this administration is the chicken tax personified. and will do to American energy what the chicken tax has done to the American auto industry, ghettoed it into an expensive, destructive, globally irrelevant niche.
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I think you can make a case that it matches in stupidity, but not in rashness. We did deliberate widely and publicly for more than a year, and gain full Congressional assent, before undertaking what I will describe as a well-considered idiocy.
@hyperplanes.bsky.social 🤝 @insidertwets.bsky.social (best — really only US-initiated — example so far!)
yes! i think Russia attacking Ukraine 2022 is a comparable, US-Iran is almost a parallel hold-my-beer moment. but i am looking for comparables among US-initiated follies.
i think we should have no predators but recover the art of understated but affectionate ridicule for takes (from all quarters) that maybe should be taken back.
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US historians: what are some decisions comparable in both rashness and stupidity to the current administration's attack on Iran? there must be comparables, but I'm a bit flummoxed coming up with any.
(although i choose them much faster than i listen to them, it's in my audible library! i look forward to it.)
does it still count as a grave error if the court is doing it on purpose? ht @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
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one day at a time, brother.
working class.
whether they did or did not occur, i’ll score the conversations very productive as it seems unlikely the idiots will render the middle east uninhabitable today.
i mean to be sleeping, but i am frightened.
is there enough competence and leadership remaining in the military to effectively push back against orders that would result in predictable failure and mass casualties?
there's a thing the humans get caught up in where it becomes less important whether a thing is true or false than who the saying of the thing would be associated with.
i'm no mother theresa. but same.
kind of a rule of thumb is expect things to go haywire when you put fascists and/or theocrats in charge.
i have argued for many years that, although US trade policy and lack of industrial policy with respect to China has been an absolute catastrophe for the US, one should not blame China, because these were US choices at every step. www.interfluidity.com/v2/71.html www.interfluidity.com/v2/540.html 1/
i am right on the merits, but my case has not won the public argument, not among elites, nor among the broad public. everyone blames China. 2/
it is right on the merits that acceding to the Iran War was Trump's choice and responsibility — America's, not Israel's — regardless of any attempts at persuasion mounted by Israel's unlikable leadership. 3/
nevertheless, i think this right-on-the-merits argument has even less chance of succeeding, at public or even elite levels, than my decades-old pleas with respect to China. 4/
it has become less pleasant, less easy, to be Chinese in the United States than it was 15 years ago. that is reprehensible but it is nevertheless a fact. i don't know why we wouldn't expect an analogous turn of events with respect to people the public and also elites associate with Israel. /fin
a cynic might say that economic interests in the world's largest fossil fuel producing nation might not be averse to a massive oil shock driven by Gulf shutdown.
escalation dominance is just another word for nothing left to lose.