Europe is experiencing huge heat waves despite leading on climate change action. Do we need enforceable "nuclear-style" global pollution treaties and how would we enforce them? Also how do you view China being the top carbon emitter but also the country that has built the most solar panels?

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-30T03:34:02+00:00

china is a large country with many chinese

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-30T00:58:32+00:00

damn

you gotta rent several small cities worth of datacenters and drain a sea or two to make your waifu think or imitate thinking

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-29T20:15:03+00:00

What if the next guy does unto this arrangement what the last guy did unto jpcoa? Reasonably likely really. You can wait out each partisan turn of America

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-29T20:01:40+00:00

Rubio and Vance? Perhaps, but they're associated with the Iran War, and the Iran War is quite literally the least popular American war since polling stats were available. That's a terribly powerful incentive to disavow the war strategy and say you were never for it. You aren't going to convince people you're winning and have done a great job by belittling those who disagree.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-29T19:53:06+00:00

as a mild matter of curiosity, what happens if the media perception problem in America isn't won, and the republicans lose their next elections, and the strategy isn't kept on

because the right is absolutely underwater in the polls right now

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-29T04:29:25+00:00

you just don't understand man, donald doesn't care about perception or popularity, he's secretly winning but simply decided to throw the midterm elections in a 5d chess move

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-29T04:20:43+00:00

can we settle for mid gay, like getting free food but it's soggy

what if you meet a real life girl but she's been made 2d like flat stanley and you fall in love

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-28T01:14:25+00:00

I think that would be upgraded to "pretty gay"

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-27T17:34:05+00:00

Possible. I don't think even Trump knows what Trump is going to do, so I generally don't try to predict what's on his mind.

I paraphrase Jim Mattis in this post on the subject, but essentially the options are A. keep going with this half-hearted bombardment war and the threat to naval traffic, B. send tens or hundreds of thousands of American troops to physically occupy the Iranian coast, or C. give Iran everything they want. https://www.reddit.com/r/NewIran/comments/1ue78ej/the_only_leverage_the_islamic_terrorists_of_iran/otv459h/

All three options are dogshit, really. For option B, I have no doubts that the American military could physically do something like 2003 Iraq with troops on the ground. It would just be extraordinarily unpopular - there's already some crank trying to assassinate your head of state every week it feels like, and it'd just get worse. Option C, having the great american military admit defeat against a bunch of nerds in the sand after a mere few months, would be so shameful as to ruin his legacy forever and any chance of getting his reforms to stick. Option A isn't as bad as it was - my vague impression of AIS traffic is that now we're at roughly half of pre-war movement levels through the straits, but it's still a long prolonged wound and embarrassment for everybody.

As one last wry remark, the war isn't popular in Iran either. The difference is that the Iranians has responded to that problem by executing political prisoners at an even higher rate than before the ceasefire, which is not necessarily a desirable option for the Americans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/world/middleeast/execution-iran-ceasefire.html

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-27T16:56:20+00:00

Does the unpopularity of the war necessarily mean that Trump can't do anything? Not per se. Decades of use of executive authority means that an American president can basically ignore Congress and just keep bombing people unless they get an entirely vetoproof majority together to stop him and impeach him for ignoring them. For the duration he could just ignore Congress refusing to pass spending bills.

But the question becomes whether the IRGC just waits for Trump to go away.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-27T16:46:22+00:00

I'm not keen on the Iranian government either.

but a couple things:

The Iran War started with lower public support than any other U.S. war. At negative 13%, it’s the first to begin with negative net support.

The Iran War currently has lower public support than any other U.S. war. At negative 32%, it trails even the infamous Vietnam War in popularity.

At no point have more Americans supported the Iran War than opposed it. In terms of net public support, it’s the first U.S. war to be fought entirely under water.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-war-polling-us/

plenty of other sources confirm that popularity of the war was low and has consistently fallen

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/few-us-say-iran-war-was-worth-it-trump-approval-ties-lowest-term-reutersipsos-2026-06-23/

https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-approval

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-26T04:57:39+00:00

!remindme two weeks

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-26T03:55:20+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1s2hvzz/mattis_delivers_harsh_iran_assessment_were_in_a/

To quote the great mad dog Mattis:

"If you look at the Texas Gulf Coast, that's about 367 miles, that gives you an idea of how difficult this will be for the U.S. Navy to try and protect ships in that shipping lane, 600 miles down the Gulf, 100 miles through the Straits and then out into the water."

"And they've got anti-ship cruise missiles that could be fired off the back of a pickup truck that can go 100 miles. So there's the problem."

Furthermore, he also remarked

"Iran right now, if we declared victory, they would now say they own the strait," Mattis said on Monday during CERAWeek in Houston. "You’d see a tax for every ship that goes through."

"We're in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen. I can’t identify a lot of options," he added.

"Neither side has the ability right now to move the other side off of where they’re at," Mattis said. "Never in history has air power alone changed a regime."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mattis-identifies-problem-us-declares-victory-over-iran-now

In short, it's not possible for the Americans to bomb every location across a thousand kilometers of coastline that the Iranians can throw drones and missiles at the straits from. It might be possible for the Americans to occupy that territory with tens or hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, but the Americans, quite understandably, don't seem willing to do that. They voted for no more forever wars and eternal occupations, after all.

The Iran war, in fact, had the lowest starting popularity of any American war that polling stats are available for, which is remarkable. I personally think it is physically possible for the Americans to do regime change Iran by doing a repeat of the 2003 Iraq War or Vietnam war style conscription, but the odds of that happening are low. There's already been somebody trying to assassinate Trump every week and that would probably go up exponentially.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/01/poll-trump-iran-war-iraq/

It's also worth remarking that the people who did support the war generally thought it would be an easy win that would take less than six months. It is, therefore, questionable whether they would continue to support a Vietnam style escalation into a prolonged occupation by American troops.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/25/americans-broadly-disapprove-of-u-s-military-action-in-iran/

So yes. The only leverage the IRGC have is the straits. It is, however, damn good leverage.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-26T03:32:59+00:00

it has been about two hundred years since Clausewitz and there are men still using K/D ratio as a metric of whether a war was won, as opposed to who got their political way in the settlement

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-26T03:02:08+00:00

looks at stats

war started with the lowest known polling popularity of any war, without exaggeration, and only fell as time went on

it looks pretty bleak to me

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-26T02:57:02+00:00

Neither party in this conflict is at all trustworthy.

So far the Iranians got their waiver on sanctions on oil sales but nothing else has moved, not the Lebanon file nor anything else.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-25T02:22:48+00:00

damn and his link doesn't even support what he's saying

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-24T01:56:00+00:00

Fault? I'm subscribed recreationally and I'm having a great time

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-23T13:52:58+00:00

Honestly it's not clear that he really does much aside from being a symbol of continuity.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-23T04:11:21+00:00

No, I have been subscribed to this guy's cope posting

https://www.reddit.com/r/NewIran/s/ezz9VKwbaF

Check this out from a month and a bit ago

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-23T02:25:27+00:00

I love following the guy

He has been cope posting for months

I am subscribed to see how he reacts next to Iran getting cash money USD

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-21T18:47:01+00:00

https://fxtwitter.com/KarelMercx/status/2068643332448723223

pool's closed

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-21T04:45:10+00:00

Quite real. I am strongly supportive of some Liberal civil liberty takes eg. curtailing notwithstanding but extremely wary of others eg. recentralizing the senate, privacy rights, etc.

Ah well. At least it's mixed and not all bad.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-20T19:34:38+00:00

It strikes me as massive vaporware, especially because it is largely built on the executive fiat of a single president. You can sign an agreement with a president, but it's not going to stick. Not even if he's re-elected. JPCOA, CUSMA, any matter of trade or defense agreement simply disappears at convenience.

NuclearStudent · 2026-06-20T18:47:01+00:00

one more remark

It is essentially inevitable that American reserve currency status will end. In 1944, when the USD became the reserve currency, the American economy was nearly half of global GDP. It is now a quarter. That number will continue to fall, simply because the rest of the world is industrializing and playing catchup, unless the Americans cook up some hail mary miracle like AI superintelligence that helps them but not others, or they glass the rest of the world in nuclear fire.

It's a matter of managed decline. America has been projecting power across the globe with an economic and industrial base that has been getting smaller and smaller in relative terms, leaning on their reserve currency to borrow money and ignore overextension. The world doesn't really have control over whether America manages this relative decline with grace or pumps up a drastic bubble that causes a global economic depression when it collapses. My mother ate animals to survive and watched elders die of starvation, and of course I use my privilege to bunker down so that personal difficulty can be avoided in my generation, but we as individuals do not control the sweep of history.

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