War with...Iran?

[GohanIYIan]

This is completely insane. I realize most of the international order is dead letters at this point, but I wonder when the US will start getting formally kicked out of things. Will there be a G6 summit during Trump's presidency that the US isn't invited to?

 

[GohanIYIan]

The sane-washing of the Iranian regime is just incredible. Read through the Wikipedia article for the Ayatollah... it highlights his deep commitment to women in education and research, somehow without mentioning the Iranian student who got beaten to death by his morality police for not wearing a hijab. You've got to ask yourself how a crowdsourced news site ends up with that level of propaganda. I think the Gaza war has absolutely been a "mask off" moment in a lot of places. You had Americans on the left celebrate the release of Palestinian "resistence fighters" from Israeli prisons -- people who were arrested for blowing up school busses and killing children. Somehow, Israeli children were legitimate targets in a war, but every Palestinian casualty was an innocent civilian even if they were fighting for Hamas. That kind of de-humanization doesn't happen by accident. It's one thing for civilians to die as collateral damage in a war, which is unavoidable, and something else entirely to deliberately target them.

This seems like a two things can be true situation. The Iranian regime was bad, full stop. But also, when the president says in an interview that all the people they hoped might lead a new government have been killed, it's clear this is not a well executed effort to replace the regime with something that will be better.

 

[GohanIYIan]

Not a strawman. You're the one who brought up race in the first place. Noone else did. Besides being a very ill-defined term, it's not useful in the Mideast and Eastwards to characterize the various conflicts, unlike ethnicities and religions.

And I've said before on Ars I consider being called "white" extremely offensive.
https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threa...-they-have-chosen-to-be.1506891/post-43709838
Jews, being Semites, aren't white.

This is a little silly since these categories aren't real and questions about who is or isn't white don't have real answer, but I think the American view of this isn't rooted in a lack of education; it's about the history of legal segregation.

If you were a Jewish-American person living in American in 1942 and drafted to fight in World War 2, some bureaucrat would have to decide if you're assigned to a white troop or to a Black troop because the military was segregated back then. I don't think most people would look at someone with Netanyahu's skin color and say "that's a Black guy", so legally speaking he has to be a white guy because those are the only two choices. Back when segregation was legally enforced, everyone had to fit into one category or the other even if some of the fits were awkward.

 

[GohanIYIan]

And it's completely untrue that that there were only two categories even in the US's segregation period. Southern states' Jim Crow laws may have referred mainly to those ("one drop rule"), but there were Native Americans, Latin Americans, various Asians...

Sure, but the point of the World War 2 example is there were scenarios where it did narrow down to just the two categories. If you were a Mexican-American child enrolling in public school in the era of segregation, someone had to decide if you go to the Black school or the white school.

But I agree trying to impose one society's racial and/or ethnic constructs onto a different society doesn't work or make much sense.

 

[GohanIYIan]

I have been thinking, from a global warming perspective, this may ultimately be the silver lining. Sure the straight being closed is expensive and painful, but the costs of oil going up is something that needs to happen. So, you know, now the time to buy solar power.

Maybe yes maybe no. A lot of the LNG exports being blocked could wind up being replaced by coal, and burning coal releases a lot more greenhouse gases. The net impact would be complicated to model.