SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

“Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back.”

  • 239 Posts
  • 4.21K Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: January 3rd, 2022
  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPtonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 11th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Fourth Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    13·
    10 hours ago

    The reason the US started this war might be becoming more clear.

    Global competition with the US was rising, especially non-dollar markets, so they decided to rule the ashes.

    alternatively, it’s possible that nations who are strongly reliant on the US’s food exports and have been turned into cash crop harvesters would be hit hardest by the crisis and turn into political pressure cookers, while countries that are more independent would be able to shift towards expanding/diversifying their crops to make up for the lack of fertilizer, and/or becoming closer to China, who will only be producing more renewable energy infrastructure as time goes by and thus able to somewhat alleviate the fossil fuel shortages. not to mention China’s repeated advances in agricultural science.

    so both China or the US could stand to gain depending on who can plot a more coherent forward course through the crisis

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPtonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 11th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Fourth Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    26·
    13 hours ago

    Team Trump has been doin this for a while, including his first term.

    More than anything it’s astonishing to me how much Trump’s presidencies have depended on imagery and mirages to maintain the sense of a still-powerful America. Obama and Biden were kind of similar, but with Trump it’s almost like a pathological obsession to deceive other countries and pump up his and the US’s image, even to their own short, medium, and long term detriment.

    I feel like almost any other president in the position the US is currently in (if they would have gotten to this position, which seems very unlikely) would be willing to back off a little on Iran, make a “good faith gesture” by sending away a carrier group or something similar, ensure the media is presenting the retreat as a “magnanimous act to save a floundering regime and the region as a whole, for the sake of the economy and humanitarian causes” etc etc, and try and negotiate something. Try and really sell America as the reasonable one and Iran as the unreasonable pariah state. But instead it’s just deranged jingoism that is completely disconnected from the situation on the ground, and because Trump is terminally afraid of being called a loser, he cannot back off from this campaign.

    It’s one of those uncommon historical situations where the personality of the leader really starts mattering more than it ordinarily would.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPtonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 11th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Fourth Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    95·
    15 hours ago

    Apologies for not participating in the comments so far for this conflict, but I genuinely don’t have anything to contribute yet this time around other than calling the Zionists murderous childkillers, being extremely angry at journalists, and getting into arguments in the megathread with other posters over things that none of us could truly know (like how attrited Iran truly is, etc). Events are moving fast enough right now that I’m just gonna let events play out rather than deep-nesting with somebody here about the state of Iran’s missile and drone stockpiles and production rates.

    I would also post more minute-by-minute news, but trying to figure out what’s real and what’s AI or propaganda has proven challenging for me, so I’m already giving almost all media claims/events at least a few hours before they can be somewhat verified and I begin to believe them. Massive claims are made and then withdrawn minutes later, as we just saw with that comment by the US Energy Secretary that the US has helped a tanker transit the Strait, and major statements are assigned to various figures by random OSINT accounts without being verified. And I thought early 2022 was bad.

    A few of my observations:

    • I feel very vindicated for believing that Hezbollah wasn’t disarmed and destroyed by the post-Nasrallah combat pause and were probably preparing and training instead.
    • I cannot physically express how little sympathy I feel for these Gulf monarchies and the rich people who willingly travel to them.
    • I’m glad that Iran’s leadership has finally, finally, attained the requisite seriousness for the situation they’ve found themselves in. Here’s hoping we finally escape the seemingly endless cycle of negotiating into war into ceasefires a week or two later into letting the Zionists regroup, then repeat from the beginning. If your winning strategy is attrition and your enemy’s winning strategy is shock and awe, don’t make peace immediately unless you absolutely have to!
    • To engage in a little Great Man Theory, as a treat, there’s a chance Sinwar is gonna be seen in retrospect as the man who wiped away the US’s footprint in the Middle East. What a chain of dominoes he triggered.

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