Russia's strategy is really fucked up; they have all the recon drones they need and are outclassing Ukraine as the Western media itself admits, but the Russian generals are just so stupid and cruel that they're sending a thousand unarmed soldiers into the fog of war anyway because the Russian brainpan is missing the key phrenological markers of intelligence that would allow them to use the drones that they're provided. not only that, but Russia is in a constant state of mobilization in order to keep these atrocious human wave losses up, but unlike every society on the planet up to this point, Putin's evil genius has found a way to do it such that nobody in the population even talks about it, let alone complain, so the evidence for these mobilizations and losses are really hard to confirm
iran is so stupid, everybody knows that how you get points in this game is killing crowds of civilians, not making precise and successful strikes on military targets
they want an America-style war where its citizens literally might not even know it's happening, let alone care, let alone care enough to protest, let alone care enough to become revolutionary defeatists
unfortunately, you don't have two gigantic moats on either side of your country, protecting you from almost all consequences. that's the real crime - not the genocide, no, we're very fine with that - but that I might myself, personally, have my treats affected. my entire world is limited to my own body and the happy chemicals in my brain and a sense of nationalism constructed quite literally out of Arab corpses. there is no greater injustice that I can feel than having those happy chemicals turn to sad chemicals because some group of people who must be simply biologically wired towards pure evil are stopping my treats from arriving to me.
genuinely, ask a "sure, Biden is doing bad things in Palestine but we need to vote Biden or Trump will be even worse!" person "How many people would Biden have to murder before you would no longer vote for him? 500,000? 1 million? Every single person in Gaza? Every single Palestinian?"
these people will justify death tolls that would make Himmler blush just because of the mere threat of a pretty average American president (that is, a genocidal war criminal) who tweets mean things a lot taking power. wherever Biden is, Trump will always be worse for them. Biden kills 100,000? Trump will kill 200,000. Biden kills 10 million? Trump will kill 50 million. Biden's warmongering policy starts a war in eastern Europe and a regional war in the Middle East, both with nuclear powers? Well, Trump will start three!
To be clear, I could not give less of a shit about who is president; nothing of substance got better under Biden and things will decline yet further under Trump. But the mere concept that Biden could be equally bad or even worse than Trump (from the left-wing standpoint of "they both fucking suck and MAGA people are also total morons") is such a forbidden thought that exposing libs to the concept will drive them mad, eldritch horror style, and they immediately start retreating and throwing at you various memes about things will get worse for minorities who they couldn't give less of a shit about and are mere electoral tokens for them. I do think things will be worse under second term Trump than they will be under current Biden. I also think things will be worse under second term Biden than they are under current Biden.
"You're starting a new war? Yeah, cool, have a great few years doing that. We'll just be over here, setting up alternative transportation routes, increasing our self-sufficiency in microchips and dozens of other fields, and undermining your imperial strategy of turning every poor nation into an entirely US-reliant slave. No, no, it's fine, keep on going."
There's this fascinating contradiction that we've seen now in both Ukraine and Israel where they're simultaneously asserting that everything is good because their air defense systems intercepted everything, Iran/Russia is seething and coping because of it, etc etc; but also that this was a massive and brutal escalation and Iran/Russia must be punished for all the harm they've done to us. I can't personally say I care that much about whatever narratives that Israel produces to cope with their losses, and the last six months show well how Israel even more so than Ukraine is putting all their cards into propaganda in the hopes that it'll affect things in the real world somehow, as if saying that your military bases aren't being BTFO will un-explode them.
Last night really was a paradigm shift, which was easy for me to forget in the videos of drones and missiles smacking into Israeli installations. Israel's sense of invulnerability shattered on October 7th, and their operations and propaganda inside the Gaza Strip since then has been one big attempt to not just attempt the impossible task of destroying Hamas, but to rebuild that sense of strength in their society. When Hezbollah and Yemen joined in, it was two further blows to them. But one thing that Israel could tell itself while rocking back and forth in the fetal position was that there was still one last shield it possessed, one way in which it was still strong - it knew that Iran would never attack them directly. They simply would not dare. It would be too massive of a hurdle to jump, too dangerous for Iran to strike them, a nuclear-armed power. They would only ever act through resistance groups, they thought. And that has been more-or-less true for many decades now.
Until last night. The Rubicon has been crossed. There's now little left for Israel's sense of protection. Weeks where decades happen.
i'm currently working myself into a fucking breakdown thinking about what the US and her vassal states are about to do in responce and where that might lead
we went through this in the original megathreads when the conflict broke out, and while I don't think it's an unreasonable response, I don't think it's a particularly helpful impulse when we're talking about historical justice of this magnitude.
it's like being punched in the face by an attacker a few times and then once they're revving up another punch, rightfully deciding to defend yourself by kicking them right between the legs and instead of going "fuck yeah, get their ass!" it's instead going "oh no... now they're going to get hit even harder by this attacker who was going to keep punching them anyway... god help them..."
the only thing violent settler colonialist oppressors understand is violence. if you don't respond to their violence, they aren't going to stop being violent against you. the last hundred years in the Middle East is a perfect demonstration of this. you have to give these powers like Israel or France or the UK or even America a giant fucking kick in the teeth, and once they inevitably start punching back at you in anger, you have to work to disable/dismantle them until they're incapable of doing further harm and/or surrender to a new reality where they aren't oppressors anymore, at least in that part of the world. it's how Vietnam did it, it's how the DPRK did it, it's how Algeria did it, and it's how the Resistance is going to do it, and most of them cheered as Iran's missiles and drones rocketed through the sky. the politicians and military planners in Iran and Syria and Lebanon and Hamas know exactly what they're doing, they're very competent people, they know precisely the dangers and consequences, they've been calculating them for decades and have now decided that the time is right.
Iran has the most powerful military in the Middle East and it's not even really a contest, given that Israel's military has been revealed to be a trembling mass of cowards getting obliterated in the Gaza Strip. The West's only advantage is their airpower, which is kind of a problem if you don't have functional airfields to return to once the drones and missiles are done, and Iran and their allies in Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hamas and other Resistance groups in Iraq and Syria have spent decades constructing underground fortifications which are among the best in the world, specifically to negate that air advantage. The West can murder civilians en masse but they can't really achieve much militarily, which partially explains why their legacy in the Middle East has been one of such failure despite the atrocious civilian tolls, why the US is on the verge of being kicked out of Syria and Iraq, why Israel has threatened a ground invasion of both Rafah and southern Lebanon and fearfully procrastinated this long, and why Iran feels confident enough to send hundreds of drones and missiles towards a nuclear-armed power.
I call bullshit, Biden probably told him that they'll fully support Israel attacking Iran but he just doesn't want to be seen as egging on a regional war which could have dramatic effects on the world economy and lead to the defeat of the most important US asset outside of America itself when his popularity is already in the shitter
of course they're going to respond to this disproportionally, but the last two years has been a series of Western military embarrassments and I don't expect them to suddenly start deciding to be capable now.
If they can't stop Yemen, then they can't stop Iran.
This is literally indistinguishable from a redditor. We are in Reddit hell. Though, on the other hand, I think I prefer this to competent diplomats and officials. If they're at the point where they're doing epic twitter takedowns instead of, y'know, their jobs in trying to take down their adversaries, then that just makes Iran's job a little easier. One imagines Hitler tweeting from his bunker about how the USSR's shoddy performance in the first couple years is evidence of socialism's inferiority while his armies of barely-trained young men are being obliterated in the streets of Berlin.
I suppose it's the problem with actually being a competent military power, unlike Israel - crowds of dead civilians are very hard to hide, but if it's "just" important military officials and classified airbases getting blown up, that's much easier to just censor. Only one of them has a meaningful military purpose and it'll lead to Israel ceasing to exist as it currently does probably within the decade and hopefully within the next year or so