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  • I think this is also missing a critical piece - the interaction between force projection and intelligence.

    Iran went hard out of the gate to disable significant portions of enemy military installations, and the US pulled a lot of materiel out in response. If the high value assets are moved out of reach, and Iran knows it, then there's fewer high value targets to hit.

    But also, by lulling the enemy into a false sense of security, the enemy can be induced to engage in activities that otherwise they would not. Things like repair, recovery, or even potential cases of hardened underground facilities becoming activated and thus revealing themselves. Iran may be observing the enemy to see where they move their attention when the threat is reduced, which provides them with invaluable intelligence.

  • It's a form of limited non-nuclear MAD. If you show your opponent that you will respond to their actions in kind, it forces them to consider equal or great retaliation when calculating the benefit of any given action. If they attack air defense, their air defense will be attacked. If they attack civilians, their civilians will be attacked. We'd all be better off if the agressor stopped attacking altogether, but in the absence of that, proportionate response seems a valid strategy, particularly with the West and its proxies.

  • https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/03/15/765419/Most-missiles-used-in-war-are-a-decade-old-US-does-not-dare-enter-Persian-Gulf-IRGC-Spokesman

    The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) has revealed that the majority of missiles so far launched against American and Israeli targets during Operation True Promise 4 have been manufactured approximately ten years ago, with more advanced weaponry held in reserve

    "The missiles currently used belong to a decade ago," Naeini emphasized. "Many of the missiles we have produced since the 12-day war until the Ramadan war have not yet been deployed".

    Hot damn.

  • Not just their head of state, also his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. Also multiple leaders from one chain of command across 3 layers.

    That would be like killing Trump, Ivanka, Jared, their child, AND Vance, Mike Johnson, and McConnel all in a single night.

  • That's not what extortion is. Extortion is when you threaten someone so that they do something to benefit you. Cuba is not threatening it's doctors, and it's not trying to get the doctors to do something that benefits Cuba, other than just be doctors who get paid to be doctors.

    As for the cab driver story, yeah, the country is being starved of everything. If you want money, you get it from the rich American tourists. That's how every poor country has always worked with white tourists. Poor in China? Do work for the American tourists, they have no idea how much anything costs locally.

    That's just Cuba being poor because the US is extorting them. The US is saying we are going to keep starving your children, your sick, and your elderly unless you do what I say.

  • Are they firing from that point much? Seems like one of the least defensible launch sites.

  • I think it only makes sense in a European worldview. The idea that the decision making problems are algorithmic or mathematical in nature and this abstractable, universalizable, and permanent is a fantasy.

    The more abstraction a higher order system has, the less it is able to respond to changes in the lowest order systems. Highly effective mathematical abstractions for decision making will solve a lot of problems in the short term, mostly problems that exist due to inefficiencies that mask solution spaces from us currently.

    But once those short-term problems are solved and the inefficiencies in solution searching are gone, the hard problems will still remain.

  • Good post. Thank you.

    I am of the opinion that Iran is currently pushing to establish its national security. That will require, at minimum, driving out any military installation that can be used to attack it or neutralize it. This will be a difficult task, but it appears that this been under careful strategic and tactical analysis for a long time, possibly 2 decades.

    It requires speed. The boundary between Iran's force projection and the empire's force projection, a sort of Iranosphere, needs to expand far enough to ensure that imperial force projection is costly, obvious, and detectable early.

    Working against this is the empire's two pronged attempt to neutralize Iran. First by destroying their force projection capabilities - launchers, launch sites, missiles and drones themselves, munitions production capacity, etc. Second by destroying society's ability to function and thus serve the functions that support the force projection - food, water, medicine, communication, leadership, planning, intelligence, etc.

    So far, Iran has been moving faster than I expected. But the empire may have yet more moves available to them. We don't know. So we wait, watch, and pray.

  • Oh. Sailors disguised as fishermen in fishing boats are often used to lay mines. No wonder China behaves the way it does in the SCS

  • MAD is established doctrine. Anyone who scrambles their strategic nuclear assets is immediately subject to MAD. That's why it's called MAD.

    If the US uses tactical nukes in a way that no one can tell until they've been deployed, then I don't even know. That's a nightmare scenario. MAD doctrine in theory would apply, but it is a massive gray area.

  • Well. That's it for him. Trump doesn't like people taking superlatives away from him

  • I haven't seen the PSL form a coalition with Democrats. Do you have references?

  • Israel is not a petrol state AFAIK, relying on imports for 99% of its consumption.

  • Check out Justice A.I. by Christian Ortiz. He claims to have created a decolonial LLM.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_convergence

    It's somewhat counter-productive and very idealist to argue that people should only be motivated by morality. The reality is that people are self-interested, even when they include larger groups of people (like family and community) in their sense of self.

    White people are harmed by racism. Men are harmed by patriarchy. Torturers are harmed by torturing. None of these facts diminishes the other facts that non-white people are more harmed by racism, that non-men are harmed more by patriarchy, that the tortured are harmed more by torturing.

    It is perfectly alright for white people to say that they want to end racism because it harms them. It is perfectly alright for torturers to fight against torture because it destroys them and their families. It is perfectly fine for men to fight patriarchy because it harms them.

    We need that convergence of interests to move society in the direction of truth, reconciliation, reparation, and liberation.

    1. US intelligence has been up against more widesread and more effective counter-intelligence. It's entirely possible that they simply didn't have the intelligence they needed and they had to fill in some gaps with guesswork, and they chose optimism.

    2. it didn't matter if the situation was going to get bad because the alternative was letting Iran get stronger

    3. the goal isn't to win it's to get enemy capabilities focused somewhere, anywhere, instead of being held in reserve, in order to create opportunities for the US to gain initiative on its next move

  • Struggling to find the article from The Atlantic. Can anyone else help me find it?

  • There are some fucking bars in there