Live data from Hacker News

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

acoup.blog

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#891
post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't exactly limit the impact of cutting off the supply. It's a global trade market. If China buys on the global market from other places instead of Iran because that oil isn't available, that still creates a shortage for everyone and that still pushes up the price of oil for everyone.

Sure. But the US has substantial domestic production. So China (and everyone else who has to import the majority of their oil) gets hurt more.

Short term, you might be right.

However... higher oil prices also increase energy prices across the board, and China's energy sector is dominant in renewables. I think they're more than happy to have the competing energy sources become even more expensive.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, ok... Iran invaded the US embassy holding 52 civilians hostage, has conducted unprovoked attacks against US, Israeli and other interests for more than 40 years, regularly launches missiles into Israeli airspace, indiscriminately attacks merchant vessels in international waters, massacres and tortures tens of thousands of their own people for the crime of speaking out against their government, sponsors terrorist…

> massacred over a thousand people including children, That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o > Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers? Yes, jailed for years young boys and even teens without any reason. Why would they need gas chambers when traditiona…

> That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o

You cite one example of a bad Israeli soldier and extrapolate to all of the IDF. This belies your faulty reasoning and desire to project a perspective based not on facts, but your own biases.

Again, there is no comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel. The countries Germany invaded exhibited zero aggression against Germany. In contrast, Palestinian terrorist groups launch routinely launched rockets into Israel, send terrorists in to blow up civilians, and conducted wholesale massacre and rape in the name of Allah.

Interesting that you ignore than Iran are hostage takers and murderers of their own people. After the first bombings of this war, Iranians in Iran were dancing in the streets.

> I looked up the claim of seizing tankers

I said "attacks" not just seizing. But there was seizing too.

May 2022: two Greek Tankers seized by IRGC commandos 2023: Tankers Advnatage Sweet and Niovi seized by IRGC commandos Jan 2024: St. Nikolas seized by Iranian Navy Apr 2024: MSC Aries seized by IRGC commandos During the Tanker War 1981 - 1988: Iran was responsible for approximately 168 attacks on merchant ships

July 1987: Kuwait tanker MV Bridgeton struck by Iranian mine April 1988: USS SAmuel B. Roberts nearly sunk by Iranian mine. 2019 Limpet Mine Attacks July 2021: Iranian drone strike on MT Mercer Street Nov 2022: Pacific Zircon struck by Iranian drone

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the first to make such observations. To quote Barry Goldwater (Republican party nominee for US President in 1964): > Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name o…

Was he describing America or Iran? Hard to figure out as we seemed to be in War due to similar people in control of another (not)important country :)

It was about America. I think the only overlap between "conservative" Republicans and religious fundamentalists is the "social conservatism", e.g., "family values", "law and order", etc. The quotes are because there's debate about what those terms really mean.

The key difference is that religious fundamentalists pledge their allegiance to the Church, not the country; not "God" either (although they might claim it to be so). They are tribal to their core and anybody outside their church is an "other" and is not worthy of being considered a fellow citizen.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> massacred over a thousand people including children, That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o > Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers? Yes, jailed for years young boys and even teens without any reason. Why would they need gas chambers when traditiona…

> That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o You cite one example of a bad Israeli soldier and extrapolate to all of the IDF. This belies your faulty reasoning and desire to project a perspective based not on facts, but your own biases. Again, there is no comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel. The countries Germany…

Do you think I just gave isolated examples? I gave actual news articles because you would make up stuff and say its not real. These are part of a large trend. Its funny how providing actual hard facts, reported in Israeli media itself, gets me accused of being biased.

Palestine is a fun example. Why limit your looking back to such a short period. Let us rewind a few more decades. Israel itself is the product of violent terrorism and displacement. Israeli's are such nice people they bombed a hotel with innocent British and Arab people and then a future prime minister was from the very terrorist organization. Israel has been belligerent and violent from the very start.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disputing that American sources are untrustworthy. I'm not disputing that the situation is bad. I don't read Arabic, but I'd be happy to look at a citation with assistance: if 50% of babies in Baghdad are dying, someone would be reporting on it.

Second link: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/... Maybe you didn’t read it.

Right, 15 years ago in a recently heavily bombarded city 50% of children were born with defects, according to one study. Terrible even if off by an order of magnitude.

Nothing in that document, or anything else I've found, supports the claim that today in Baghdad half of all children are dying from birth defects.

Things were bad. Are still bad. But throwing around inaccurate numbers does not help matters.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#896
post #872
post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US. China can't replicate any…

> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense. What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners. Do you know when…

You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.

Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.

There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.

Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.

Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.

Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.

Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.

What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.

Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?

The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.

If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#897

I think this analysis is missing the big picture. (1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US; hence Venezuela and Iran ahead of 2028. These are shaping operations. China suffers more from these conflicts than the US. (2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so. If Iran can cheaply cut off passage, so can Saudi Arabia and UAE and everyone…

China is not the only nation that depends on Gulf oil, all of SEA does as well. If the strait remains closed it will destabilize the region and diminish the prestige of the US, and with the US military focused on the strait China will benefit.

Current US interventions should be read as a sign of weakness - an inability to shape events without resorting to naked aggression. Global hegemony can not be maintained through force alone.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But he's still a bad person. But that doesn't make him a supremacist. Tucker knows his audience and gives them what they want. He's done content in support of both major parties in the US; he's a true capitalist not a supremacist.

He said immigrants make the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.", he credited “white men” for “creating civilization.”, he was pro-iraq war he said he felt “no sympathy” for Iraqis, calling them “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”, he believes in the great replacement theory he said the Biden administration’s immigration policy is like “eugenics” against white people, he said black people killed by police t…

FWIW he has said many times he regrets his role in supporting the Iraq war, and says he has since change his views.

>Biden administration’s immigration

To quote Joe Biden: "An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who are of european caucasian descent for the first time in 2017 we'll be an absolute minority. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America will be white European stock. That's not a bad thing, that's the source of our strength."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgrliuQW_-Q

Joe Biden's White House sued Texas and Arizona to get them to take down their border walls, and even sent the Border Patrol with fork lifts to forcibly open the barbed wire:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rxPu0OnVoYU

>"the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries" as a statement of fact

In one generation (1965 to now):

USA: 90% (higher than that in most states) -> 50%

UK: 100% -> 83% (predicted to be a minority by 2066)

Australia: 98% -> 55%

New Zealand: 90% -> 67%

Germany: 100% -> 80%

Spain: 98% -> 81%

France: 100% -> 85% (difficult to estimate but likely lower than 85%)

Netherlands: 100% -> 72%

Italy: 100% -> 92%

Denmark: 100% -> 82%

Belgium: 100% -> 64%

Sweden: 100% -> 75%

Norway: 100% -> 90%

This is just one generation, extrapolating these trends out another one or two generations and the result is that whites are a minority in most of their homelands.

>nazi fucks

I mean if you're saying that I want to invade Poland, quite the opposite is true. I'm saying we should leave Poland alone so they can manage their own borders and grow peacefully. :)

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#899
post #863
post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments. China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military r…

> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China. Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China. > Russian oil infrast…

China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.

As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.

Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.

When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.

China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.

Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.

Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they are not as intelligent as you think they are.

I believe that highly intelligent people can do incredibly stupid things -- I've seen it first hand. The correlating factor for those two acquaintances is that they are both devout Christians . I find that to be beyond ironic but also makes sense, as that devotion parallels the appeal to authority and many churches are run by leaders who believe in Supply Side Jesus. I don't mean this to be inflammatory as it's only…

I agree with your last organized religion comment somewhat, but the jump to devout Christians based off some anecdotes comes off as a bit prejudiced. The "not trying to be inflammatory" is a decent pre-emptive hedge attempt, but still falls flat when reading. This is a pattern I see here sometimes, which is criticism of religion drifting into assumptions about specific groups, and it tends to weaken an argument that was otherwise reasonable. And I'm saying this as someone who is extremely critical of Christianity.

The truth is that people are perfectly capable of making bad decisions regardless of their beliefs. Appealing to authority is not unique to religion. You see this same thing in corporate environments, academic circles, political groups, etc... It's probably more useful to focus on that broader dynamic than tie it to a specific group.

Post reply on HN