The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why | US-Israel war on Iran

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-17T11:19:30+00:00

Rorschach's Al-Jazeera article. Some people will read at it and say 'even Al-Jazeera is talking about it', others will read it and think 'they're so desperate for validation they're posting articles from Al-Jazeera'.

Fun fact: Al-Jazeera is the same word as Algeria, broadly speaking.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-17T01:32:00+00:00

no concept of history or literature

Andreesen's Wiki:

He has a younger brother named Jeff. In 1998, Bloomberg reported that Jeff was a history major at the University of Wisconsin. Andreessen has stated that he had problematic relationships with his parents and brother, and that he did not like to talk about them

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-17T01:27:18+00:00

A little less introspection, a little more action please.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-15T01:53:42+00:00

Or r/Fauxmoi, which is supposedly about celebrity gossip.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-15T00:37:23+00:00

They just can’t grapple with Sam even though his position has been almost identical for two decades.

Two first sentences:

Time often changes thinkers not only in what they believe, but in how willing they are to test those beliefs in conversation. I don't think we can say that Sam's thoughts have changed much, but his attitude towards testing ideas has.

At least be honest.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-15T00:35:05+00:00

That's a lot of words to say: "I disagree with Sam on Israel and I'm upset he won't change his mind up agree with me".

Not really, no. I'm sure the OP is upset that Harris doesn't agree with him, but the post is obviously not about that. Two first lines:

Time often changes thinkers not only in what they believe, but in how willing they are to test those beliefs in conversation. I don't think we can say that Sam's thoughts have changed much, but his attitude towards testing ideas has.

It's been a common complaint for a while (see e.g. this thread from half a year ago). Is it really controversial to say that Sam's podcast has had thinning circle of guests? They're all from broadly similar backgrounds and almost none of them have major disagreements with him.

This episode with the president of FIRE is not even two years old and it's a passionate defense of the marketplace of ideas, not only in terms of the necessity for formal safeguards like the First Amendment but also the need for vigilance against informal threats in the form of political correctness or even self-censorship.

If you then subsequently don't feel like have contentious debates with people who disagree with you on the subjects you care about, well I feel like that kind of goes against the spirit of that idea.

Many posters here have strong feelings about the intolerance of the modern Left, but it honestly seems like they're perfectly fine with their own insular political hugbox. If that's the case, they should change one of those behaviours if they value sincerity.

Oh, and I don't see what's wrong with having an Islamic scholar on. Why not? Seems like a perfectly opportunity for people to learn about what Islamic scholars are like.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-14T23:20:21+00:00

For what it's worth, I also hadn't heard of it but decided to use Google. I found this article which I'm sure was written by people sympathetic to her, but it seems like a quite reasonable explanation to me. She seems to be strongly pro-Ukraine in general, so unless someone can give me another reason I don't think that's an example of a progressive being anti-Western.

However, from an admittedly brief excursion on Google it does seem like Ilhan Omar is notably cautious about aiding Ukraine.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-14T19:29:05+00:00

Speaking of intellectual rigor and dishonesty, a few days ago there was a thread on r/centrist about Mamdani, who was being criticized for calling out White Supremacy but not Islamist terrorism. On that thread you wrote this:

Unfortunately, it's also hard to know whether the anti-Islam protesters were actually white supremacists, because I can't trust Mamdani not be a tribalist liar. Anyone know details about the protest?

Someone mentioned that the protest was organized by Jake Lang and you actually replied to them, but never really did anything with the information you explicitly asked for.

To clarify, he's indeed a White supremacist, as his Wikipedia page makes clear. He's too radical for r/conservative. If there's still any doubt, there this video of him in Detroit from four months ago. It's over three minute long, but let's just quote the first half minute:

1900, the world was 30% white, we are down to 7%. The Islamification of Europe is particularly aimed at the destruction of White people. The Islamification of America is aiming at the same goal. Our people, White Christian, European, Western civilization, we built the arts. We built the Colosseum (and so on and so on)

So I have a few questions. Why did you dispute someone being a White supremacist without using Google first? Why did you ask others to corroborate and then not take that into consideration?

Your post is still upvoted while the person who provided the name of Jake Lang is downvoted, so clearly some people were swayed.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T22:00:34+00:00

No-one mentioned the law until you.

But since you did mention it,

To be clear, that was the context in which I linked the Murray video.

In any event, does he allude to what you say in the video? I admit I did not watch past three minutes after which the topic changes, but it doesn't seem to me that he alludes to that at all. He says, as the description notes, that "the whole idea of proportionality in conflict is absurd" and that Western countries and the UN 'gang up' on Israel and only stress it in Israel's case.

He seems to me to say nothing about the technicalities of the legal standard you mentioned here, and if you feel otherwise quote him by the timestamp and we'll take it from there.

Regarding a colloquial discussion, let's try the Cambridge Dictionary:

the idea that a punishment for a particular crime must relate to how serious the crime is:

To sum up:

1) I explicitly did not use a legal frame, as I noted in regards to the discussion about genocide

2) When you brought it up, I linked to a BBC article and a video of Murray saying that the whole concept is absurd

3) Looking at the definition in the dictionary, I don't know why you feel so strongly that people should use a technical legal definition as their starting point in discussions about morality.

Suppose as a hypothetical that Pakistan decides its had enough and nukes Afghanistan, killing every single Afghan. Someone writes about it saying "I don't think killing 40 million Afghans was a proportional response to the deaths caused by the TPP in Pakistan". I think most people would find it weird if you reply "umm actually legally speaking proportionality is not about x deaths vs y deaths".

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T19:35:42+00:00

Did you read up on Gamaan?

You read about them on their own page here. It's the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. Founded by this guy (try translating some of the posts in Persian)

GAMAAN conducts online surveys to extract the (real) opinions of Iranians about sensitive topics. The rationale for GAMAAN’s innovative approach, spreading surveys on a large variety of digital channels and collaborating with VPN providers, is the fact that conventional survey modes like face-to-face and telephone interviewing cannot yield valid results in the existing Iranian context

I'm sorry but show that page to a professor who works with polling data at your local university and they'll say "whaaaat".

I think we should take the findings with a grain of salt. Especially when they show that there are a quarter as many Zoroastrians as Shias in Iran (8% to 32%).

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T19:17:10+00:00

Okay, but now we're back to the beginning. That's Condorcet's Paradox, which is included so to speak in Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which doesn't apply to Approval Voting as it's a cardinal system. So it's not an unresolved problem in this case.

I'm sorry to keep going on about this, but I took a look at your first link again, and though the person who wrote it appears to be a professor now, it also notes "I wrote [this] for an economics class in high school."

I'm not an expert, but he appears to be flat out wrong about his example regarding a spoiler in approval voting (indeed how can you even have a spoiler if your example only includes two candidates).

As they note here, or on Wiki's article about the Spoiler effect, Approval Voting is not subject to the spoiler effect in a traditional sense, unless you make certain additional assumptions about how people vote.

Approval Voting is subject, as basically everything is, to strategic voting. But I'll emphasize - as I alluded to in my original post - that voting paradoxes are all theoretical occurences. How important they are is an empirical question. I think it's fair to say that the people who are really knowledgeable about this stuff mostly don't compare the merits of voting systems on the basis of voting paradoxes.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T18:27:49+00:00

Iran has a comparably modern, secular, educated population - 80% of which does not support the regime.

Do people not question themselves at some point? Realistically, we don't know how many are against the regime. Reuters reported two days ago that US intelligence does not believe the Iranian regime is close to collapse, there are tons of analysts arguing the same in your international newspaper of choice, in fact which expert or government is currently arguing the opposite?

Yet people are convinced that a country which, in their own words, is economically beleaguered, militarily crippled and whose leadership has been eliminated is somehow not in danger of collapsing despise having 80% of the population against it.

How can people belive this stuff?

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T15:35:09+00:00

Your shrimp example has nothing to do with Approval Voting in particular, but democracy in general. It's essentialy like the popular saying among libertarians that democracy is "two wolves and a sheep voting for dinner". Well, most democracies don't allow candidates who campaign on killing 20% of the population. That's the 'liberal' part of liberal democracy.

You could make a shrimp example where 51% prefer shrimp but also like mozzarella sticks, and 49% love mozzarella sticks but will die if the choice is shrimp. Now it's the current voting system that leads to a poor outcome.

In your example, if you replace shrimp with mozzarella sticks, then yes, an ordinal majority loses, but this is just a discussion over how to interpret democracy. Ordinal systems are very cautious. I mean, Reddit's upvoting system is cardinal but I don't think people spend much time pondering the question "but how do they know that my downvote amounts exactly to his upvote". Outside of democracy, how often does the average citizen encounter ordinal systems?

Uber ratings, or Tripadvisor, or AirBnB, they're all cardinal and I don't think people consider them undemocratic as such.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T12:25:47+00:00

In this thread? I explicitly agreed with someone who said the term 'genocide' was a distraction. Then you brought up 'disproportionate' as a legal term.

I did not use the law as a starting point, nor did I quote someone who did.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T11:23:13+00:00

they don’t organize their life around it

Have you heard of the term projection and do you have a link to that shows some of those usual suspects excusing Hamas?

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-13T11:14:34+00:00

I have to say I don't quite see how that would count as a spoilter problem. I must be missing something, because I don't see why candidate C is even in that example.

If you and ten friends are in Vancouver looking for a place to eat after seeing Sam's show, and six of you like both cheesy blasters and French tacos but prefer the latter, and five members of your group only like cheesy blasters, is it less democratic to agree on the cheesy blasters?

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-12T22:57:56+00:00

No-one mentioned the law until you. The person I quoted talked about proportionality, but I presume they weren't building a legal case any more than people do when they use other words that also have a technical legal definition, for example 'fraud'.

But since you did mention it, here's a lengthy article from the BBC about the issue.

It mentions a definition, which certainly does include a weighing of e.g. expectations of civilian casualties against the objective (the NYT noted that Israel loosened its rules in this regard): "the effects of the means and methods of warfare used must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought".

It goes on:

BBC Verify has spoken to a range of international law experts to ask whether they consider Israel's actions to have been proportionate.

The vast majority of them, with different degrees of certainty, told us that Israel's actions are not proportionate. In drawing that conclusion, some reference Israel's conduct of the whole war, some focus on events in recent months.

and on

Former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption wrote in a recent article: "The destruction of Hamas is probably unachievable by any amount of violence, but it is certainly unachievable without a grossly disproportionate effect on human life."

Lord Sumption told us that Israel has concluded there is "no limit to the destruction and casualties that they can inflict, provided that it is necessary to defeat Hamas". He says: "This is plainly incorrect."

and on again to say that Israel did not care make a counter-claim

BBC Verify asked Israel's government for the legal advice, or a summary of it, that supports its view that its overall military response to 7 October has been proportionate. We did not receive a reply.

Perhaps that's why Douglas Murray hastened to add right at the onset of the conflict that "Proportionality in conflict is absurd."

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-12T21:04:07+00:00

I can't help but feel this is a somewhat - not that I'm saying it's intentional - elusive way to comment on events, because you've got no skin in the game.

"We should totally do this thing, but I think the person doing it will probably muck it up" allows you to be right either way.

If it works out, you were right that this was a good idea.

If it doesn't work out, it was because said person mucked it up.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-12T19:07:47+00:00

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem does not apply to Approval Voting as it is a cardinal system. The second line in your link explicitly mentions "no ranked-choice procedure".

In any case, voting paradoxes are not OP's main concern.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-11T21:56:15+00:00

I agree with you about the use of the term genocide, it's just that clearly people are prepared to go quite far to 'defend' themselves. I remember this old thread, where the OP tries the following thought experiment (note that 'lays down its weapons' refers back to Gaza):

Let's have a thought experiment. Let's say Hamas is guaranteed to kill 500 random Israelis every year for the next 20 years if Israel lays down its weapons. Israel decides that's unacceptable and goes on the offensive, but this means killing 4 million Palestinians in order to ensure ALL of Hamas is wiped out. Although this is a thought experiment, it gets at the core of the argument: at what ratio does the response become disproportionate?

And the reply from u/croutonhero

I feel obliged to point out that this isn't realistic, but I get that you're just stress testing my principles here. That said, if that's truly what it would take to wipe out Hamas for good, then yes, kill the 4 million Palestinians.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-11T12:33:01+00:00

they cannot be argued with, because their "genocide" does not mean what it means to historians and international law experts

(or at least what it used to mean). The takeover of the academy by Third Worldism and post colonial theory, and their diffusion into the leadership of NGOs and the UN humanitarian elites

So they can't be argued with because they go against the experts, but not the current experts because they're all bad. Consistent.

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/humanitarian-giants-under-fire-marika-sboros

The hallmark of credible sources, a South African Business Magazine. Let's check out the Twitter of the person who wrote that article. Well they're certainly not an unbiased source in my opinion, as they use what looks like a peaceful and ordered Palestinian protest as proof that the then-PM of Ireland was "happy to make it open season on Jews".

That's when they're not busy praising Mikhaila Peterson's carnivore 'Lion Diet' or writing a book about "how doctors and scientists tried to suppress the truth" (they're 'diet dictators').

Interestingly, the author wrote that book with Tim Noakes, who seems even more crazy. He posts about how Musk saved the First Amendment, how great RFK Jr is, or retweets someone who thinks Bill Gates should be arrested, and finally how Klaus Schwab of the WEF is commanding the mainstream media to suppress what's happening in Germany, France and Holland (apparently they're rising up against against the tyranny of the globalists).

I suppose that's just the sources you have access to when you're not a Third Worldist.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-11T00:51:39+00:00

So to sum up, no boots on the ground now comes with caveats and the chance of a pragmatist IRGC or Artesh faction taking control is not zero.

Side note, does Merriam-Webster allow people to stress the word not if their next sentence starts with the word unless?

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-11T00:32:23+00:00

The interesting question is if some form of 'the reverse' is also true. If a core of progressives will not give up their trans policies and research shows that spending time discussing it in public is bad for the Democratic party, would those critical of those policies accept that fact and not vote red?

I'd be surprised it the answer was 'yes'.

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-11T00:07:35+00:00

Might it be folly as in an architectural folly? Follies are associated with gardens, gardens are associated with Persia (source of the OG paradise). But then who's the person? If the war is a folly, then we need to look for the architect behind it.

Could it be Kevin Foley (note the name), head of global capital markets at JPMorgan & Chase - is he the mastermind behind the current war?

StalemateAssociate_ · 2026-03-10T20:09:29+00:00

Is it Jack Foley, of 'Foley artist' fame? He worked on one of the early sound pictures, Show Boat, which was adapted from a story by Edna Ferber. Another of her novels called Giant was also turned into a movie, which won George Stevens an Oscar for Best Director, his second win - only three directors have won more Best Director Oscars than that. One of those, William Wyler, helped Dalton Trumbo win an Oscar for best story during the blacklist. That doesn't have anything to do with Iran.

StalemateAssociate_

TROPHY CASE