate effectively.
Last night I looked up stats related to population density for the US now and Germany in the 1930s. I’m not at home and don’t have time/attention to look them up again, but the continental US is about 25 times as big as Germany (not counting Alaska and Hawaii), and the population density is maybe a third (or less?) of what Germany’s was pre-WWII. (Although I was shocked at how high that population actually was.)
And that’s to say nothing of cultural, regional, and ethnic diversity….
If I had to bet a nickel, I’d bet that we don’t have elections again any time soon, but that Clickbait and his minions and handlers never manage to consolidate their power over the longer term, either. What happens in the meantime and where the US ends up in the longer term I have no idea, and I don’t really expect to live to see it. I grieve for nous’s “people of the future” ….
*****
Also not unrelated, Digby quoting James Fallows on a different comparison from the frequent references to fascism and Nazis, i.e. the Cultural Revolution in China:
https://digbysblog.net/2025/06/09/the-china-syndrome/
The Times essay by the author is illuminating (gift link below). The crux is this, these folks (currently) value their cultural priors way more than any rational appeals to public policy (cf giving all our wealth to people who already have way too much of it). Insofar as this take more or less matches reality (make your case), “meeting them where they are” is essentially hopeless.
There were a couple folks described in the essay that could possibly be reached….but the question is this: What price are you willing to pay to get them to come over to “our” side?
The rest? I am truly sorry, but their intoleranace and ignorance should be met with unyeilding white hot opposition.
They are the enemy.
They revel in it.
They radiate hate and grievance. Return fire with fire. There are greener voter pastures elsewhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/opinion/trump-supporters-kentucky.html?smid=url-share
20% of Kentucky’s white (a tell to those who pay attention) 5th District still found a way to vote for Democrats. That’s who we need to reach out to to shore them up and provide resources for them to fight the fight and let them know we are with them and THEY shall NOT be abandoned. If you want to “meet them where they are” you need to allocate a lot more resources to our allies who are already there.
LGM thread on this–many sides make their case:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/stolen-pride
Be kind.
Also not unrelated, Digby quoting James Fallows on a different comparison from the frequent references to fascism and Nazis, i.e. the Cultural Revolution in China:
The parallels to the Cultural Revolution have been obvious for some time. I’m hoping our case doesn’t go that far. Not to mention that long — at least Trump is unlikely to live as long as Mao did, which probably means fewer years for our disaster.
I have no time for the endless media post-mortems of Democratic messaging failures not because Democratic messaging isn’t in need of help, but rather because what the American people need is a realignment of the political discourse. Republicans have blown up the norms and protocols. They are not even bothering to cover it up anymore, and too many voters continue to act as if the Republicans are still the party of small business, and the rule of law – when everything they do is an attack on the very grounds that make those things possible.
Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to talk as if those norms and protocols can be restored just by refusing to give them up – the government is just out of balance.
No.
Democrats need to forge a new coalition around a new vision of the common good. They need a fresh vision of what the Constitution and the Declaration promise that rings true with the documents and shines a spotlight on the weak, terrified, ravenous, hollow heart of the modern GOP and drive a stake into it.
That, or we need to take a sledge to the parts of the constitution that have been hollowed out by years of termite infestations and put in some new walls and framing that will support the load.
‘Cause this house is crumbling.
I wonder if it might be useful to take a look at what happened in China after the Cultural Revolution. How did they go about walking back what had been happening? What process was involved in establishing a different direction for society?
Not to say that we want to do the same sorts of things here. Nor that it wouldn’t be far better to avoid going down that path if we can possibly avoid it. But we might consider the potential of avoiding the traditional American Not Invented Here syndrome. Why reinvent the wheel?
I wonder if it might be useful to take a look at what happened in China after the Cultural Revolution. How did they go about walking back what had been happening? What process was involved in establishing a different direction for society?
Well, the first thing they did was to pin everything on the Gang of Four, which included Mao’s widow, so if I were Melania or Vance, I’d be careful.
Nor that it wouldn’t be far better to avoid going down that path if we can possibly avoid it.
Too late.
Should has said “further down that path”
I think we’re at the point where a lot of people are gonna get hurt before anything gets better.
Everyone is gonna have to make their own assessment of what they are willing to risk. And we don’t have to look at China to find historical parallels, we have a rich history of our own.
Now I’m wondering if it’s too big and diverse to take over / obliterate effectively…. Last night I looked up stats related to population density for the US now and Germany in the 1930s.
Consider the rural Great Plains (white counties in this map). 520,000 square miles — that’s 55% larger than California, Oregon, and Washington combined. East-west width ranges from 300 to 600 miles. The average population density is 9.9 people per square mile. 231 of those 360 counties have a population below 7.0 people per square mile. That’s the standard definition used for “frontier” in US history. The frontier is expanding: there were several more frontier counties in the 2020 census than in 2010. Only ten of those counties have a population >100,000.
How do you “occupy” something like that?
How do you “occupy” something like that?
Concentration obviously. Only one residential area per county and an obligation to report there in person at least twice a week.
Small farms should be abolished anyway for efficiency’s sake. Since collectivation is un-American, they have to be eminently domained and then privatised in huge chunks. The former owners will be either moved to the county residential area or bound to the soil (and tagged, so they can be located at any time).
Hartmut, the thing is, the family farm is a serious minority of the farm acreage. Has been for decades. They do still exist, but big industrial operations are the norm already.
As farm equipment becomes autonomous, fewer people will be needed in the Great Plains. Even now, tractor, combine, and other operators spend just some of their time keeping track of things and tweaking the controls. They can spend the rest watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, babysitting their kids, etc.
I think the Great Plains could make a comeback if the government broke up Big Ag and supported carbon-negative farming. I know a lot of Millennials who are locked out of the housing market who would be willing to give permaculture farming a shot.
It’s the culture war that makes the Great Plains unattractive. How to change that is a bigger conundrum.
I know a lot of Millennials who are locked out of the housing market who would be willing to give permaculture farming a shot.
And… immigrants.
And… immigrants.
Sounds like a plan. I’m for it.
The automated tractor/combine operations need to give way to no-plow mixed farming practices. Those can be managed with tech as well, but it’s a more hands-on sort of tech.
I recommend reading The Blue Plate – by Mark J Easter. He’s done a lot of work on this out of Colorado State University.
Hartmut, the thing is, the family farm is a serious minority of the farm acreage. Has been for decades. They do still exist,
A few exist or find it much easier to exist because they have a YouTube channel that may generate more income than their farm.
I am subscribed to one of those YouTube channels
https://www.youtube.com/@FarmCraft101
Concerning family farms, I thought it was obvious that my post was satirical in nature.
Just FYI in the face of the breathless coverage of Unrest In Los Angeles!!! – yeah, no. Not that big a deal. Nothing much is threatened. Crowds are all manageable. LAPD is handling looters with their usual loving care.
101 was stopped for a little, but I routinely avoid the 101 because it’s often an eight lane parking lot in that area.
Outside of a couple two block radius areas everything is completely normal. And in those two block areas there is nothing that threatens to spill out of control or grow larger.
Don’t believe the hype.
Don’t believe the hype.
Unfortunately, as we saw with the George Floyd “riots”, it only takes a handful of anarchists and thugs to make a huge, peaceful, protest look like a massive riot. And a “riot” makes much more riveting TV “live-from-the-scene” reporting.
Yep. Only a couple of dozen people died and a few billion dollars in damages.
More to the point of what’s likely to happen, and related to what wj said at 8:30, what we believe — hype or reality — is irrelevant to what is going to happen. (Unless someone knows some magic words that will wake us all up from the current nightmare.)
The whole point of the hype is to justify the next thing….
*****
I think i’ve told the story here of going into a store in Augusta a couple of years after the George Floyd protests. The person who waited on me was from Portland (the other one, i.e. Oregon) and was about to take his Maine girlfriend home to meet his family. He was afraid about the devastation he was going to see when he got there. Like, a dumpster burned somewhere during the protests? But he was dead serious.
a few billion dollars in damages
More complicated than it might seem on the surface. Surprise surprise.
I think the Great Plains could make a comeback if the government broke up Big Ag and supported carbon-negative farming. I know a lot of Millennials who are locked out of the housing market who would be willing to give permaculture farming a shot.
Respectfully, I have to disagree.
Historically, perhaps a third of the Great Plains has ever been plowed, another third grazed, and the last third won’t support enough forage to run livestock. The western half of the GP is too arid for dry land farming of any sort — without irrigation it’s nothing. Driving through northeast Colorado on I-76 where it parallels the South Platte river is educational. On the river side of the highway things are green and all summer long you can watch the irrigation systems that keep it that way run. On the other side, sagebrush and bunch grass steppe, with lots of crusty ground showing. No fences because there’s not enough forage for livestock.
Lubbock, TX got its start growing irrigated cotton. Take a look at this picture. In the center is Lubbock-area cotton grown with just natural precipitation. Off to the left is cotton grown with heavy irrigation. In dry years, that stunted cotton would be dead.
Climate warming is just going to make things worse. A couple degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and almost every year will be a dry year. The Poppers were largely correct: “Greatest failed agricultural experiment in history.”
Lubbock, TX got its start growing irrigated cotton.
Also largely true of Phoenix, AZ. Imagine growing cotton there without irrigation. (Not the Great Plains, but still…)
I’ve sometimes thought it might be good to identify all the non-arable land in the Plains and set up a buffalo reserve. Just let them roam and graze and do their thing.
Manage it as a national asset and let people go in and hunt some to manage population, like we do with deer.
My assumption is that this is a total non-starter for about a hundred reasons, but it seemed sensible, to me.
But I don’t live in the Plains.
Also wanted to mention that small acreage farming is not-uncommon here in New England. Mostly because there are not many large holdings available any more due to development etc.
In my county (Essex County, MA) there are some grandfathered farmsteads that were purchased by a non-profit, who then leased the land to farming families. The biggest one is 1,000 acres, most are smaller, some much smaller.
It’s a pretty successful program. They all run CSA’s, sell at local farmers markets and at their own farm stands, some raise stock for meat. The food is really good, and they’re pretty popular.
It’s probably the only way to make small scale farming viable, at least in my country. The pressure from land prices is insane.
As you go west in the state, there are more small farms that are actually owned by the folks who farm them. A surprising amount of the state (and of New England in general) is rural.
You just gotta get west of Worcester.
On the “Original Topic”, we haven’t got close enough to the MD50 for schadenfreude for any definite conclusions, so many more failures of Trump will be on the schedule.
FDA (what’s left of it) is ON IT.
You just gotta get west of Worcester.
Clears throat to say: “Or north of Portsmouth.”
https://modernsurvivalblog.com/lifestyle/northeast-population-density/
Maine comes within a hair of having as much land area as the rest of NE combined.
Fascinating agricultural stats here. VT pulls way beyond its tiny size in total farmland (almost as much as Maine). I imagine lots of sugarbush acreage… 😉
And Maine has a lot of probably unfarmable forestland as well.
Yeah. My musings were less about the population density and more about the revitalization of small cities and surrounding farmland in the viable areas. Sustainable farming practices are going to require a lot more human oversight than the factory farming practices that are exhausting the soil and causing massive carbon release.
The good news is that a lot of the farmland that had been depleted in the past with traditional farming practices (plowing) can probably be recuperated with modern regenerative soil management. Give people a subsidy for carbon farming – their crop could be partly measured in how much carbon they can sequester in their soil and a bounty paid on that.
RIP Brian Wilson. Responsible for an indelible American sound, and a huge part of my youth.
Indeed, GftNC. I remember listening to this tune long long ago in a different time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwgGuadsqyo
Well, hell.
And I can never decide whether it’s Good Vibrations or God Only Knows in my desert island discs…
(a radio show which has been running in the UK for many decades, you only get eight).
The good news is that a lot of the farmland that had been depleted in the past with traditional farming practices (plowing) can probably be recuperated with modern regenerative soil management.
My BIL is a successful family farmer in central Kansas. He’s in an odd place — not quite far enough west to need irrigation to survive, but far enough west that you have to have a certain volume to make it work. He has a couple square miles. He could have more — for years, the kids he went to high school with who inherited their fathers’ land when the old men died have offered him a discount price before they sell to the corporates. He tells me that he walks the property, takes lots of soil samples, has a lab test them. His most common response is, “Your dad absolutely ruined the soil. It’s not worth the decade it would take me get it uniformly productive again.” He does the same on his own land every couple years, and pays for computer controls for some of the equipment so it works in organic material where the map says it’s needed, stuff to balance the pH, even out nitrogen, etc.
Last time we talked he listed off his revenue sources: (1) the federal government says some of the land can be farmed, but since he doesn’t agree, he lets them pay him to leave it fallow; (2) he pays a market advisor to steer him to specialty wheat that’s going to be in demand; (3) the family has accumulated enough capital equipment that they can sell services (eg, custom cutting); (4) the younger son is a genius at keeping old diesel equipment running, a talent in high demand now that the equipment vendors make independent repair of new gear impossible; and (5) fully grass-fed beef that goes into the pipeline of small slaughter, small butcher, and higher-end restaurants.
He says the services are surprisingly lucrative some years. Now that cutting wheat is in the hands of big corporations, they won’t leave a crew behind if unexpected rain means the fields are too wet the week they’re coming through a particular county. He can charge a premium to cut ten days later.
It’s been several years since I’ve been back there. The last time, his wife asked if anyone had seen her son. Someone told her that yes, Adam and Mike were in the kitchen discussing politics. When she crashed through the back door, she had obviously run the whole way, thinking that there would be blood on the floor. Adam and I were having a pleasant conversation agreeing on the evils of giant corporate intellectual property, and how “right to repair” was a right worth fighting for.
(a radio show which has been running in the UK for many decades, you only get eight)
Linda Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time”. Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. Second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks”. We can discuss the other four.
My desert island discs change every time I go back to reconstruct a list. I could live with:
Peter Gabriel – The Rhythm of the Heat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7w1SrtNwHc
Dead Can Dance – Yulunga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ariSCwZp_Lc
Opeth – Blackwater Park
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4xCb_OU_lM
The Cure – A Forest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbAxbmAHgx4
Michael Hedges – i carry your heart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwczXm64eRk
Maria McKee – Breathe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdJOpb6dJlY
Sólstafir – Ótta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRHuvk-fzwo
Cynic – Veil of Maya
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMn9T9OkRYA
Mine changes from time to time too. But it would definitely include:
1. Paul Robeson – Lindy Lou
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHG_VK1tFHs
2. Joan Baez – Silver Dagger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xlmb8gG7HU
3. Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwOfCgkyEj0
4. Beach Boys – God Only Knows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u90beUXTKwo
That’s all I am pretty sure of at the moment. If I were going to include any Handel (which I’m not) it would be the Water Music. There’d possibly (probably) be more Dylan, (maybe singing Girl from the North Country with Johnny Cash – it’s my handle for a reason), maybe some Janis Joplin (Piece of My Heart).
Over and out.
There are songs I like when I hear them, but I don’t have any particular favorites.
Here is a stab at the eight most popular songs from 1960 to the present. Depending on the metrics you use several of them may be in that range.
The Beatles – “Hey Jude” (1968)
Queen – “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975)
Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean” (1983)
ABBA – “Dancing Queen” (1976)
Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee – “Despacito” (2017)
The Weeknd – “Blinding Lights” (2019)
Journey – “Don’t Stop Believin’” (1981)
Ed Sheeran – “Shape of You” (2017)
This is more my style. 🙂
Well, my Senator has now been handcuffed and arrested for asking a question at Puppykiller Barbie’s press conference…
The gifs are all over bsky at the moment.
…okay, not arrested, but wrestled to the ground, cuffed, and detained.
Israel is not our ally. We should not have armed them after the first several weeks in Gaza showed they were dropping bombs on apartment buildings.
And now they attacked Iran, no doubt expecting us to help them.
Dump them. Netanyahu will do anything to stay in power. We should stop this “ ironclad” support. All this support has taught them they can do anything and we will help them.
What Trump will do is anybody’s guess.
What did Iran ever do to anyone?
Maybe make an argument rather than play these stupid sarcasm games, malicious feathered entuty.
Iran has a terrible human rights record internally. They supported Assad. They supported Hezbollah which supported Assad. They supported Hamas which opposed Assad. They supported the Houthis.
We supported the Saudis, another country with a bad human rights record, and their bombing and blockade which we supported killed nearly 400,000 people. Currently we are supporting an apartheid state committing genocide.
Do you have something serious to say or is yet another stupid war that could spiral out of control a source of amusement to you?
And frankly,up to this point, Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis seem saber than the U.S. and Israel. That is not a compliment given the very low bar here.
Bomb Iran
Saner , not saber.
What did Iran ever do to anyone?
Well, at the start of the American military action in Afghanistan, Iran offered us full, free, transit for military supplies. (In contrast to Pakistan, which charged us tens of millions — a chunk of which the Pakistanis funneled to the Taliban to fund fighting against us.)
Too bad we didn’t accept. We didn’t even admit we had received the offer.
The Middle East might be quite different today. And Russia might not have Shahed drones to attack Ukraine.
So Israel can do whatever it wants without any tangible consequences, because … ? Not that I’m surprised.
PS Let’s ignore the trolls.
Also interesting: the immediate calls to deescelate and the stern warnings to Iran not to inflame the situation. It’s almost as if “the right to defend oneself” doesn’t apply to everyone.
It’s almost as if “the right to defend oneself” doesn’t apply to everyone.
That’s what turned the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary into a World War.
Several powers were of the opinion that the k.u.k. monarchy was no part of the major power club anymore and thus hadn’t the right anymore to punish a minor one in self-defense. In modern terms: Austria was no longer Ledeen-entitled and thus the country’s reaction to the Sarajevo incident was illegitimate, although the assassination plot was organized by the Serbian intelligence service and the Serbian government was purely stonewalling.
To be clear: neither the Israeli nor the Iranian leadership should be seen as in any way the ‘good’ guys. It’s rather mini-Adolf and mikro-Joseph getting into a fight (with torches in the powder magazine).
Iran was developing nukes during the Biden administration. While also calling for and threatening the destruction of Israel. There might be a connection between the two. What other options did Israel have?
Novakant–did Israel have the right to destroy Hamas after 10/7?
Israel had the option of supporting the original treaty that Obama negotiated which Trump withdrew from and in fact leading Israeli military figures disagreed with Trump and Netanyahu. And now that Trump seemingly wanted a deal, Netanyahu has decided to manipulate Trump into supporting this unnecessary war. He didn’t have to do that. But it is better for his own future.
Biden, unfortunately, was not serious about bringing that treaty back— he continued to use Trump’s sanctions in an attempt at producing a treaty that would roll back Iranian influence. He failed. Iran quite rationally has continued to enrich uranium, realizing that a treaty with the U.S. is not worth the paper it is written on. The Europeans look on uselessly. The only good thing about Trump might be that they will stop being our pathetic lapdogs and stop following our lead in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The Iranians have probably learned the lesson of North Korea— if you have missiles carrying nuclear warheads people are afraid of launching a bombing campaign. Western professions about the virtues of human rights and diplomacy are so much hot air and can’t be relied upon. The next election and poof— the treaty is gone. And don’t count on the next Democrat to bring it back.
If you want peace you have to negotiate with unpleasant people and give up the idea that you can have everything your own way. And as it happens, Israel is deeply unpleasant, and it isn’t just Bibi, but it isn’t going anywhere. The Saudis are terrible. Iran is terrible. The U.S. sucks. European leaders have largely been worthless or worse. Maybe we should take the Bibi approach and bomb everyone we don’t like and have the added benefit of distracting from our domestic failures.
The only possible bright side here is that Trump feels the need to claim the U.S. had nothing to do with it, but I am not getting my hopes up. Trump is a bully. He is also inconsistent and what he says today could change tomorrow.
Btw, according to the pro- Palestinian accounts I read on Twitter, Israel just imposed an almost total blackout on internet connections from Gaza. If true, gosh, I wonder if they might do something bad while the world is focused on Iran?
They could, of course, allow Western journalists in so they could see firsthand what is happening. I crack myself up sometimes.
So Iran rationally threatens Israel’s destruction and rationally develops nukes–no one is claiming their program was not a weapons program–and rationally expects Israel to just wait around for the bomb to go off? Makes sense.
So Trump’s “Art of the Deal” boils down to “do as I say or I’ll have the Israelis hit you over the head with a shovel” – great moments in the annals of diplomacy:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/13/israel-iran-strikes-defence-minister-tehran-middle-east-live?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-684bf9928f08d7fb8602e0c7#block-684bf9928f08d7fb8602e0c7
There was a treaty which was working,— Trump and Netanyahu undermined it and Biden was never serious about bringing it back. Somehow, you keep missing that point. Strange.
The Iranian government talks tough, but throughout its history they have been extremely cautious about getting into an all- out war. This isn’t because they are nice guys. It is because they know they would be killed. They don’t seem very competent. This attack was telegraphed and some of their leading scientists and leaders were killed.
But sure, feathered one, if you choose to ignore the facts which undermine your position you can win every argument. But that is called “ trolling” and I am not going to waste any more time acting like you are capable of more than that.
Meanwhile, Trump has basically endorsed the attack and the U.S. probably contributed to it in some way whether they admit it or not.
And while all this is going on, no doubt Israel will continue its humanitarian efforts in Gaza, which seem to involve shooting a lot of civilians.
Why are we allied with these idiots?
Why are we allied with these idiots?
I’m not sure “allied” is really accurate these days. Once upon a time, sure. But today, “blindly support” is probably a more accurate description of our behavior. With “demand blind support” the Israeli side.
An ally would have at least have given us a heads up in advance. Probably have had discussions about what kind of support would be provided. Not that anybody but an utter fool would do something like that with Trump. Operational security isn’t his thing.
Not everyone shares the current Progressive take on our relationship with Israel, but that is not the discrete issue at hand. You argue, if I’m getting you, that Iran talks tough but is basically incompetent and afraid so therefore Israel should not worry excessively about Iran getting nukes, and certainly not to the point of pre-empting.
Imagine Israel pre-emptively invading Gaza out of fear of a country wide assault on soft targets, pre-10/7. You and and everyone hear would have insisted that The rationale was pretextual and unfounded.
Post 10/7, Israel isn’t going to take unnecessary risks. You can thank Hamas and Irans theocrats for that.
The Hamas of to-day is the illegitimate child of Bibi and Persian Gulf authoritarian leaders, created to split the Palestinians. As late as mid-2024 Bibi allowed funneling of money from the Gulf to Hamas.
Now Bibi’s gang openly talks about arming rival islamists in Gaza as a counterweight to Hamas. What could go wrong there? Will he rearm ISIS next to counter all in one the new counter to Hamas, the new Syrian government and Iran? What comes after the Devil and Beelzebub? In the end obviously Azrael in person but how fast exactly?
Not everyone shares the current Progressive take on our relationship with Israel,
I’m not sure we exactly share the “Progressive take” on Israel. But there are definitely some of us conservatives who find the behavior of Netanyahu, and the current Israeli government, horrifying when it comes to Gaza.
For those pedantic about such things, “genocide” (as usually defined) may be hard to establish. But there’s no question that ethnic cleansing is in progress.
Post 10/7, Israel isn’t going to take unnecessary risks.
But what if bombing Iran was an unnecessary risk?
Imagine Israel pre-emptively invading Gaza out of fear of a country wide assault on soft targets, pre-10/7. You and and everyone hear would have insisted that The rationale was pretextual and unfounded.
Holy crap…you have a great point there. We should nuke Russia and China into oblivion immediately. Thanks for your brilliant insight.
The funny (not “ha! ha!” funny) thing is that Israeli intelligence should have been able to figure out what Hamas was up to before the 10/7 attack. Who knows? Maybe they did, but Bibi wanted a good excuse to destroy Gaza, so they didn’t do anything to stop it. I know, that’s very cynical.
Feathered entity—
It is weird how you keep missing an essential point three times now.
There was a treaty in place that prevented Iran from enriching uranium to the point where they could make nuclear weapons and mechanisms in place to verify it. Trump abrogated the treaty and Netanyahu was glad.
Read that until you get it.
I think you keep avoiding this point because it shows that Netanyahu has always wanted a war with Iran, with the US backing Israel. He does not want a verifiable treaty.
Iran has repeatedly shown that while it jus perfectly willing to support terrorism and commit human rights violations against its own people, they have had no interest in getting into an all out war and they were willing to sign the treaty putting limits on their nuclear program. It is Israel and the U.S. which are the problem here. Netanyahu and Trump created the problem and Netanyahu wanted the war, he has wanted it for decades. He was saying Iran would have the Bomb within a few years decades ago.
There is a good chance they will get one now.
As for Gaza, some time you should look at what Israel was doing in 2018-2019. But yes, I was shocked by what Hamas did. I was expecting an explosion in the West Bank where Israel was and is supporting right wing fanatical settlers. Oct 7, however, should not have been possible. In that case it was a stunning display of Israeli incompetence. They are very good at shooting unarmed people though— gotta give them that.
Back to Iran. There was no need to trust them. I wouldn’t. ( I don’t trust Israel either, of course.) There were verification mechanisms in place. The political right didn’t like the treaty because it didn’t restrict Iran’s other bad behaviors but nobody is restricting Israel or the Saudis either.
Israel would have the Western world completely on its side if they had kept control off the West
The funny (not “ha! ha!” funny) thing is that Israeli intelligence should have been able to figure out what Hamas was up to before the 10/7 attack. Who knows? Maybe they did
Reports were being sent up the line for days by the Israeli female border guards in the towers, who observed the extremely suspicious and suggestive pre-10/7 preparation movements over the border. They were of course ignored, and several were murdered, and some raped and abducted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67958260
Donald, BBB has to ignore the Ubu-abrogated treaty, because it is so inconvenient for his/her argument. It is part of the RWNJ or at least Trump-adjacent mindset to imagine that anybody who criticises current Israeli behaviour (or previous settlements etc) must also be trying to exculpate Hamas, Iran et al. I would say that inability to understand real complexity is a major feature…
Donald, of course, everyone knows that Iran keeps its promises. However, despite keeping its promises not to enrich weapons grade uranium, it apparently did so. Maybe by accident. It didn’t do all of this in the last 3 months. Very strange.
And yes, Iran without nukes has not started a war. So far. Japan didn’t start a war until it did. Ditto Germany. The way war works is, there is peace until there isn’t. After 10/7, the awful Israelis don’t seem to be in a chance-taking mood. It makes no sense.
Yup, I think given the consistent use of condescension and sarcasm, and ignoring of inconvenient history, timelines and facts in general, we might be well advised to do as novakant initially advised and stop feeding the trolls.
Bird
I don’t know if you are really this clueless or just a troll, but the JCPOA did not depend on trusting Iran. Once Trump renounced the treaty, Iran eventually started enriching uranium. This situation where Iran probably has near weapons grade level uranium is mostly the fault of Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent decades claiming Iran was going to have the Bomb any minute now and he finally has the war he wants and of course we are supposed to help him.
I am tired of your nonsense, so I will stop feeding you after this, You can make some other comment that has nothing to do with the facts.
And congratulations on the wonderful new unnecessary war we are in. It should distract attention from the slaughter in Gaza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action
Sarcasm for me but not for thee. D-do you have actual evidence that Iran was behaving properly prior to Trump any got out of line post-Trump? I’d like to see it.
I would also appreciate your insight on Iran’s failure to comply with IAEA requirements and how that failure aligns with your belief that Iran was and remain treaty-compliant
Another note: it’s not much of a war. Iran is now fully exposed as toothless. This is good, at least potentially. It is a theocracy suppressing a secular majority. Given its oppression of women and gays, the Progressive bias is strikingly strange.
Finally, why should Israel take advice from a political quarter that is, at a minimum, ambivalent on the topic of Israel’s survival as a Jewish state?
And there we have it: sarcasm free discussion.
Well, I’ll leave it to Donald (if he can be bothered) to address the pre- and post-treaty details. But given your willingness to abandon, if only momentarily, your astonishingly unpleasant tone, I would like to address this:
Finally, why should Israel take advice from a political quarter that is, at a minimum, ambivalent on the topic of Israel’s survival as a Jewish state?
I don’t know which “political quarter” you are talking about (your insistence on the Progressive label reminds me of the late lamented McKT), but on the offchance you are talking about people here, I would like to say that a) I personally have a considerable reason as a Jew and someone with Holocaust-survivor relatives living there, for wishing for Israel’s survival, and in a two-state solution why not as a Jewish state, and b) to me, and I guess to most people here, wishing “Israel” well is quite different to approving the actions of its current leadership, which has done it more damage than anyone else in my lifetime (and I am about to turn 70), not excepting Hamas.
And, personally again, my extreme aversion to the current Iranian regime (largely on the grounds of the oppression you note) makes my sympathy to it at the moment rather limited. But this does not apply to civilian deaths, and certainly my lack of sympathy does not alter the fact that the result of the Israeli actions over the last days might well be far-reaching and extremely damaging to world stability. And, in general and to put it mildly, I am in favour of nations acting within the law and not taking preventive, as opposed to preemptive, hostile military actions against other nations.
Ok, that’s. Fair.
Bird, you show no evidence of being able to understand anything that goes against your views and that isn’t sarcasm.
Iran, as it turns out, does have missiles that can get through iron dome. According to the NYT, the Iranians were fooled into thinking Israel wouldn’t attack if at all until after the next round of peace talks. So they think Trump tricked them. Trump talks as if that is true. This of course adds to our reputation as a country which can’t be trusted.
Gftnc—
I could support either a 1 state solution with equal rights for everyone or a 2 state solution but right now both seem beyond reach. Right now I support a no genocide no terrorism and no apartheid and no pogroms by either side as a temporary fix.
What I used to think was a 2ss with porous borders was possible with people going back and forth the way I think it used to be with Canada and the U.S.
Back in the 90’s that seemed maybe possible. Both Hamas and the Israeli right did their best to mess it up and there used to be a debate about who messed up the 2000-2001 talks ( both sides did).
I can’t see how it gets better unless Western countries band together and use sanctions to force Israel to be reasonable. Hamas will be around but if there is peace and a bit of freedom I suspect most people in Gaza despise their ( surviving) leaders and will say so. I don’t buy the human shield excuse the Israelis use every time they blow up some tents or an apartment complex or demolish enter neighborhoods but Hamas clearly picked a fight knowing they had zero ability to defend people from 2000 lb bombs. And everyone knows this.
If western governments had the will they could probably force this on Israel with the carrot of recognition from Arab states, which was Biden’s idea except they were comfortable with arming Israel to blow up Hamas and kill tens of thousands of civilians to get there.
But we have Trump, who aside from being a narcissist and a bully is also an idiot.
Right now I support a no genocide no terrorism and no apartheid and no pogroms by either side as a temporary fix.
Donald: with you all the way.
the way I think it used to be with Canada and the U.S.
Within my living memory. I think it changed gradually, but 911 really deep-sixed it.
the late lamented McKT
That’s you metaphorically speaking, right?
…porous borders was possible with people going back and forth the way I think it used to be with Canada and the U.S.
It totally was. About the only way I noticed that I’d crossed the border was that the distance signs on the freeway were suddenly in kilometers.
Even today, things are pretty loose. Last summer we took a cruise from Seattle up the Inside Passage to Alaska. On the way back, we necessarily stopped in Victoria.** There were signs about customs, etc. But no sign of anyone bothering to check passports or anything else. Nobody checked when we docked in Seattle either, even though we’d just come from Canada.
I even seem to recall stories, back in the day, of farmers who had fields straddling the border. Plowing, planting, and harvesting could entail crossing the border a couple dozen times in a day. And nobody gave it a second thought.
** Ships stop in Victoria because that makes the trip “international.” Thus avoiding the stupidity of the Jones Act, which says that all domestic shipping must be on ships that are US-built, owned, and crewed. Good luck with that — the US produces less than 5 commercial ships a year.
Does the “last 3 months” mean triple B doesn’t know tRump pulled out of the nuclear deal during his first term, in 2018?
Hamas clearly picked a fight knowing they had zero ability to defend people from 2000 lb bombs.
And zero intention of defending. There’s propaganda value to having a lot of dead civilians.
There are bomb shelters all over Israel. None in Gaza. Hamas leaders have said the tunnels are for Hamas, not civilians.
It’s difficult to reach lasting agreements with death cults.
That’s you metaphorically speaking, right?
Yes, as far as I know (and hope) he is still alive. But I have confessed before that I would like to know these days how he has made sense (given how he ridiculed us) of the Trumpian vendettas against e.g. law firms who represented his opponents, Harvard et al. Not to mention the obvious and imminent threats to democracy, and continuing admiration for authoritarian leaders, all enthusiastically endorsed by the GOP. In fact, as I said some months ago, I found myself paradoxically wishing he had not been so completely wrong about everything. Mind you, as we all know, he would be taking an almost identical view of the Israel/Gaza/Iran situation to that of BidBadBird. I have wondered…but the style is rather different.
Not to mention…
Not to mention that he accused us (on the basis of what the usual phantoms in his head said) of approving of Hamas’s killing of children. Pretty bitter irony there if you’ve been watching what came after.
I’m sure he’d have some clever lawyerly way of saying I’m all wrong yet again, and he was right from start to finish, but I’m not interested in hearing it. Nor is his absence lamented, at least by me. He was a vicious bully, and any time any of us spent responding to the accusations generated by his fever dreams was precious minutes of our lives wasted. Just like with any troll.
Assassination of a Democratic state representative and attempted assassination of a Democratic state senator in the NW suburbs of Minneapolis. Manhunt ongoing:
https://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-police-searching-for-suspect-in-multiple-targeted-shootings/601372993
I expect more of this still to come.
Hoping my past comparisons of our situation to post-Tito Yugoslavia are not going to prove portentous.
@nous — not that it matters particularly, but I put up a thread with a link to the earlier in the day press conference about that.
Pretty bitter irony there if you’ve been watching what came after.
God knows that’s true. And I hadn’t forgotten the mad accusation, due to (as you correctly call them) his fever dreams. I hadn’t seen him as a vicious bully, exactly, but there is no doubt that his accusations of people here bore no resemblance whatsoever to their characters or the views they clearly and articulately expressed. It was a fascinating phenomenon, and I am glad to have witnessed it, but on the whole I’m glad that people who experienced it as bullying no longer have to be subjected to that.
Will go to the dedicated thread now, but the Minnesota situation is tragic and incredibly worrying.
There was a treaty which was working,— Trump and Netanyahu undermined it and Biden was never serious about bringing it back. Somehow, you keep missing that point. Strange.
Delurking for a bit. Donald, I like hearing your point of view mainly because I don’t share it and it’s a check on my own. IMHO, you go way too far in saying Bigbadbird ignores “facts.” Frex, there was no treaty. Obama knew he couldn’t ratify it. Why call it a treaty then? It wasn’t an executive order or even a signed document. And there was tremendous opposition to the JCPOA (and the cash transfer and later asset transfers) inside the United States because it would be used on terrorism. Iran knew the deal was dependent on elections and thus not worth the “paper” it was written on from the get go. That Trump came along and reversed it wasn’t some sort of bad faith. It was, as Obama said, a “political agreement.”
As for compliance, sure, there was technical compliance initially but Obama himself noted as early as April 2016 that Iran wasn’t compliant with the “spirit” of the deal. Yeah, launching ballistic missiles, calling for the destruction of Israel, supporting terrorist proxies etc. might make one think that. And Iran reportedly tried to assassinate Trump in 2024, ordered on October 7th wasn’t it? So who undermined the “treaty” exactly? Iran KNEW what behavior the West found acceptable and what behavior was not going to fly and chose the latter. Opinions differ on the JCPOA. It never was going to stop the bomb, just slow its acquisition. If that is your definition of “working,” fine. Mine is that it was not and never was. Appeasement of Iran doesn’t work. Iran had 60 days to agree to a deal this time around. From what I understand, they refused any deal that would reduce their stockpile of highly enriched uranium below the 2015 level.
I don’t think what is happening in Gaza is genocide. War is horrific, yes. Losing women and children is horrific. I blame Hamas, whether or not Bibi played Palestinian groups against one another. It is instructive that the leadership in Iran wants to nuke the entire country of Israel because there are Jews there. They have, IMO, genocidal intent. It is imperative they not get a bomb. I don’t get this impulse to blame really, really bad acts on others (e.g. Israel’s incompetence or scheming (take your pick) made Hamas do it on 10/7; Trump and Netanyahu made Iran keep sponsoring terrorism and yelling “death to America/Israel” and enriching uranium because Trump decertified the JPCOA).
I note the surgical precision of the IDF in its strike. Maybe Tehran is lamenting its failure to place women and children around the nuclear facilities and SAM sites. Hamas would have done that and claimed genocide. IMO.
I don’t know how pointing out that there are other opinions or “facts” out there constitutes trolling. If the use of sarcasm and condescension equals trolling, well, I would say “read that until you get it” is more than a bit condescending. But I don’t think of you as a troll. And bobbyp’s 3:17 was both, but he’s no troll. I like his sharp criticism. And I love to watch battles of sarcastic wit as long as it’s not aimed at me. So carry on.
BC, thanks. That was helpful.
Donald, I think we have a situation where your take is the only take and the response to pointing out potential issues is accusations of ignorance/bad faith. BC brought the detail that my comments were missing.
Israel, post 10/7 is going to deal with its enemies differently than before. Probably in a terminal way.
That’s a fact of life and no amount of pro-Palestinian, leftish scolding is going to change that.
BC, thanks. That was helpful.
Donald, I think we have a situation where your take is the only take and the response to pointing out potential issues is accusations of ignorance/bad faith. BC brought the detail that my comments were missing.
Israel, post 10/7 is going to deal with its enemies differently than before. Probably in a terminal way.
That’s a fact of life and no amount of pro-Palestinian, leftish scolding is going to change that.
FWIW, this is what it looks like to me. I don’t really know enough about it all to even have an opinion, but somehow we always end up having one, don’t we? Here’s mine.
Iran is an ancient and sophisticated nation that is currently ruled by authoritarian theocratic bigots. We – the US and the UK – screwed them over by ousting Mossadegh (because oil and money) and foisted the Shah on them, who was a murderous bastard. He was replaced by the mullahs and things haven’t gotten any better since then. They spend enormous resources on making trouble. Their near neighbors include India, Pakistan, Russia, and Israel, all nuclear states, so I pretty much understand why they’d want a nuke, but also totally understand why it would be a bad idea for them to have one. Life would be a lot simpler for everyone if they would f****ing recognize Israel’s right to exist.
The Palestinians basically got screwed when the nation of Israel was created, and they have never really been made whole. They have also been plagued by some horrible leaders, folks who inspire them to unachievable dreams of revenge and the restoration of their former state.
Hamas, specifically, seem like freaking bloodthirsty insane maniacs to me. They are hell bent on a goal that is never, ever, ever gonna happen, and they don’t care if their own people suffer in the process of failing to realize it.
The right wing in Israel, including Netanyahu, likewise are fixated on illegitimate an unattainable goals. Or, at least, goals that are not attainable other than by becoming the kind of nation that should rightly be seen as abhorrent according to their own religious values and traditions. I’m speaking of Israel as a Jewish nation here, which I think is what they are (and which is fine).
Given Iran’s history of rhetoric and actions towards Israel, I can understand why Israel would take action to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, including possible military action (as they took against Iraq back in the day). Given the current state of the world, I think choosing to do so right now was not a great thing.
Israel’s actions In Gaza post 10/7 are, to me, horrifying. Nations have the right to defend themselves. They do not have the right to reduce other people to utter defenseless squalor and desparation. Or elimination, which is where it’s heading. Waving that away as “yes, losing women and children is horrific” just seems like the height of callousness, to me.
The russell tl;dr here is – it’s a fucking mess, with a difficult contentious tangled bloody history going back generations, and I don’t see any virtuous actors at all.
Donald’s 11:59 is the closest thing I can see to a possible way forward but I don’t know if it will happen. If it depends on Trump, probably not, because he is an ignorant fuckup, just a textbook Dunning-Kreuger incompetent idiot.
So, and I’m truly sorry to say it, I don’t see a solution. I think it’s just gonna be a living hell for a lot of people who are just trying to get through their day and their lives.
Israel, post 10/7 is going to deal with its enemies differently than before. Probably in a terminal way.
And there will be consequences to them for doing so. Because that’s how things go.
And no amount of right wing tough guy bluster is gonna change that.
Re russell at 6:42
Yup, pretty much down the line. The only addition I would make to the picture is that the region also features Saudi Arabia. Which is also ruled by authoritarian theocratic bigots. But nothing resembling civilization in its history — so no cultural memory of such. But it has had longer, and more resources, to make trouble across the Islamic world.
Bc
The agreement was meant to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It worked. Trump decided not to follow it. That didn’t work.
The spirit of the agreement? Well, if we want to get into that then I go back to talking about Obama green lighting the bombing of Yemen and Israel continuing to expand settlements and shooting unarmed demonstrators and so forth. Appeasement of Israel, keeping our support “ ironclad” didn’t work. They continue to expand settlements and practice apartheid. Appeasing us doesn’t work. We continue to arm bad actors who slaughter civilians.
So what you are describing as not working is this— Iran continued to behave badly just as our side did. Many Westerners seem to have extreme difficulty with the concept that we should be judged by the same standards we apply to our enemies.
The agreement was meant to strengthen the more Western aligned side in Iran and we don’t have total control over that but Trump came along and demonstrated that the U.S. was not interested in negotiations. Good job, I guess
Surgical precision in Iran? You wouldn’t call it that if it happened in reverse. Israel blew up apartment buildings. The war is going to get more brutal on both sides as it drags on.
As for blaming Hamas for all of Israel’s war crimes, I have little patience with this. People like me are at a disadvantage in these debates because we try to be fair to both sides— what I mean by that is that I don’t deny the atrocities of Hamas or defend the human rights record of Iran and I hold back from some of the arguments I want to make because I am not sure I can back them up. But there you go, casually putting all the blame for the civilian deaths in Gaza on Hamas.
There is no way you can mean this, Try reading some of the human rights reports. Amnesty International, for instance, closely examined 15 Israeli air strikes in Gaza and showed beyond any reasonable doubt that they were in violation of the laws of war. They bomb people’s homes at night when everyone is asleep, You blithely assume that the Israelis are civilized and would never deliberately kill civilians or bomb indiscriminately. The evidence is overwhelming that they do just that. And my gosh, read some of the things their politicians and some of their officers have said.
In peacetime they shoot civilians. In the West Bank they allow pogroms.
Oh yeah, human shields, Israel uses them regularly, They kidnap Palestinian civilians and force them to go into buildings to see if they are booby trapped or if someone is in there ready to shoot, This is habitual. Did you know that? Do you think I am making it up?
I don’t know what to say to people like yourself, except go to Human Rigths Watch or Amnesty International or B’Tselem. These are not organizations that glorify or romanticize or excuse Hamas or Iran. ( B’Tselem is strictly about the I- P,conflict.). They write reports about their crimes. And they write reports about Israel’s crimes.
Then I read someone like you and it is like no book, no human rights report, no NYT investigation ( yes they do some good work) ever was written, There are good guys and bad guys and I am just for some reason unable to grasp this.
You know what I haven’t pushed back on? I don’t know if the Iranian leaders are truly genocidal. Years ago I read that what people commonly cite has been misinterpreted, but I am not going to try and dig that up and anyway, I don’t know. I don’t trust religious fundamentalists of any sort, not saying that as a secular person because I am a believing Christian, but no fundamentalist, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, can be trusted very far. But Iranian leaders have shown a great interest in self preservation. They aren’t good people— they do want to stay alive and in power. That won’t happen if they nuke Israel. Also, I don’t really think they could justify to themselves or their followers the fact that they would be wiping out the Palestinians they were ostensibly saving. But I am not going to waste too much time on that, I don’t trust the Iranian leaders, or Hamas, or the Israeli fanatics or a corrupt man like Netanyahu, They are all bad people.
As for sarcasm, after several exchanges with Bird who kept ignoring my points except the ones he could use— I have been in
countless arguments with people like that, so don’t try and tell me that my sarcasm was unwarranted, I am not wasting another second on Bird. I have been in so many freaking arguments with right wingers who just pocket my concessions as their due and that is fine because I conceded what I think is right, and I get nothing back. Nothing.
Let me suggest a few books along with he human rights groups Avi just mentioned. And please, please read some of the human rights literature, It is just such a waste of time arguing with people who already “ know” that their side is good,
Okay from 20 years ago, there is “ Sacred Landscapes” by Meron Benvenisti, a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem. It is no longer current, but it is about what happened in 1948, which Israle,lied about for decades, No surprise— most countries have a sordid past. But I know people used to have an absurdly one- sided view of 1948 and that carries over to the present.
Then there is Avi Shlaim’s “ The Iron Wall”, also from 20 years ago. Then Sandy Tolan’s “ The Lemon Tree”, which is about the conflict from the viewpoint of two families, one group Holocaust survivors and the other family survivors of the Nakba ( no, not equating them).
“ Avi just”
Another weird spellcheck thing. I just mentioned the human rights orgs, Avi Shlaim is not in the thread.
did Israel have the right to destroy Hamas after 10/7?
That wasn’t addressed to me, but I want to answer it. So I will.
In international law, any nation has the right to use its military might as it pleases, subject to some rules about treatment of civilians, which Israel has broken.
Let me ask a question from another time. During the Troubles, Irish Republicans perpetrated many terrorist attacks, in England as well as in Northern Ireland. They tried to kill me, without actually knowing who I am – terrorism is like that. It’s certain that they were funded by sympathisers in the USA. So let me ask you: did the UK have the right to send troops into Boston to put a stop to that?
did Israel have the right to destroy Hamas after 10/7?
I tend to avoid I/P discussions, because all I can bring is sarcasm, but Hartmut pointed out and it may have been missed that Israel boosted up Hamas as a way of undercutting the PLO. I’m not sure what is the ‘best’ link for this, but these two pieces covers the basics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
So if you ask about Israel’s right to destroy Hamas, in the spirit of capitalism, if you pay for it, I guess it is yours to destroy. But karma always seems to bring a lot of collateral damage.
I refuse to accept any argument that treats the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children as propaganda tools to be blamed on the other side. That’s necropolitics, pure and simple, and it shows a person who is no longer operating within a moral or ethical framework.
The same would, of course, hold true of Israeli children, whose lives are equally precious. I do not pose the question of their lives here because Israeli children have not been dying by even the hundreds. Yet despite this the spectre of Israeli childrens’ deaths have been used to fuel the bloodthirst that excuses the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children, and that absolves Israel of any need to give the lives of the remaining Palestinian children the least consideration.
It’s a fucked up moral calculus, and I reject it. I’m sad that people I know to be otherwise good people have embraced this way of thinking.
And that’s about all that I have to say about this.
Summary of the Amnesty report
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
I did not answer the question about whether Israel should respond to Hamas’s massive crime against humanity on Oct 7.
Of course they had to. How they did so is a separate question.
Now ask me more. Do Palestinians have the right to destroy the Israeli government, supposing they had a nice big Air Force and lots of bombs? No, not if it means doing to Israel what has been done to Gaza. And Iran shouldn’t be bombing Tel Aviv and Israel shouldn’t be blowing up apartment buildings in Tehran or Gaza or Beirut, but they do.
So what Palestinians should do living under a brutal occupation where Israeli soldiers or civilians can kill them without much fear of repercussions. My answer is I have no idea. They shouldn’t use terrorism. But guerilla wars generally involve that. Still, bad idea as we have seen and are seeing. Trying to face the IDF in a conventional war like Ukraine means they get bombed into oblivion on day 1.
They should use nonviolent protest methods because then the West will put pressure on Israel, except no, they won’t. Palestinians who do use such methods get shot or arrested or beaten up and nothing happens. But the death toll is lower as Israel continues to steal more land, so go with that. Maybe the West will one day change.
My actual answer to all of this is that we should take international law seriously when we have the power to enforce it. We probably can’t arrest Putin. But we can arrest or kill terrorist leaders and put deposed dictators on trial and if we really mean it, we could start holding Western officials accountable in court. We could show the world we mean what we say.
Though right now, with Trump in office, we don’t really even pretend to stand for anything, so my proposal is even less relevant than usual.
The bottom line is that democracy was supposed to end all this violence, but the rich and powerful reject allowing the little people to have their say, the fundamentalists reject other realms of thought, unhappy people blame others for their own failures. As a Minnesotan who grew up in a culture that encouraged education and dialog I am very sad that so many people are quick to harden their opinions and unwilling to compromise, so quick to take violent action. We all have one life to live. It’s sad that we have “leaders” who care more about power than the greater good.
a comment I made didn’t appear and it was in the spam folder and when I went to free it, there was also a one line comment right after GftNC’s comment (the time stamp I have is 11:16 AM, but I am not sure if that is based on Japan Time or not)
I don’t know if it would have substantially altered the discussion, but it is worthwhile to consider the possibility that someone may make a conciliatory comment that is lost to the ether. I’m not sure if I would have made my comment had I seen the previous one line comment. But I think it is always a good thing to keep in mind moving forward. Thanks.
did the UK have the right to send troops into Boston to put a stop to that?
And every Irish and/or cop bar in NY as well.
lj, I just read BBB’s restored one-liner at 11.16 just after mine @11.04, and you are right. If I had seen that it would have altered my attitude towards BBB, particularly if s/he had continued to show that ability to acknowledge and see other people’s points of view.
Nobody who only blames one side for atrocities in the I-P conflict should be taken seriously. Hamas chooses to murder and kidnap people and started a war with a racist state knowing full well how they were likely to respond. And anyone who thinks Israel doesn’t deliberately commit atrocities is living in a fantasy world.
As it happens I have lost one friend of 33 years over this and other issues and don’t regret it. He can pull his head out of his rear end if he chooses. I still hope he does, but he has to come to that decision himself.
I have other friends who are peace activists. We protest Gaza and today we did the No Kings thing. None of them go to the other extreme and justify Hamas. There are people like that, of course. Some of the college protests started to go that that way, as some glorified the VC 60 years ago. I don’t see the moral difference between defending Hamas’s actions and defending Israel’s. And anyone who thinks Israel hasn’t been shooting unarmed people in cold blood long before Oct 7 knows nothing.
On Iran,I don’t like trusting anyone with nuclear weapons. But we had a chance to appeal to self- interest in Iran with Obama’s agreement and instead we went Trump’s route. For people interested here is a summary of what Obama’s agreement achieved. Basically Iran complied until Trump withdrew and then it stopped complying.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/arms-control-and-proliferation-profile-iran
In arms control you have to decide if you want to focus on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons or try to work on all the other areas— in this case, Iran’s support for nefarious actors who were opposed to the nefarious actors we support. I would vote for appealing to the self preservation instincts of the theocrats and focused on the nuclear weapons issue.
If we wanted to deal with the Iranian sponsored bad guys, get the bad guys in Israel to stop settlements , recognize a Palestinian state run by moderate Palestinians ( it would help if that geriatric Holocaust denier Abbas stepped down) get recognition from the moderate Arab states and you have your alliance. But Israel has decades invested in those settlements and has moved too far to the right and nobody in the West wanted to bother with the issue and really push Israel and the PA and here we are.
That is me being moderate.
So screw it. Go for the arms control agreement and just expect the bad guys on both sides to kill people with conventional weapons. But stop supplying them with those weapons if they are dropping them on refugeees in tents.
I am repeating myself at this point.
We could have tried to continue appealing to their self interest but Netanyahu just decided to start a war hoping that we will support them like the chumps we are. Hell, even I can see the point in stopping missiles from hitting Tel Aviv, though unfortunately Usrael has placed important targets in areas surrounded by civilians. Fancy that. But we shouldn’t have given them a single bomb for Gaza.. They needed out bombs too, so it would have forced them to only use the
In arms control, you have to decide if you want to slow down the proliferation of nuclear weapons or if you want to solve all the other problems at the same time. I go with arms control first.
As usual, my editing skills really suck,
We could have tried to continue appealing to their self interest but Netanyahu just decided to start a war hoping that we will support them like the chumps we are.
Except that Netanyahu’s self interest is in starting, and maintaining war(s) so as to keep the radical right in his corner. Whether the US (or anybody else) support or oppose Israel is, at this point, entirely irrelevant to him. What he cares about is staying in office because that’s all that is keeping him out of prison.
One thing that is baffling to me is how Iran is so concerned with Israel and the Middle East. It could easily turn to the East and become sort of the big brother of all the -stans (Tajikstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan are on their eastern border) I understand it is religion, which always makes people do crazy things, but since all the other muslim countries of the middle east don’t really have any time for Iran, why not just leave the neighborhood to the rest of crew?
Donald-I’m not interested in talking past each other. That said, your thoughts on Hamas are not much in evidence on the main stream on the left. I see way too much Hamas-friendliness on the left for my taste. The original 1947 UN division was a2SS and I think the evidence is clear who was and was not willing to abide by that. That’s where I land.
To me, you’re an idealist, which is not a criticism at all. I think you put way more stock in agreements than would be prudent for people depending on compliance with those agreements. But, whether I agree with your premises or your reasoning, your vision and goals–unattainable in my view– are not far off from mine.
LiberalJaponicus–who knows what the Mullahs think? It seems like religious fanaticism to me, but it isn’t uncommon for despots of any type to manufacture an enemy as a means of societal control. Smart despots, going forward, might want to choose a less lethal enemy.
I wasn’t positing what the mullahs think, I’m just musing that if you looked at a map and tried to pick out which country Iran would have a beef with, absent any other knowledge, you would not choose Israel.
Certainly, part of it is wanting to be the main state in Islam, which then gets the Shia/Shiite conflict, which then gets to Israel vs Iran, but you have to admit, is pretty rube goldberg-ish
Why Iran–which to me boils down to the Mullahs–does what it does makes no sense outside of being a Theocracy unloved by its population My take on the Iranian people is the opposite of religious fanaticism. I sense a fairly conservative but reasonably tolerant people that just wants to be left alone by their rulers and has no time for fundamentalist Islam ruling everyday life.
With regards to Iran, I think the mullahs’ motivation is entirely rooted in the Shia/Sunni dispute over which is the true successor of Mohammed. Israel comes into it primarily as an opportunity to demonstrate to the Sunni masses that Iran is the one true successor — because, unlike Saudi Arabia, they are actually stepping up for the Palestinians. I’m not sure that they are under the delusion that they could displace the Sunni sect among those masses. But I wouldn’t be astonished if many of them are.
As for the Iranian people as a whole, they are civilized and fairly tolerant. But afflicted with theocrats. Just as we might be, if we’re not careful. All establishing theocracy requires is a core of true believers and a span of time in power to get their thugs (fanatic believers or not) into positions of power in the military and police organizations.
BBB, on your 8.15:
I don’t know how long you have been lurking or seriously reading ObWi, but if it were more than a few months you would know that Donald is scrupulously fair minded, and that the rest of us are generally open to reasoned example. In fact, although this blog is with reason generally considered left-ish, we do have a house conservative, wj, occasional drop-ins like Marty, and even passionate disagreement among lefties on various “progressive” issues.
The thing is, ObWi is an outpost of people who believe that political argument can and should be carried out in a civil and civilised manner, allowing for argument on the actual issues and with a minimum of ad hominem insults (whether open or implicit, by sarcasm). I’m not saying we always succeed, and I certainly don’t speak for the blog, but I do think that this is the reason why so many interesting and bright people hang out here.
I don’t get this impulse to blame really, really bad acts on others (e.g. Israel’s incompetence or scheming (take your pick) made Hamas do it on 10/7; Trump and Netanyahu made Iran keep sponsoring terrorism and yelling “death to America/Israel” and enriching uranium because Trump decertified the JPCOA).
When bc says this, it illustrates brilliantly the great divide between ObWi and so many other places, which is not between left and right or between any other kinds of ideological groupings. It is between people who, like Donald, believe that context is important for understanding why things are as they are, with a view if possible to solving problems in the least damaging way possible, and people who are happy to fasten on to the trigger point most ideologically convenient to them and push for a zero-sum conclusion. People like these latter are often, although not always, fairly ignorant, and dislike any suggestion that problematic situations usually have fraught and complicated historic roots. It may be a difference of personality type, or symptomatic of political leanings, or both.
Lastly, we have had fairly recent experience of people who assume because most of us are lefties that we have various stereotypical attitudes, and address us as their fantasy lefty hate-figures. This is a serious mistake; people are not two dimensional, and if one bothers to engage respectfully and civilly, valuable interactions become possible. Personally, I hope that ObWi manages to hold out as one of the last places online where people with different views can discuss stuff, learn from each other, amuse each other, and (amazingly and by accident) even sometimes change each other’s minds.
A bit of a departure from the BBB back and forth, but I think still generally on topic:
I’m struck by (a) how remarkably effective Israel’s attacks on Iran have been, and (b) how unprepared Iran seems to have been.
In particular, I’m struck by Israel’s ability to basically decapitate Iran’s nuclear science and IRGC leadership. Not just strikes at nuclear and military facilities, but highly targeted assassinations of leadership.
This has to be crippling to Iran. I’m not sure where it leaves them as a regional actor, and I’m not sure what the consequences of that will be (good or ill).
Looks like Israel has some good “sources” inside Iran. Possibly a result of the Iranian regime pissing off their citizens with all their unpopular repression.
But also Iran not paying sufficient attention to how the military capabilities have changed over the past decade or so. A flaw that is far from confined to Iran, as the truck+shed+drone strikes in Russia should make abundantly clear.
Yup, Israeli intelligence is obviously now top notch, as the exploding pagers in Lebanon and Syria also proved. I’m just desperately hoping they avoid too many civilian “collateral” deaths. The Iranian people have suffered enough from their leaders.
Yup, Israeli intelligence is obviously now top notch, as the exploding pagers in Lebanon and Syria also proved.
Maybe James Bond was Jewish… 🙂
Maybe James Bond was Jewish… 🙂
Have you been watching Munich again?
I’m struck by (a) how remarkably effective Israel’s attacks on Iran have been, and (b) how unprepared Iran seems to have been.
It’s especially odd, given events in Ukraine. The majority of Russia’s attack drones are based on Iranian design. So they can hardly plead ignorance about drone technology. How did they not think to copy some of the quite effective, if imperfect, Ukrainian defense? It’s not like anybody can have been surprised that Netanyahu would launch an attack.
BBB—
There is more to 47-48 than that. I don’t think either side’s position or actions were morally right. The partition itself gave 55 percent of the land to the Jewish state though Jews at that point were 1/3 of the population. The proposed Jewish state was almost half Palestinian in population. I don’t really want to get into more arguments on this and that period from what I have read is complicated. On the moral front, factions on both sides attacked civilians — in other words, both sides used terrorism as a tool. The Palestinian side had been violent ( pogroms basically) back in the 20’s and some Zionist groups starting using terrorism in the 30’s as did the Palestinians.
I kind of look at that part of the history just as history— nasty as history often is—though I will refer to it polemically if I hear the storyline some people still trot out which is that one side was peaceful and the Palestinian refugees all fled voluntarily so that the Arab armies could come in and slaughter the Jews. The real story isn’t like that, and both sides committed atrocities and when the Zionists won, they had expelled 700,000 Palestinians and for the next few years shot a few thousand who crossed the border, some as insurgents but most not.
I might have been a Zionist if I were Jewish back then. I think the ideology is unfair to Palestinians but the problem since then is how to deal with the aftereffects.
As for lefties, the very most radical ones get the attention because they say outrageous things and it is convenient for the other side to portray every antizionist or even just harsh critic of Israel as a terrorist supporter. Also, on emotional subjects people tend to dig in and refuse to concede any validity to the other side, even if privately they might do so. So they won’t condemn Hamas except sometimes in passing because they don’t want to give support to the idea that Israel is doing the right thing.
Here btw, is what I think is a readable link to a Washington Post investigation into the killing of Kind Rajab and her family last year. The point being there is a lot of material like this pointing to deliberate killings by the Israeli side.
https://archive.is/VlUQV#selection-335.162-335.452
Someone at a Substack provided the link and it worked for me.
Hind, not Kind. Freaking spellcheck.
I think the Iranian unpreparedness was in large part thinking there was an implicit guarantee of no attack before the next meeting. That, of course, was amazingly stupid, since they were relying on Trump and his influence. And even if it were sone other President you would still be counting on that President having a tight grip on Netanyahu, who really needs this war.
My impression was that Iran and also Hezbollah used to be good at this cloak and dagger stuff, but if so, they aren’t anymore. Maybe geriatric leadership, something we know something about, has played a role.
Their hypersonic missiles are pretty good.
I am not rooting for either side. If Iran could damage the Israeli capacity to bomb Gaza that would be nice, but trying to hit Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv means civilians get killed and vice versa with the bombing of Iran. I don’t see either side as the good guys. Just two sets of militarists both trying to hold onto power. Or for another analogy, it is like Saddam attacking Iran back in the 80’s.
My impression was that Iran and also Hezbollah used to be good at this cloak and dagger stuff, but if so, they aren’t anymore. Maybe geriatric leadership, something we know something about, has played a role.
I would speculate that the problem, or at least a significant part of the problem, is the Russian disease: parts of the Iranian government has gotten seriously corrupt. With the Republican Guard well in the lead when it comes to monetizing its leaders’ positions.
That corruption definitely gets highlighted whenever protest demonstrations break out. Even when the proximate cause is some other bit of outrageous conduct by the regime.
I’m struck by (a) how remarkably effective Israel’s attacks on Iran have been, and (b) how unprepared Iran seems to have been.
I think it is that it was because they were in the process of negotiating and they assumed that because Israel had already hit Hamas and Hezbollah, they should be safe. A NYT article what was shared on LGM
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/world/middleeast/iran-israel-strikes-nuclear-talks.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PE8.zsa3.Nlu5qpqMROuH&smid=url-share
I don’t know if you can see the shared article, but a clip
They never expected Israel to strike before another round of talks that had been scheduled for this coming Sunday in Oman, officials close to Iran’s leadership said on Friday. They dismissed reports that an attack was imminent as Israeli propaganda meant to pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program in those talks.
Perhaps because of that complacency, precautions that had been planned were ignored, the officials said.
If so, it is not a problem with a cloak and dagger (remember, people were saying similar things about Israel’s capacity after 7 Oct), it is that they drew the wrong conclusions.
And I feel it is necessary to add the point that in an escalation, no one wins. Israel seems to be intent on pushing Iran, and Iran can still block the Hormuz Strait. So this is basically middle game stuff and I shudder to see the end game.
I wonder (definitely not suggesting, just wondering) what would happen if Iran took those Shahed drones they’ve developed and started hammering the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Or maybe the Iranians were naively thinking that Israel might not blatantly break international law on the eve of negotiations designed to resolve the problem.
Or maybe the Iranians were naively thinking that Israel might not blatantly break international law on the eve of negotiations designed to resolve the problem.
Which indicates that, despite being close to the problem, they somehow missed the salient point. This war hasn’t been launched because Israel wants a war. It has been launched because Netanyahu wants/needs a war. Trying to analyze what Israel will do in Israel’s interest is a waste of time.
This war hasn’t been launched because Israel wants a war.
I don’ think so: the majority of Israelis seem to be in favour of the war with Iran (just as they are in favour of the war in Gaza). Netanyahu wouldn’t go to war without public support.
Here is the leader of the opposition expressing a popular view:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/iran-declared-war-on-israel-long-ago-now-it-is-facing-the-consequences/
If Iran, which is in perpetual violation of international law not to mention a thorough going theocratic dictatorship, was depending on international law to dissuade Israel from defanging Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it failed to grasp the notion that a country is not obliged to stand by while its sworn adversary prepares the means of its destruction. Not to mention the profound hypocrisy.
As for closing Hormuz, that concerned me until I realized that one of Iran’s greatest fear is US bunker busters.
I think it’s over for Iran.
If Iran, which is in perpetual violation of international law not to mention a thorough going theocratic dictatorship, was depending on international law to dissuade Israel from defanging Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it failed to grasp the notion that a country is not obliged to stand by while its sworn adversary prepares the means of its destruction. Not to mention the profound hypocrisy.
As for closing Hormuz, that concerned me until I realized that one of Iran’s greatest fear is US bunker busters.
I think it’s over for Iran.
JCPOA was working. When Trump pulled out it stopped working.
I won’t make predictions. But there is a chance that this regime change operation ( which is what it really is, not a war to prevent Iran from getting nukes) will go about as well as our other attempts.
It would be nice if we really could focus on our domestic problems and the bloated gasbag in the WH, but our peacemaking President is such a chump.
But I came here to post a link to a temporarily free article which is the best summary of Gaza and American complicity that you are going to see anywhere, Articles like this should have been written by the summer of 2024 , when it was clear we would let Israel get away with an unlimited number of war crimes and continue to supply weapons.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/israel-palestine-gaza-war-crimes-genocide.html
I don’ think so: the majority of Israelis seem to be in favour of the war with Iran (just as they are in favour of the war in Gaza). Netanyahu wouldn’t go to war without public support.
They may support the war, now that it has started. But it’s not like there was great public demand for starting one. In particular for starting one right now.
What wj said. I think, particularly after 10/7, they are quite happy to know that one of their most vocal enemies and wisher of annihilation upon them is disabled, but they wouldn’t have chosen this. I agree with Donald, it is currently impossible to say what the result of this will be, and who (if anyone) it will benefit.
Here’s an evaluation of the article linked to by Donald. The evaluation is mostly positive.
Thanks Charles. I read it— I could rebut most of Grok’s criticisms though. For example, the Biden attempts at a ceasefire were hobbled because Netanyahu never wanted a permanent one and the Administration refused to use any leverage, repeating ad nauseam that our support for Israel was ironclad. The ceasefire in January was achieved because Trump’s envoy pushed for it but as we have seen, Trump had no objection when Israel restarted the war and of course has put out in the open the idea of ethnically cleansing Gaza, something many Israelis wanted anyway but now Trump has endorsed it.
The difficulties Israel would face in keeping down civilian casualties if they genuinely care to do so would be real, but no different from that in any guerilla war. The article went into the U.S. record in recent years and we were general far better. Using Mosul and Raqqa as an endorsement of Israel’s methods fails because those were exceptionally brutal and human rights groups condemned them and apparently so does the military. ( Trump lifted some restrictions on avoiding civilian casualties in his 1st term). The U.S. would never have dropped 2000 lb bombs on apartment buildings.
And anyway, the article refers to Amnesty International and newspaper investigations and other human rights groups groups precisely because they have done the detailed work of looking at specific cases where it is clear that the human shield excuse doesn’t hold water. You cannot expect an already very long magazine article to present all the evidence others have gathered on detailed cases.
It is an invalid argument to say that groups like Amnesty are biased against Israel. Amnesty is also “biased” against Hamas and every government or para- governmental organization which commits human rights violations. Governments nearly always deny their own guilt. And every human rights group which has investigated Israel has found essentially the same things. There is disagreement among some about “ genocide”, which the article discusses.
As for the breaking of IHL, yeah, Gaza has arguably done that, precisely because this war is out in the open, supported by numerous Western governments although some are now expressing dismay, showing that so far it remains true that the only war criminals who face prosecution ( or death by bombing) are African murderers or deposed dictators who are no longer useful and don’t succeed in escaping to some sanctuary ( as Assad did). It was often said that the West is hypocritical on such things— well, it is now impossible to deny.
But this was an interesting exercise in observing the limitations of AI. I don’t fully understand how it works. Are there enough reactions to the article out there that it could piece this together or did it base this on previous arguments about Israeli war crimes already out there.
On the JCPoA, this in today’s Times is by William Hague, ex-leader of the Tories. Behind a paywall, so I’d have to copy and paste the whole thing, but:
In 2013, as British foreign secretary, I took part in the “E3+3” talks in Geneva that led to a nuclear deal with the Iranians. Every day, an Israeli minister would call me to ask that we refuse to do the deal. And every day, I explained why we disagreed: we were seriously constraining Iran’s nuclear programme for the next decade at least; the only alternative was to attack Iran; the risk of that was that enough of the regime and its work would survive to go straight for a nuclear bomb subsequently, leaving us fighting a permanent war to prevent that; a diplomatic solution was more effective and sustainable if it could be reached.
We did the deal, which became the JCPoA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2015. It restricted the Iranians to 300kg of uranium enriched to 3.67 per cent, leaving them a long way from the sudden production of a nuclear weapon. Under rigorous international inspection, all the evidence was that the Iranians honoured it. That was until President Trump came along in his first term, urged on by Netanyahu, and abandoned the deal in 2018. In recent weeks, second-term Trump has been trying to stitch a deal back together, but with the disadvantage that Iran, predictably, now has far more enriched uranium — enriched to 60 per cent — and is much closer to being able to put nuclear devices together than if the deal he disowned had still been in place.
From at least one of the horses’ mouths, I would have said.
Thanks, Gftnc.
On the human shields meme, here is an analysis.
https://www.columnblog.com/p/israeli-leaders-hiding-in-tunnels
But short version.
Both Israel and Hamas use human shields in the illegal sense that is a war crime. On Oct 7 Hamas used Israeli hostages as human shields. ( If you read the Israeli press or people referring to it, you will find out that due to something called the Hannibal directive, this doesn’t work. The U.S. press treats that as a taboo topic.)
Israel uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, forcing them to investigate possible ambushes or booby traps.
Both illegal.
Now they also both put military installations in the midst of cities. There isn’t much choice with Gaza. Adam Johnson says that this isn’t illegal but I am not sure about that. But both sides are doing similar things.
Now they are issuing evacuation orders to one of the most densely populated, residential districts in Tehran – just like in Gaza.
Speaking of which: Israel kills 56 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them desperately seeking aid – but that’s apparently just the new normal and covered by the “right to defend” themselves – in perpetuity.
Someone stop these maniacs.
And the US president in his inifite wisdom advises everyone in Tehran to evacuate – a city of 10 million people. The cognitive dissonances must be unbearable.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/16/trump-evacuate-tehran-warning-israel
His infinite wisdom also led him to make his first comments to the other leaders at the G7 a complaint about how they had “thrown out” Putin (after the invasion of Crimea, but naturally he left that part out).
If Iran, which is in perpetual violation of international law not to mention a thorough going theocratic dictatorship, was depending on international law to dissuade Israel from defanging Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it failed to grasp the notion that a country is not obliged to stand by while its sworn adversary prepares the means of its destruction. Not to mention the profound hypocrisy.
bbb, I’m not putting this up because I’m trying to convince you, I’m not really sure what sort of information is needed to modify your take, which I think is wrong. But I will tell you how I get to where I am on Iran.
I’m not sure how many years ago I spent a lot of time trying to figure out about Sunni/Shia split, Iran vs Iraq and the rest of the gulf, and all the other stuff. It may have even been during the Iranian hostage crisis, I was in university, and was (and still am) a Carter supporter. I often ended up dipping back into all this background about Islam when some crisis would come up as well as when I was in Kyrgystan, trying to figure out what I was seeing when I was there. I most recently revisited it a few years ago when a student was doing their graduation thesis about Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, which takes its name from the idea that Iran had a civilization going back a couple of millenia.
The reason I had to (and still have to) keep going back to it was because it was never something on the front burner, it was like a language I learned some phrases in and then had to study again to get that information back.
After delving into all this, it was clear to me that Iran has a context that isn’t really too amenable to the kind of judgements that I feel you are making. It is as if a non-American was complaining about US oligarchs and when you quizzed them, they had no idea who Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Buffet, Cuban were. When you earlier said ‘the mullahs’, it portrays them as a class that are indistinguishable from one another.
I don’t want to make my argument about, for lack of a better word, credentialism. ‘Ha, you don’t know [obscure fact], why should I take your argument seriously?’ But every time you’ve spoken about Iran, it has been treating them as an indistinguishable lump. Which they may be, but if they are, that is because Netanyahu has made it his mission in life to array the entire Arab world, both Sunni and Shia against Israel by attempting to rid Israel of the problem of Palestine by ethnically cleaning the region.
There was a piece by Beinart, that talks about the notion of proxies and how misleading it is. He suggests that the use of the word proxies is when you don’t want to admit that the people who are joining the proxies might have reasons to do so. So, just as the US tended to dismiss North Vietnam as a communist proxy because it minimized the problem that the Vietnamese themselves were rebelling, so too does the talk of Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies reveal an inability to accept responsibility for Palestine and Lebanon.
This doesn’t begin to delve into the historical facts that Iran was Westernized, and it was the CIA plots and the death of the Shah, followed up by support of Saddam in the Iraq-Iran war, that sent Iran spinning down the theocratic wormhole. When I take all this into account, it is pretty hard for me to see how you can dismiss Iran with the language you do.
The parallel between the way I think about Iran and the way I think about China is left as an exercise for the reader.
Novakant—
I don’t think anyone will stop the Israeli murderers.
After 67, when Israel wiped the floor with its enemies there was no pressure on them to do anything. Sadat planned the 73 war and the Israelis won, but they had a real scare there briefly and there was an incentive to make peace with Egypt. That led to Camp David.
Egypt had shown it could be a threat.
The PLO was just a nuisance to be crushed.
There was the First Intifada and then the Oslo process and the West was somewhat interested because the Palestinian problem was seen as a source of instability. Then things went downhill in the Second Intifada but in the meantime we were saving the Mideast by invading Iraq. Somewhere along the line the Palestinian issue was seen as less and less important, and the emphasis was on normalizing relations between Israel and the “ Arab” world. We were told that the Arab world, meaning the governments, didn’t really care about the Palestinians. The situation was seen as stable. Then Oct 7 happened.
Now if Iran is crushed— it is hard to tell for sure but their missiles sent launched in large enough numbers to hurt Israel badly enough- there really isn’t a big incentive for Israel to listen to anyone and the West really doesn’t give a crap anyway— the concern was always that the Palestinian issue might cause instability. The human rights people care but who cares that they care? Most people don’t vote based on this one issue ( except in Michigan) and voting does nothing in this case anyway, plus there is the large subset of the population that thinks every single murder Israel commits was because Hamas pushed the victim into the bullet’s path.
, I think we have another generation of ethnic cleansing and terrorism in front of us and meanwhile the world will move on. Israel- Palestine is sort of a test case for how the West deals with its own horrific crimes and the answer is that it supports them, maybe with a bit of pious expressions of dismay that goes nowhere.
LiberalJ– I don’t follow much of what you say. I’m not conversant in the Sunni Shia differences, nor do i see where they are relevant to Iran’s compliance with international law. Further, I don’t consider events from 1953 particularly material. By “Iran”, I mean the governing theocracy. I think that is clear in context. My sense is that the Persian people are far more civilized and open-minded than fundamentalist fanatics rooted in the 8th and 9th centuries.
The thing is, the Sunni/Shia split colors almost everything involving Iran. For a parallel, think of things after the Protestant Reformation. Except the bad feelings have never faded.
bbb, thanks for the reply and sorry I wasn’t able to make my points to you. I don’t think any historical fact or explanation will change your view so I’ll just point out two things. The first is that historical memory is a lot longer in other parts of the world and international law is not as airtight as you presume it to be.
I mentioned the Troubles in Northern Ireland earlier: they can reasonably be traced back to the English Reformation starting in the 1530s, and to Cromwell’s brutality starting in 1649.
So historical memory can be long in this part of the world too.
A belated welcome to BigBadBird. Reasoned argument from different perspectives is good for this site.
By Iran I mean the governing theocracy
And, to a large extent, when most of us talk about and criticise Israel at the moment, we mean the corrupt leadership along with the racist fanatics who keep them in power.
Clearly, many of the circumstances around the establishment of the state are murky or worse, although historically that is easy to understand. But, for example, the Israel under Rabin, which was willing to negotiate the Oslo accords, is not the Israel of today.
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/congressional-testimonies/congressional-testimonies-2025/4061-ata-hpsci-opening-statement-as-delivered
Scroll on down to where Gabbard gives the US intelligence assessment ( as of last March) that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. It doesn’t matter what one thinks of Gabbard ( whose position on the political spectrum seems remarkably mobile), that has been the consistent intelligence assessment of the U.S.
Of course our very stable genius in the WH just gave his own assessment pulled out of his palatial rear that Iran was developing one.
Also he casually told people in Tehran to evacuate.
Reasoned argument from different perspectives is good for this site.
Sure, I just haven’t seen any. But by all means, go for it.
Several discrete topics are in motion.
1. Novakant said, in substance, that Iran was possibly surprised by Israel’s blatant violation of international law. My response was to the effect of that Iran has no business standing on international law given its own track record. By Iran, I mean, it’s leadership, not its people.
2. Liberal J believes I mis-apprehend international law, and that very well may be the case. Regardless, to the extent such a thing as international law even exits, given Iran’s stated intent to destroy Israel coupled with Iran’s efforts to acquire nukes, what principle of international law favors Iranian policy and prevents Israel from acting defensively? Or, does Israel violate international law unless it first absorbs an Iranian atomic bomb?
I believe that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, but it was not not developing them.
That is, it had enriched large quantities of uranium to near weapons grade: the only purpose would be for further enrichment then use in nuclear weapons. It seems that it wanted to be, or appear to be, in a position to develop nuclear weapons quickly.
Of course this wouldn’t have happened had Trump not withdrawn from the JCPOA. Making a stupid and ignorant narcissist the president of the USA kills people.
BBB, one more note and I’ll step back. You say that Iran has not standing based on international law, but why does the US and Israel? What aspect of international law allows rulings on countries. You seem to place a lot of faith in Iran’s ‘stated intent’, which you link up with Iran’s nuclear program (it is not ‘acquiring nukes, it is trying to create a program to make them, there is a difference). While I’m not sure how international law can link statements to an indigenous nuclear program (of a type which Israel has also done), I’d also ask you to consider who made those statements. I’m guessing you are referencing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who finished his two terms as president and was refused a chance to run for a third, along with several other refusals, and has been sidelined, possibly because his rhetoric was too inflammatory. He’s also at odds with Ali Khamenei, who is the current Iranian Supreme leader.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/ali-khamenei-ruthless-defender-of-iran-revolution-with-few-good-options-left
I also assumed (and apologies if I am wrong) that you are USian, which was my reference to historical memory as I think that Americans bring a problematic notion of historical memory to these discussions. Pro Bono mentions Ireland, but I was actually thinking if an Israeli or Jewish commentator who had a similar position to yours would accept that the mid-20th century was not ‘particularly material’. In fact, saying that what happened in the mid 20th century was not material would be exactly what Ahmadinejad would argue.
I strongly agree with lj. Israel has reason to fear Iran, among other countries. Iran, among other countries, has reason to fear Israel. That does not mean that they have to go to war.
Seldom is the path to peace the bullying of one side into submission. The JCPOA involved compromises one would rather avoid with theocrats one dislikes, but it was achieving the objective BBB gives as the justification for Israel’s attacks on Iran – stopping Iran having nuclear weapons. And it was doing it without bombing civilians.
One thing I think commentators here agree on is that killing civilians should be the very last resort.
My response was to the effect of that Iran has no business standing on international law given its own track record. By Iran, I mean, it’s leadership, not its people.
Let me also note two things:
First, if someone violates the law, the behavior of the victim doesn’t come into it. If you are an arsonist, that doesn’t make it OK to burglarize their place of business. Doing so is vigilantism, not law.
Second, if Israel’s quarrel is with the Iranian leadership, then they should be focusing their attacks. Look at Ukraine which, although far more clearly engaged in an existential war, goes out of its way to minimize collateral damage — not blowing up apartment buildings in Russia in the hope of killing a single Russian general. And they do that even while Russia is routinely striking apartment buildings in Ukraine, even though they have no Ukranian military presence.
One view is that Iran was JPCOA compliant but not everyone agrees. The closer one gets to ground zero, i.e, Tel Aviv, the more skepticism one sees. Post 10/7, I understand the skepticism. Further, I haven’t seen evidence that Iran was JPCOA compliant, just people stating such was the case.
WJ-your first point eludes me. Your second point ISTM is one of perspective: Israel’s targets were clearly strategic, military-related elements. Iran’s missile barrage was indiscriminate. No war was ever fought without collateral damage which is why we hate war. But again, 10/7 was a full paradigm shift and it is no secret as to who did it or who was behind the perpetrators.
Mostly unrelated: no point trying to understand Trump’s blathering. He’s as ignorant of what he thinks as we are.
“Further, I haven’t seen evidence that Iran was JPCOA compliant, just people stating such was the case.”
So, Iran wouldn’t let you personally inspect their facilities? Did you ASK? Are you on the IAEA inspection team?
My guess for the questions above is “haha”, “no”, “no”, and more moronic RWNJ blather.
I will gladly retract my comment if BBB posts scans of letters requesting that he personally inspect, official Iranian denials of the request, and documents proving he’s an employee of IAEA.
But I think he’s just a RWNJ gas-bag, and will mock accordingly.
Trump demands Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ and says US won’t kill supreme leader ‘for now’
What is this? The Sopranos?
Also:
In a post published about thirty minutes earlier, Trump said, “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”
Note the 1st person plural …
Just a reminder: there were supposed to be Iran-United States nuclear negotiations in Oman on Sunday.
1. BBB: The extract I posted from William Hague was not “one view” with which Israeli public opinion has equal weight. As a (right-wing) politician who helped negotiate the JPCoA, he was in a position to evaluate the reports on compliance, and dismissing his account without bringing any similarly respectable evidence seems worthless.
2. wj’s first point was in response to your implying that Iran’s track record on international law means that it cannot legitimately complain of breaches of international law i.e. that as the victim of a breach, it cannot complain because it has itself previously breached.
3. lj, an interesting linguistic point unrelated to the actual argument: when BBB says “My response was to the effect of that Iran has no business standing on international law given its own track record” I think you have interpreted his use of the word “standing” in legal terms, to mean that they are not a legally entitled party, whereas I think BBB is using it to mean “no business supporting their argument on the basis of international law”.
4. BBB: Snarki is snarky. But, see my point 1.
WJ-your first point eludes me. Your second point ISTM is one of perspective: Israel’s targets were clearly strategic, military-related elements
Not sure what else to say. You stated that Iran had no standing to say that Israel was violating international law. But whether Israel was or was not is a matter of objective fact. (We can argue over what the facts are. But that’s not the same as saying someone can’t make a valid statement based on those facts.)
There is some question about Israel’s targeting. Certainly some of them were legitimate military related stuff. On the other hand, I’ve also seen reports of apartment buildings hit, simply because some military related individual was believed to live there. That doesn’t qualify as a military related target.
No war was ever fought without collateral damage which is why we hate war.
I will allow an expert to weigh in:
WT Sherman to John Bell Hood.
“Collateral damage” is a euphemism that seeks to turn cruelty into an “oopsie”. It’s an attempt to minimize and deflect responsibility for the actual horror of warfare.
“Eh, we did our best, couldn’t be helped, these things happen”.
Gaza has been flattened. It’s people have nowhere to go, and are being deprived of the most basic necessities of life and survival. At this point, it’s very hard for me to see the actions of Israel and the IDF as self-defense. It looks much more like collective punishment of the very harshest kind.
The hard line Netanyahu is pursuing is going to change the character of the nation of Israel. Or, already has. Or, reflects changes of long standing.
Israel is in a tough spot and has been since it’s founding. That doesn’t justify the elimination of an entire population.
What is this? The Sopranos?
Yes. And other folks will not forget.
Oh God, I hope the pathetic anticlimax of Ubu’s military parade is not sufficient to provoke him into a “successful” US military action with Israel. If so, the least important part of the consequence will be his abandonment of the Nobel Peace Prize pursuit, and his promises to the US electorate to take the country out of foreign wars.
I imagine tRump would settle for something like the Syrian strike in 2017 and market it as one of the greatest military actions in human history. He’s too much of a vacillator to commit to a large-scale and drawn-out military engagement. That’s just my personal assessment.
GFTNC, my apologies. I completely missed your comment with the quote from William Hague and it does respond directly to my question. Not sure how that happened, but it did.
Which clarifies for me the time that Iran has had to enrich weapons grade uranium. I just read that a US General, Michael Kurilla, testified last week that Iran had enough material to build 10 bombs in 3 weeks. I saw no indication of yield nor am I aware of whether there is a consensus that the General has it right or not.
So, apart from Trump’s role in abrogating JPCOA, and leaving aside that Iran was not compelled to go down this path, IF actual nukes were only 3 weeks away, weren’t Israel’s options somewhat limited?
leaving aside that Iran was not compelled to go down this path, IF actual nukes were only 3 weeks away, weren’t Israel’s options somewhat limited?
It rather depends on: Options to achieve what? Israel’s options if it merely wished to not fight Iran were the same as they were when it wished not to fight Saudi Arabia. Which, be it noted, was funding various anti-Israel groups. (And which could undoubtedly afford to buy nuclear weapons, even if it lacked the technology to build its own.)
Somehow, the Israelis managed to find a way to live with the Saudis. Without staging a massive military attack — which would have been far easier and more effective than this attack on Iran. They could have done likewise, had they been interested in building peaceful coexistence rather than pushing for war. But it appears that they (specifically the Netanyahu government) weren’t interested.
WJ-opinions will vary. IMO, prudent Israeli leader, regardless of political leaning, could tolerate a nuclear armed Iran. Post 10/7, Israel cannot afford to give its sworn enemies the benefit of the doubt.
NO prudent Israeli leader regardless . . .
I left out “no.”
[No] prudent Israeli leader, regardless of political leaning, could tolerate a nuclear armed Iran.
That’s probably true. Which is why we are all gnashing our teeth so hard when we contemplate that we’re here because Trump blew up the JPCoA, which was working. As for how to proceed now, apart from the old Irish joke when being asked to give directions “Well, I wouldn’t start from here”, that (and the hatefulness of the current Iranian regime) is why people like me were not all that outraged at Israel’s first day or two of actions.
But they must have expected retaliation, so to use that retaliation as an excuse to hit more and more targets, among them obviously civilian ones, is an escalation too far. As a (Jewish) friend of mine said a few weeks or a month into the Gaza retaliation after 10/7, “they’d be doing themselves more good by sending in vast convoys of Israeli aid for the civilians, and using the UN agencies to distribute it.” You could say that that was very cynical, but the amount of damage their Gaza campaign has done to Israel is now almost incalculable, so I reckon that even if you leave humanitarian motives out of it, they were right.
Here’s the details on the Gen. Kurilla testimony:
The IAEA uses 90% enrichment as the benchmark for weapons-grade uranium,
and it considers 25 kg of 90% enriched uranium enough to construct a simple nuclear
weapon. The IAEA estimates current Iranian stockpiles to include over 400 kg of 60%
enriched uranium – almost double of what it was just six months ago. This is mere
steps from reaching the 90% threshold for weaponization. Should the Regime decide to
sprint to a nuclear weapon, it is estimated that current stockpiles and the available
centrifuges across several enrichment plants are sufficient to produce its first 25 kg of
weapons-grade material in roughly one week and enough for up to ten nuclear weapons
in three weeks.
https://armedservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/uscentcom_posture_statement_2025.pdf
More details about uranium enrichment for the sake of the conversation:
https://theconversation.com/what-is-uranium-enrichment-and-how-is-it-used-for-nuclear-bombs-a-scientist-explains-259031
I just read that a US General, Michael Kurilla, testified last week that Iran had enough material to build 10 bombs in 3 weeks. I saw no indication of yield…
I have read recently that Iran has mastered the explosive lens technology necessary for implosion-type warheads. I have no real knowledge if that’s true, but will note that it’s what I call a straightforward problem: not simple, but everyone knows at the book level how to do it, so mostly testing to iron out details. No need for fissionable material for such testing. Boosting with deuterium and lithium-6 is also straightforward. That puts them potentially in the few hundreds of kilotons yield.
Implosion warheads also require significantly less fissile material.
Megaton yields require Teller-Ulam designs with more than one stage. Tom Clancy published The Sum of All Fears in 1991, and described a possibly working Teller-Ulam design built by terrorists. Some of that is “Tony Stark built this in a cave in Afghanistan using scraps!” kind of stuff. Still, in 1954 the US detonated the Castle Bravo device, yielding 15 megatons from an almost bomb-sized package.
Conventional wisdom has long held that Israel has nukes. They haven’t used them yet.
Conventional wisdom has long held that if Iran gets nukes they WILL use them, pronto.
Conventional wisdom seems premised on the notion that Iranian theocrats are fanatics (“I don’t care if I live, as long as you die”) but Israeli theocrats are pragmatists (“I don’t care if you die, as long as I live”). ISTM that conventional wisdom is to wisdom as biblical history is to history — maybe overlapping, but not identical.
–TP
Well, Clancy built a credible scenario around it and according to his afterword deliberately muddied some details. He wrote that he got easy access to some rather precise details about the construction by simply asking for it. The key is that the terrorists in the book don’t have to work from scratch but have found a lost fission bomb and gain access to an actual expert and a limited supply of (as it turns out contaminated) tritium. There are some real life horror stories about how lax security at some Soviet/Russian nuke storage facilities was for some time after the fall of the Soviet Union and there were quite a few potential former nuclear weapons developers for hire too (unpaid and disgruntled, so targets for temptation). North Korea hired a Pakistani for their own nuke program.
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Imo the dangerous thing is that the more the Iranian leadership feels threatened, the more they could be tempted to go all in before it’s too late for them (“taking you with me!”).
Meanwhile, apparently Tucker Carlson took Ubu seriously with his no foreign wars schtick, so is sounding off about it, and Ubu is insulting him back. You’ve got to get your laughs where you can in times like these (especially since I imagine TC will remember which side his bread is buttered on soon enough).
I just read that a US General, Michael Kurilla, testified last week that Iran had enough material to build 10 bombs in 3 weeks.
Kurilla is somewhat famously an Iran hawk. He is also CENTCOM commander, which puts Israel, Iran, and the Middle East in general in his wheelhouse. And he apparently is planning to retire later this summer, which leaves a small window for Israel to act with a CENTCOM commander known to support aggressive action toward Iran in place.
In March, Tulsi Gabbard, nominally head of US intelligence, thought Iran was *not* close to making a bomb.
Per nous’ comment, maybe they are. Or maybe they’re not. Or maybe they’ve been hedging their bets, trying to build as much leverage as they possibly can to give them a stronger negotiating position.
I have no idea.
What it all looks like to me, is chaos. Like the US and Israel are not singing from the same page. Like Israel taking advantage of Trump’s inconsistency and general cluelessness to go ahead and do what they want to do. And then Trump playing catch-up to try to put the best face on it.
With Trump, of course, following up with claims that we “know where Khameini is” and maybe we’ll kill him. Or maybe we won’t.
Who knows, we might know where he is. Maybe that isn’t a card you really want to put on the table. Wherever we might have thought he was, he’s probably not there anymore.
Right?
I’ve never been involved in a real estate deal more high-stakes than buying my house. Perhaps fucking with everybody’s head – changing your mind mid-course, blabbing sensitive intellgience that you “claim to have”, threatening your counterparty with assassination – is a normal part of large commercial real estate transactions. If so, I’m glad I’m not in that business.
I really don’t think it’s a good way to manage international relations.
Holding a loaded gun to somebody’s head as a negotiating tactic is (a) unpredictable and (b) very hard to walk back. Maybe they’ll fold. Maybe they won’t. If they don’t you’ve just given up a lot of control over how things play out. Your options have become very very narrow. You’ve reduced them to (a) pull the trigger or (b) lose. And pulling the trigger commits you to a path whose outcome is really, really hard to predict.
And Trump’s range of action is inherently narrow. He is incapable of any calculus other than “how does this make me look?”. Or maybe, “how much money do I get?”. It makes him really easy to play.
GLTA
since I imagine TC will remember which side his bread is buttered on soon enough
I expect he hasn’t forgotten. It’s just that, in a world where his 3 Day Blitz shows no real signs of significant progress over the last three years, Vlad has to get his kicks where he can. And having Carlson trash talking Trump is a cheap giggle.
Thomas Friedman on the issue in today’s NYT. It’s not that his prescription for a solution is bad, it’s just that the possibility of Trump acting in such a way is inconceivable. Dear God, I wish I were wrong…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/opinion/trump-israel-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P08.tffk.DGSR3IV9exme&smid=url-share
With Trump, of course, following up with claims that we “know where Khameini is” and maybe we’ll kill him. Or maybe we won’t.
Khameni is old (checking wikipedia, 85) and has not been in good health, so with talk like that, if he drops dead tomorrow from his ailments, what’s to stop Iranians from thinking that he was assassinated? I imagine that would be next level shit hitting the fan.
It’s one of those times when I hope it’s TACO Tuesday.
GftNC, been thinking about your interesting point about BBB and my use of ‘standing’. I can’t speak to exactly what BBB has in mind, but you are right, I’m thinking of standing in the legal sense, whether they have a right to make a claim. If he does mean that Iran has no right to stand on international law, it sort of eviscerates the concept of law applying to all.
There’s a deep connection in language and culture between being outside the law and not being afforded any considerations of society. Think of the word outlaw, which fundamentally means you are eligible for attack without legal consequence. Some latin for folks, caput lupinum, having a wolf’s head, is the old English legal term which allowed anyone to hunt them down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caput_lupinum
The debate about international law is interesting to me intellectually, but rather than see it as decisive, I just wonder what comes after the Iranian regime is toppled, which is the clear goal of Netanyahu. Dirty bombs? Radiological attacks? Israel may feel that they have the intelligence to prevent anything happening in Israel, but Iran has about 90 million people and Israel has 9 million and when you add all those disaffected by Gaza and Lebanon, and it expands to be countries like the US and Europe, God help us.
caput lupinum, having a wolf’s head, is the old English legal term which allowed anyone to hunt them down.
Or, as the Old West wanted posters put it:
Wanted Dead or Alive
Netanyahu has been warning the world about the imminent threat of Iran having a nuclear bomb for more than 30 years now:
https://aje.io/fcyxah?update=3782565
It’s his get out of jail free card:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/17/middleeast/israel-iran-netanyahu-motivation-intl-latam
Further, I haven’t seen evidence that Iran was JPCOA compliant, just people stating such was the case.
That can only be because you haven’t looked. Here are IAEA statements on Iran. This one was published just before Trump’s idiotic withdrawal from the JCPOA.
lj: caput lupinum! I’d never heard of it. It’s splendid, thank you.
On the whole standing issue (and so much else) I realised afterwards how badly I’d expressed the alternative reading. I think I meant that when BBB said Iran “had no business standing on international law” the “standing” meant relying. This is a not infrequent usage, at least here.
But, as I say, I often realise after the event how badly I have expressed myself, and how inadequately my explanations actually explain. I knew what my point 2 upthread meant, and maybe some others did, but it would be unsurprising if BBB did not!
I don’t understand why it isn’t obvious to everyone that the POTUS is winging it, always. The man is a squirrel.
The man is a squirrel
Noxious as they are, slandering of squirrels will not be tolerated.
Squirrels are evil.
Every gardener knows this.
Squirrels are evil.
Except for the adorable, tufty-eared red squirrels, who have almost all been wiped out in the UK by their evil American cousins the grey squirrels. No doubt they were the ones you were thinking about, Snarki.
(Once, in my friend’s back garden in Manhattan, I saw a black squirrel – I cannot judge their degree of evilness.)
“Bastards. I hate them with their long tails and their stupid twitchy noses”
Black squirrels are the same species as gray. We see them up here sometimes.
And all squirrels are of course good. They provide endless entertainment in YouTube videos. Not their fault that people don’t provide enough protection for their tomato plants or introduce them into countries where they don’t belong.
Case in point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvS9lvRxZ8
Whose fault is it when squirrels dig holes in my lawn to bury acorns, which they promptly forget about?
Yours of course. You need to put up sone landmarks so they can keep track of where things are.
Another squirrel video. I haven’t watched this one,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg5wznn3IBE
I once saw a squirrel fall out of a tree from a significant height. It made a surprisingly good thud for such a small thing when it hit the ground, but jumped right up and scurried back up the trunk. I didn’t think that was something that happened until I saw it.
I didn’t think that was something that happened until I saw it.
My wife and I once watched a litter of squirrel kits taking their first steps outside the nest. The nest was way up in a big old pine, they were learning how to walk the tree limbs and jump from one to another.
They were… not very good at it. They missed a lot. They fell a lot. Fortunately they never fell completely out of the tree, because the downstairs tenant’s German Shepherd was also observing, from the ground.
The legendary squirrel nimbleness is not inborn. Takes some practice, apparently.
Also – while squirrels famously forget where they bury seeds and nuts almost as soon as they are in the ground, chickadees cache and retrieve thousands – as many as ten thousand – seeds, even months after they have stored them.
They have a big hippocampus. In fact, their hippocampus can expand in the fall when they need it for remembering where their seeds are stored, and then shrink back in size in the spring when that’s less needed.
Animals are remarkable. Actually, all living things are remarkable. There is stuff going on out there that is mind-boggling.
In any case, be like the chickadee, not like the squirrel.
Squirrels cause so many power outages that they have their own category in the record-keeping systems. Given the sheer number of outages due to the tiny suicide-terrorists, it is almost certain that they have killed people.
The intersection of squirrels and rigid government bureaucracy.
“Peanut the Squirrel was an internet sensation, captivating hundreds of thousands of internet followers with videos of his charming antics with his owner, Mark Longo. That changed last Wednesday, when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided Longo’s home, seizing Peanut and another pet, a raccoon named Fred. The two animals were euthanized soon after. Longo claims that DEC informed the media about the animals’ deaths before they told P’nuts Freedom Farm—Longo’s animal sanctuary nonprofit, named after Peanut.”
Government Goons Murder Internet-Famous Squirrel: Peanut the Squirrel charmed a large internet audience that helped fund an animal sanctuary. Then the government seized him.
“Living in Florida, Reba and Tommy Morse often helped rehabilitate wild animals that were injured. One such creature was Grace, a squirrel taken to the veterinarian last fall after its head got trapped in a toy truck. The vet called the Morses, who helped nurse Grace back to health and then kept her as a pet—until the family moved to Alabama and Grace was seized by state wildlife services.”
Family in Trouble for Bringing Squirrel Across State Lines
I have a comment stuck in moderation… 🙁
— You are now immoderate. 😉 wj
Thanks!