The dude is MAGA through and through including some proud boys connections, so his motives could also include „old fashioned, WW2 style“ ones…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kent
War with...Iran?
- Thread starter Technarch
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The dude is MAGA through and through including some proud boys connections, so his motives could also include „old fashioned, WW2 style“ ones…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kent
Just one small turd of shite in the ongoing river of sewage, but I believe it is specifically illegal to deliberately target another nation’s cultural sites. It is deliberately erasing a nation’s history and heritage. There’s a word for that.
Targeting cultural sites is a breach of The Hague Convention 1954. Which was adopted in part because of the cycles of cultural destruction and retaliation seen in WWII.
https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-aff...med-conflict-regulations-execution-convention
(There are exceptions if the cultural site is under military use or is militarily useful in some way. Said exemptions have been heavily relied upon. )
Post 1954 there have been several quite major West-led incidents, mostly involving military occupation and damage of sites as a side effect, or failure to protect cultural sites from local looters.
However I can’t find any post-1954 incidents of openly declared deliberate targeting of cultural sites by Western nations.
Which would make Hegseth quite uniquely ranking in this particular war-crime competition.
Of course, he was not a US Govt Secretary of War at the time, but he seems likely to repeat the threat in his official role, especially as the war runs into a morass.
Well the UN is another thing that's unlikely to survive the Trump administration in its present form.
According to what I heard earlier today on NPR, they just knocked off about the only guy who was negotiating prior to the war. Not that that matters much when you already called off negotiations to make an unprovoked attack. But it does leave a big question mark for anybody down the road that wants to start negotiating terms.
I though Afghanistan was our Afghanistan.
One essential thing about a good leader is they're able to tell when they're getting bad advice.
I honestly don't care where he goes as long as it's nowhere near power ever again.
Sure, Jan.
Yeah there are reports that Iran offered 3-5 years moratorium on enriching and Trump or his negotiators came back with 10-year moratorium.
But also suggestion that fucking Jared -- why the fuck is he involved? -- and Witkoff tried to kill the negotiations. Jared takes money from UAE, which probably wants to see Iran weakened.
Dropsite News report claims that Trump administration has reached out to Iran to see if there was a way out, like some agreement which would make Trump look like a winner and re-open the Strait of Hormuz.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-war-trump-witkoff-araghchi
Iranians have not answered.
If they think they've been cornered, that US and Israel won't stop until they've killed thousands of leaders and loyalists, they might pretend to want to make a deal with the Great Satan.
OTOH, there may be millions of loyalists who may turn on any leader who is seen as bending the knee to US and Israel. Remember, this is a regime which has thugs going around beating young girls unconscious for not covering themselves enough.
If they think Netanyahu is going to keep coming for them, they may decide to do as much damage on their way down, probably while they still have enough weapons left.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-war-trump-witkoff-araghchi
Iranians have not answered.
If they think they've been cornered, that US and Israel won't stop until they've killed thousands of leaders and loyalists, they might pretend to want to make a deal with the Great Satan.
OTOH, there may be millions of loyalists who may turn on any leader who is seen as bending the knee to US and Israel. Remember, this is a regime which has thugs going around beating young girls unconscious for not covering themselves enough.
If they think Netanyahu is going to keep coming for them, they may decide to do as much damage on their way down, probably while they still have enough weapons left.
I mean, as far as I can see even when his other politics has bounced around, the anti-war stance has been pretty consistent and the dudes first wife was killed in a useless war so it’s clearly personal. So sure, there might be an element of fleeing the sinking ship, but that’s not the whole story.
That's not why he's doing it. It's a rationalization to alleviate cognitive dissonance arising from finding Trump deviating so far from the ideal Kent had built up. Right-Wing Authoritarians need a strong leader figure to embody the underpinnings of their identity and worldview. That need is stronger than rationality. Kent isn't trying to protect Trump, he's trying to protect his own fragile sense of self now that the leader has let him down. He's convincing himself, not other people.
That plays into these historical aphorisms:
He's genuinely disappointed in Trump but can't bring himself to fully comprehend how stupid Trump was because 1) he's agreed with Trump on so much and 2) it would mean admitting he picked the wrong in-group and the wrong authoritarian figure right from the start.
The obvious conclusion for him is that Trump was misled by someone else.
There's this really fucked up cognitive distortion that seems to spring up around a lot of conservative projects and personalities, where the platform is fundamentally incoherent and under-specified, so everyone maps it onto their own private fantasy. There's never a step where everyone has to get together to reconcile their mutually exclusive fantasies, and when they actually win you end up with Brexit or Trump and people are shocked, shocked that the reality is vicious and stupid and self-destructive.
I haven’t seen Trump specifically address Kent’s resignation but this reporting seems about right:
‘Weak on security’ maybe refers to Kent being a participant in the infamous Signal chat that included Vance, Hegseth and a journalist from the Atlantic.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/nor...d-but-loses-on-diplomacy-20260318-p5okj1.html
‘Weak on security’ maybe refers to Kent being a participant in the infamous Signal chat that included Vance, Hegseth and a journalist from the Atlantic.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/nor...d-but-loses-on-diplomacy-20260318-p5okj1.html
What is the bet that Iran offered that, knowing full well they couldn't do any enrichment any way.
So, a win win situation.
Trump would get to declare himself the victor. Iran doesn't make any weapons grade uranium.
Everyone goes home.
But, someone had to go fuck it up.
The question would be who fucked it?
I'd put my money on Trump himself.
NewNinetyNine
Ars Centurion
They're cornered, and the only way to deter Trump or Netanyahu bombing them every time a bad poll or an election hits is to make the economic pain strong enough to be a deterrent. They've been stripped of their proxies and haven't been seriously pursuing a nuclear deterrent, so survival dictates global trade shockwaves.
It seems to have been Jared Kushner.... though I suppose it could have been Steve Wittkoff (a name which, sadly, doesn't mean "wit-head", because that name world be fitting).
This. Iran cannot back down as soon as Trump starts feeling the pain of touching the stove, they need to keep his hand on the stove till he is screaming in pain.
Otherwise Iran knows Israel and/or the US will just attack them again the next time its convenient for them.
I've always maintained that after Trump boots the UN out of the States, he'll turn the building into a casino.
...
Which will go bankrupt several times.
He'd turn it into a for-profit detainment center run by his children with him as the sole beneficiary (you know, to maintain the fiction that he's not getting paid from it).
Why would he settle for the old UN building in NYC when he's going to get Trump Tower in Havana?
What would that accomplish?
Trump has made it eminently clear that he has no interest in listening to anyone, much less dirty furriners whose only role (in what passes for his mind) is to bow down to his every whim.
Many of the NATO leaders have already said that this is pointless, illegal and that they won't be helping either with the war or being sacrificial targets IE escorting ships through the Strait.
Given that the last 2 times Iran has sat down at the negotiating table with the USA they've been bombed by the USA partway through the negotiations, they'd be insane to come to the table for a third time.
The point is to tell the world, including the American people, that Trump’s demanding that other countries needlessly and pointlessly risk sacrificing their naval vessels and crews in an action that would not resolve the blockade.
I wrote a fairly angry rant but decided to remove it because I actually like a lot of US people here. I hope none of you suffer the well-deserved fate of the US that Trump is doing everything in his power to bring forward.
There's no point in telling the US people anything. Why bother trying to educate the people that elected Trump a second time, when he was clear in his motives and had a documented plan for his regime (that he's followed very closely)? There is no point telling the US people anything because while individually they might be nice and cool and lovely, as a group, they're fucking morons not worth the effort of saving.
I am waiting for Iran to announce a policy of allowing passage only if Israel is embargoed by the nation seeking passage of the Hormuz Strait. That should spice things up. 
Those two morons are just middle men grifters to my mind, the 'plan' would have came from elsewhere; my money is on the top moron.
I remai more optimistic; there is a solid 35-40% for whom whatever Trump does is good, even if it is the opposite of what he said he’d do yesterday or it hurts them or their mother or child. The rest are in play.
Filled up the fossil fuel vehicle this morning on the way to the shop. £92 it cost me - while it may've been a little lower than usual, I cannot remember ever putting more than about £65 in it.
£1.86.9 a litre for diesel - last time I filled up it was in the £1.3n region. Sure this is at a super rural place, but they are normally one of the cheapest places for mile.
ThanksObama Trump
£1.86.9 a litre for diesel - last time I filled up it was in the £1.3n region. Sure this is at a super rural place, but they are normally one of the cheapest places for mile.
Thanks
No, what I meant that he could be a real Neo-Nazi. Sorry for being so vague. The absurd thing about the MAGA cesspool is that all kinds of seemingly incompatible toxic creeds intermingle, from extreme Zionists to holocaust deniers. I hope the whole construct explodes at some point. Maybe the current situation in Iran is the start.
Joe Kent is a known white supremacist, nazi sympathizer, antisemite and conspiracy theorist.
https://democrats.org/news/trump-pi...ism-to-lead-national-counterterrorism-center/
I would argue telling the time by not consulting stopped clocks even when they might incidentally be right about something is better and more resilient. I think it's only really relevant in that it demonstrates Trump losing the support of key parts of his base.
Involving himself with Iran—which was completely unnecessary—may be what seriously pierces the illusion of his appeal, as well as curtail his profit potential by irreparably damaging his homeland and the power it wielded. Pride before the fall, and all that.
I would not call him a stopped clock. This is opportunism to:
- Jump ship since he knows the war will go south, and in any case, it is not popular outside of the core Trump supporters
- It's a good time to blame the Jews in general by conflating all of them with Bibi's government, and pile on the bloodthirsty and shadowy string-puller conspiracies
I would argue MTG is probably smarter than we give her credit for, at least in a narrow Machiavellian sense, and figured out which way the wind was blowing probably before most of the true believers. But it's a sensible observation.
Similarly for warmongers like Bolton. He's being quite critical of Trump largely because he didn't do the manufacturing consent parts and didn't prepare for Hormuz closure. It's not that he did the thing, in other words, it's that he did it badly.
I think for a lot of his supporters the "no foreign entanglements/keep gas cheap" thing is probably as close as they get to sincere principles and it's pretty clear this is chipping away at that.
More in this vein, this has been making the rounds. I agree with her that she's an idiot (3 time Trump voter), but I think this probably represents a serious headwind for Trump going into midterms, which was already not looking good: https://fxbsky.app/profile/mikesington.bsky.social/post/3mhbz76hy2s25
I had this whimsical theory about trump 1.0 that maintained that he wasnt really in charge. He was a monstrous figurehead that managed to rally lots of monstrous idiots around him and make a lot of noise. And the theory said that if he REALLY started doing a lot of damage then the men (obviously men) who really did run the show would shut him down. He would get mysteriously sick or disapear, or have a plane crash.
Now we have trump 2.0 and while he is probably on his last legs, the utterly foul beings that he has amassed around him are doing the kind of damage I never thought I would see. And we must kind of assume that...the real bosses are not going to turn up and say "right, thats enough"
Like I said....a whimsical theory. Because the real bosses are the real monsters in charge of the USI.
Now we have trump 2.0 and while he is probably on his last legs, the utterly foul beings that he has amassed around him are doing the kind of damage I never thought I would see. And we must kind of assume that...the real bosses are not going to turn up and say "right, thats enough"
Like I said....a whimsical theory. Because the real bosses are the real monsters in charge of the USI.
Because they're each trying to weaponize Trump for their own little hellscape future and none of them can reach a consensus that enough is enough. Some of them are even at odds with each other.
This is why the "shadowy council of nefarious evildoers behind the scenes" conspiracies don't work. Like every other group of humans, they're fractious as much as ambitious.
He was in charge, but his staff in the first term were people who will disagree with him. This time, he figured out that he doesn't like that, so everyone he picks will agree with him on everything he said.