I am sorry that I don't understand. How can the ageing of most species and the non-ageing of some species be an optimised evolved trait? They are the opposites of each other. — Truth Seeker

Natural death evolves when older individuals in a species are a hindrance to the younger individuals. The old must die to make way for the young essentially.

Trees are the best example of these sorts of evolutionary pressures to evolve natural death, as they grow to similar sizes and have the same basic features and conditions (i.e. "eat the same thing" of relying on photosynthesis, minerals and nitrogen fixing etc.), yet some trees grow to be thousands of years old, others essentially immortal, and some have a natural death after only about 70 years.

With non-tree organisms there's a lot of confounding factors like size and metabolism and diet, but trees are a sort of special case where confounding factors filter out.

Obviously trees can live a super long time, so if that was an evolutionary advantage in all cases then all trees would be super long lived.

The advantages of natural long life or natural short life are also easy to see with trees.

There is the clonal advantage of not needing to bother with sexual reproduction at all:

Wollemi pine
According to Cris Brack and Matthew Brookhouse at the ANU Fenner School of Environment & Society: "Once you accept that a common, genetically identical stock can define a tree, then the absolute "winner" for oldest tree (or the oldest clonal material belonging to a tree) [in Australia] must go to the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). It may be more than 60 million years old. The Wollemi pine clones itself, forming exact genetic copies. It was thought to be extinct until a tiny remnant population was discovered in Wollemi National Park in 1994... There is also substantial evidence that the tree has been cloning itself and its unique genes ever since it disappeared from the fossil record more than 60 million years ago." — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Then there's "stemming" trees which have the advantage of capturing resources over a vast areas and occupying the soil, even though individual "trees" are shorter lived.

Quaking aspen
Covers 107 acres (0.43 km2) and has around 47,000 stems (aged up to 130 years), which continually die and are renewed by its roots. Is also the heaviest-known organism, weighing 6,000 tonnes. — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Then there's long lived trees, without stemming or cloning, in the more normal sense of a single trunk that live thousands of years:

Wollemi pine
Patagonian cypress
A new 2022 estimation of 5,484 years expands on a previous minimum age based on incomplete tree rings of 3,654 — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Of which the advantage is monopolizing space in the canopy.

Point being, there are plenty of trees covering most ecosystems that can live a really long time, way longer than short-lived trees in the same ecosystem.

Compared to the shortest lived trees of similar size, so like a birch, is about 60 yeas.

One advantage of a shorter life span is that the species can evolve and adapt more ably. If evolution is largely constrained by generations, the shorter the generation the quicker it's possible to evolve to new conditions. Trees can produce a lot of seeds so "probably" young trees of the same species are going to grow in the space where an older individual dies. Though that's not even a universal tree strategy, as trees in rain forests have evolved ways to keep distance to avoid epidemics of diseases and pests; for in a more biodiverse environment the pests and diseases are evolving quicker too.

Another advantage is that shorter lived trees usually grow faster and do that by being less dense and so are weaker and more likely to be felled by a storm, eaten by birds and insects and beavers, and burn in a fire and so on. Species that anyways don't have long-term survivable conditions have no evolutionary pressure to be able to survive long term anyways, so can put energy and information creation and preservation (that also takes energy) into other things.

I could go on about trees, they're pretty fascinating, but I hope this is sufficient to explain why very different characteristics may co-evolve in different species of the same general kind in the same environment. There are pros and cons to different characteristics and natural death span has lot's of positives from an evolutionary survival and adaptability point of view.

Trying to make humans immortal is more likely to be a recipe for extinction than continuing on as we're doing. We know the current way "works" and balances all sorts of factors (including younger generations learning from the mistakes and biases of the old), whereas trying to make humans immortal, or as immortal as possible, may go terribly awry in all sorts of ways.

We can even develop interesting game theory scenarios to underline how dangerous it is. For example, someone adopting the explicit goal of causing the extinction of humanity is a rare event, but not impossible; such a maximally destructive individual with a limited life-span will face very adverse conditions for achieving their objective; the goal is rare, he or she will find few allies, very special circumstances will need to be created to ensure the extinction of all human life with any assurance and those circumstances will take considerable time and effort to create, so difficult that it is likely impossible for one individual to accomplish in a natural human life time span. Make that person immortal! In obviously super sophisticated technological conditions, able to work in the shadows for centuries if not millennia to find that "very special sauce of circumstances" that would kill every living human. Given enough time and consistent application of a single person's faculties, such goals are no longer discountable. Immortality is not a goal we would have any reason to believe extends the life, exploration and enjoyment of humanity as a whole.

But again, it is not even worth considering extending human life as a project apart from general health and well-being, in conditions that are not sustainable. If our environmental and ecological conditions were sustainable then we could argue the morality, theology, practicality of trying to extent people's lives beyond the natural bound that evolution has resulted in.

*Please note: Any teleological language to describe natural processes is because it's more understandable, and easier to use teleological language but then remind everyone at the end that trees do not themselves have "a strategy" of evolution; evolution happens to the trees regardless of what they think about it.

In that case, why do some organisms age (e.g. humans, cows, dogs, etc.) and some organisms don't age (e.g. planarian flatworms, hydra, Bristlecone pines, etc.)? — Truth Seeker

It's an evolved trait that optimizes over time for the survival of the species.

In terms of chromosomal continuation all species are functionally immortal in terms of their chromosomes until they go extinct. From the perspective any chromosome you have right now, there's an undivided chain of chromosome divisions all the way back to the common ancestor, and it all happens inside a cell membrane of one form or another. Of course, most chromosomes die when the individual of a species dies but all chromosomes in your or any other organisms cells today "doesn't know that", so to speak. How exactly a species chromosomes perpetuates into the future then evolves to best able to do that. Turns out that having individuals that procreate and then die is an efficient evolutionary strategy (to use teleological language).

Rate of mutation is also an evolved trait. There is an optimum rate of mutation that balances harm to the species due to the vast majority of mutations being harmful and the benefit to the species that some mutations are required to evolve.

On its own, making humans immortal won't be enough to achieve all 14 objectives. We would need to build spaceships to transport organisms to other planets and star systems so that we can spread life across the universe. — Truth Seeker

Step one in such a plan would be to ensure the current biosphere of the planet we're currently on is sustainable.

The idea that colonizing the moon, Mars or anywhere else in outer space somehow mitigates the danger we've created to our own survival on our own planet is preposterous.

If Elon Musk actually succeeds in sending people to Mars and having them live there permanently, such a colony would be entirely dependent on supplies and technology and people from earth for likely hundreds of years.

Therefore, if things are not sustainable on earth there is no point in trying to leave earth and colonize elsewhere. In the situation that the earth biome really was collapsing it would still be far easier to setup a sort of space colony on earth (under the sea, or in a bunker, or just out in the "desert of the real") than in outer space somewhere.

If we stopped being selfish and instead shared resources equitably (i.e. everyone receives according to needs and contributes according to ability) there wouldn't be any poverty. — Truth Seeker

Yes, so therefore that's the primary problem and making people immortal would be a secondary problem, even if it was a good idea which is debatable.

Many illnesses are preventable, and many more are treatable. Again, sharing resources would make healthcare accessible to all. I have been trying for 37 years to get everyone to love everyone, but I have failed because people don't listen to me. If everyone loved everyone, there wouldn't be any wars or crimes. Why doesn't everyone just love everyone and be vegan egalitarians? We should share resources equitably, and everyone should receive according to need and contribute according to abilities. — Truth Seeker

Improving society is a slow process. I don't see why you would expect it to go any quicker than history would lead us to believe.

Evolution is a deeply flawed process. Here is a list of biological design flaws in humans and other species that strongly suggest evolution through natural selection, rather than intelligent design. These features reflect evolutionary compromises, historical constraints, and trial-and-error processes typical of evolution — Truth Seeker

Evolution as such is not a flawed process as it's a natural process that did not have any design criteria to begin with. Saying evolution is a flawed process is like saying a volcano or the sun is a flawed process. Natural processes are the conditions in which we find ourselves and to assign flaws to those conditions doesn't really make any sense.

We humans can make processes to change our conditions to meet some criteria and those processes we make can be flawed given our objectives.

For our customary human goal of good health, clearly our knowledge and technology can help us change natural processes, such as diseases, with processes that can be flawed, such as side effects.

Not only is it extremely implausible the idea we could make flawless medicine but diseases too evolve.

But the project of human health through medicine is simply unsound in the context of critically damaging our ecosystems. First for the obvious fact that if we do not tend to the conditions necessary for our own survival, pursuing pristine health through a calamity makes little sense, but secondarily most of our diseases now are caused by the same agents that damage the ecosystems and it is cheaper anyways to address these causes than to continuously treat the symptoms. The focus on medicine (that the pharmaceutical corporations love) is a distraction from the political organization question that is the cause of so much disease from both pollution and poverty.

You're absolutely right: in most animals, DNA chains shorten during cell division, specifically at the telomeres - the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, telomeres shorten, eventually leading to cell ageing (senescence) and organismal ageing. — Truth Seeker

This is really not how it works.

Cells can add more telomeres to chromosomes to keep them healthy. Of course, in a chronically unhealthy person that cell maintenance will degrade so associations between telomeres health and overall health would not be surprising (though even this has weak evidence; as DNA health is a core task that cells may continue to do even in adverse conditions).

However, the best evidence that telomeres doesn't simply shorten until there's none left and you die is that there are vastly different cell division rates in the body, so if the hypotheses was true then organs with faster division (like intestinal walls) would be far more likely to fail first and people who die of natural causes would overwhelmingly die of organ failure associated with fast cell division.

Instead of that, people die of all sorts of organ failure, and one leading cause of death is heart failure and heart cells don't divide at all in adulthood. Likewise, neurons don't divide at all in adulthood.

The premise that making people live longer achieves your objectives I also think is highly questionable.

First, because there is a long list of more pressing matters of war and poverty and illness, that we have the knowhow to address already but it is a matter of political organization.

Second, it is completely nonsensical to even consider extending human life without first being assured we are taking care of the environment and our economic activity derived from the environment sustainably.

Third, natural age is an evolved trait that nature has found to maximize our chance of survival as a species, and the wisdom of trying to reprogram evolution on these fundamental points resulting from hundreds of millions of years of genetic optimization is highly questionable.

Extending the life of the boomer generation, for example, seems incredibly foolish from the perspective of concern for humanity and the wellbeing of all life on the planet. Natural age may simply be nature's way of getting rid of such generations before it's too late.

Why “however”? What do you want it to contrast to? — neomac

The use of the word "however" is to to contrast with the fact that parties seeking their own gain at the expense of some collective gain (family, organization, business, institutional, government, country, empire, or what have you) usually don't advertise that, but will present their plan as in the interest of the group.

So, party A pursues B and party C pursues D; however, party C will usually also claim to be pursuing B.

Perfectly fine use of the word however.

Your expectations are based on reality or on your moral standards? — neomac

The current state of the conversation is descriptive. People can be described to act in the interest of "something". That something could be anything.

For example, some people act in the interest of their pet, dedicating their whole life to their pets welfare. For this particular conversation, people making (contributing to) US foreign policy are unlikely to be dedicated to the welfare of their pet to the exclusion of all other interests.

National interest is and can’t be anything else than what results from people’s self-serving interests on a national level AND given certain power relations between them. — neomac

It obviously can.

You can easily have a situation where the "certain powerful people" self-serving interest would be to plunder the national treasury and make off with the winnings. This is obviously not in the interest of any sensible concept of "the nation".

The fact of the matter is that people don't necessarily do that even if they can, as other people and even "the nation" as they conceive it has value and meaning apart from the maximization of their own store of value.

In order to analyze how policy is made we must take this obvious fact into account.

Of course, simply recognizing that some parties involved are acting in their own self interest to maximize material gains in the process (for example increase the value of a defence stock they are invested in) or then acting in the interest of another nation (perhaps simply because they are a spy or then duel nationality and are unable to serve two masters equally well) or a religious group or whatever, are going to be inputs into government decision making that likely conflict with any sensible definition of national interest.

For example, if one's reason to have a war is that it will increase defence contractor stocks, it's very unlikely that war just so happens to be also great for the national interest.

If someone else's reason to have a war is to fulfill prophecy; again, unlikely to happen to line up with any sensible definition of national interest.

Of course, what exactly is the national interest, even for people trying to be genuinely focused on that, is up for debate, but what is not really debatable is that people who have completely different objectives than the welfare of the nation, defined as the welfare of the people in the nation or then imperial strength or then any plausibly objective definition (i.e. definition apart from their own personal goals), are unlikely to just-so-happen to happen upon goals that are in the national interest (again, under any sensible definition).

However, in pursuing their ulterior motives they will present their motives as in the national interest, as they must convince and bargain with people in conversation where national interest and national strategy is the mediating discourse.

For our purposes here, if a certain powerful American Zionists puts the interests of Israel above the interest of the United States, they are unlikely to simply state that. They are far more likely to state that their Zionist objectives just so happen to be the plausibly objective interests of the United States. So, let us imagine a Zionist wants regime change in Iran at the expense of the United States, knowing full well the US won't derive any net benefit from that (would be just a really costly war), but it would result, in their estimation, in improving Israel's strategic position in the region, they are unlikely to put the argument to non-Zionist American decision makers and analysts, as well as the media and regular people, that American should embark upon an extremely costly war that will harm America but benefit Israel. Rather, they are likely to come up with arguments to try to convince people that what they want happens to be in the interest of "America".

As I said you are framing a situation not in terms of competing interests, but in moral terms. This reflects your allegedly “impartial” (or “virtuous”?) interest. Yet your views are exposed to the same “bias” you are accusing others to be victim of or purposefully embracing: namely, viewing national interest in light of your self-interest. Your “populist” views are putatively aligned with those of the mass of powerless nobodies which are victims of the putative abuses of evil elites. — neomac

At this point in the discussion you are interjecting into, the debate with @Tzeentch and @Benkei is descriptive of whose interest is even being served by recent policy.

@Tzeentch presents a description of the decision making process as coherent grand strategy since many decades, whereas @Benkei and I disagree the policy changes and decisions in the middle-east represent some sort of coherent US grand strategy over many decades.

@Tzeentch and I have debated this for quite some time, when the genocide first started. While both agreeing a genocide is definitely happening, @Tzeentch is of the view that Israel is acting on behalf of US Imperial interest in that "eliminating" Gaza and shoring up Israel's strategic position, while also creating chaos in the Middle East, is a logical next step in a rational US grand strategy in line or then formulated (or then "formulatable") by impartial imperial grand strategists.

I disagree with @Tzeentch, I view the genocide in Gaza as absolutely terrible for US Imperial interests (defined as preserving and expanding imperial power relative to other powers) and the policy to support and cover for Israel's genocide is due to Zionist influence in American government. That Zionism is a powerful faction, they want the genocide in Gaza and they are expending their political capital in order to achieve it vis-a-vis other factions and coalitions in the United States that disagree with them.

By factions I mean in a broad sense including entire institutions, such as the Pentagon even if the Pentagon itself is of course made up of myriad subsections (there is also resulting collective positions from all that sub-factional dynamics).

My analysis of the current situation is that Zionists "went for it" and tried to push the United States into a high-intensity war with Iran and the faction that stopped that from happening (for now) is the pentagon (because they know it conflicts with US imperial interest, represent far more costs than gains, have other regions they worry about, such as East-Asia) and (I would guess) managed to convince Trump in the situation room where it's mostly pentagon people in the room that war with Iran is incredibly high risk and don't recommend it (if they did, I have a hard time imagining the war wouldn't be on full blast right now). For, war with Iran as concept is easy to talk about, but when you get into the nitty gritty of how to actually make war with Iran, that they fought Iraq for 8 years and are not push overs, have bunkers everywhere, mountains and a surface area of 1 Rocky Mountains + 1 France, and the ballistic missiles capacity and so on, it's obviously not an easy task and many dead Americans would result tin the attempt.

At the same time, I believe Israel was threatening to escalate to them using nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian enrichment plant. Trump bombing the plant with conventional weapons (but not killing anyone) and then Iran's symbolic counter attack, enabled Trump to simply declare a ceasefire.

The reason I was so concerned about Israel escalating to nuclear weapons is because they have no diplomatic off-ramps by design, literally opening the war with assassinating negotiators; precisely so that the US would be inevitably sucked into an expanding conflict.

Trump simply announcing a ceasefire basically short circuited that escalation process, and the bombing removed the reason for Israel to use nuclear weapons.

To summarize, in my model of what's happening, the constant escalation by Israel represents Zionist influence in America essentially cashing in their chips at a combined optimum of the combined factors of their influence in American foreign police and American power relative Iran. A sort of 'now or never' moment for Zionist whose objective is to push Iran into a failed state, as well as carry out genocide while the US can still cover for that.

To this discussion, @Benkei adds the additional information that the previous nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated by Obama was clearly part of a strategy of detente with Iran, that drops sanctions and allows them to develop and normalize, and not some sort of 5-D chess move knowing Trump would come in and tear up the agreement, then Israel embark on a genocide under Biden to be finally in a position to attack Iran in a second Trump administration.

Obviously Obama would be aware that if detente doesn't work American could go to war, but the calculation at the time was clearly that a peaceful arrangement with Iran was more in America's interest, even Imperial interest (allow that pivot to Asia), than another Middle-East war that kills plenty of Americans.

For, even if American Imperial violence hasn't stopped qua violence, there are a lot fewer American soldier deaths since many years now, and I would very much suspect that policy and decision makers with any sense of US interest are very apprehensive about any proposal that involves US soldiers returning in boxes at a high or steady volume.

I'm not completely sure if you're disagreeing with me.

By interest I mean people's perceived interest they are working on behalf of, which is (usually) a mix of personal and collective interests of one form or another (family, company, institution, country etc.). For example, someone working in a company may have the interest of the company in mind in making decisions, what the company to succeed, but also want to advance their career; sometimes these interests are aligned (doing a good job advances your career) and sometimes in conflict (advancing one's career requires spreading rumours about someone who's actually more competent; of course in this person's perception; someone else may have "honesty is the best policy" perception as to their personal interest to advance their career).

In terms of how government decisions are made lot's of individuals representing explicitly and implicitly lots of mixes of interests go into these decisions.

However, all of them are going to say what they propose is in the national interest.

To take the war in Iran, American-Zionists who want the US to attack Iran for Israel's benefit, claim this is also the US national interest as well.

So, everyone is always talking grand strategy and sometimes that's in earnest (as earnest as they can, such as the authors of the Brookings paper discussed above) and sometimes it is obviously a lie.

A "healthy" Empire, the plausibly objective interest of the Empire as such manages to assert itself over special interests that wish to plunder the Empire or otherwise consume its capital base (including diplomatic capital) for their own ends. An unhealthy Empire everyone comes to divide up the spoils and get away with their pickings.

I was just about to cite this very paper as an example of people trying to be objective.

The paper essentially makes the point that diplomacy is the only option likely to succeed.

I don't have time to make detailed citations right now, but of the situation we are in (American people simply don't back an invasion so the only attack option is bombing), the authors are very lucid of the likely consequences:

Disadvantages (of just bombing stuff scenario)

- Iran’s determination to acquire a nuclear weapons capability would probably not be reduced by such an attack and, especially in the short term, could well be increased.

-The hard-line Iranian leadership that presently struggles to maintain political support at home might be strengthened by a nationalistic reaction among the Iranian people against what they would doubtless perceive as an unprovoked American attack.

- Even massive airstrikes might only set back the Iranian nuclear program by as little as a year or two, and this seems more likely than the more optimistic possibility that this policy option would delay Iran’s program by three years or more. Given the track record of U.S. and international intelligence in accurately assessing the nuclear programs of foreign states, any attack, even a sustained American operation, might fail to destroy a substantial fraction of Iran’s nuclear program. The United States cannot strike what it does not know about, and there is good reason to think that Iran has or will soon have major nuclear facilities—including alternative uranium hexafluoride storage/production and uranium enrich- ment plants—that have not been identified. — WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran - Brookings Institute

Which is exactly what the media is arguing with Trump about presently.

Furthermore, even if the program was delayed by 3 years, which is viewed as essentially the best case scenario, what does that delay accomplish outside a followup invasion? Obviously bombing them is going to motivate them even harder to get the bomb and make diplomacy far more difficult, if not impossible (as we see), to get them to agree to give up their nuclear program (which they've stated pretty clearly they will never ever do). So if the plan is diplomacy, simply doing some bombing in the manner that has been done is not part of any rational diplomatic strategy. If there's no appetite to invade Iran, then bombing (even successful) doesn't delay the nuclear program for the purposes of organizing a successful invasion.

Without a followup invasion, what exactly is the point in simply delaying Iran getting the bomb? With the high possibility bombing: A. causes that to happen as Iran may simply not develop a nuclear bomb if not attacked (as has been Iranian policy for 40 years) B. the bombing is not even effective so don't really delay anything and C. creates domestic and international sympathy for Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon.

All the bombing accomplished is removing the nuclear material (that we for sure know about) from international inspection.

No worries. Slightly off topic but maybe others have the same question. The old forum had on the front page all the main forums and last-post of each forum, which encouraged posting in the less active forums (as your post would stay on the main page until it was a bit awkward no one responded yet). That each forum was on the front page had the bonus that sub-forums could then be listed (without showing the last post so as not to trigger people) but people looking for scriptural debate or then current-events knew exactly where to go to get their fix. Mostly scriptural debate was catholics arguing with protestants so was pretty amazing. There was this one catholic called Mariner who absolutely brought the fire; totally lit.

It's in the lounge, it's under "all categories".

The lounge is where political stuff is put so that it doesn't show up on the front page. On the old forum there was a current events sub-forum to the political-philosophy forum, and you could see the link to the sub-forum but last post wasn't shown, which was a less confusing way to achieve the same thing of not showing current events last posts ( / controversial flamewars) on the front page.

Same thing was done for scriptural discussion sub-forum to the theology main forum.

Oh, and this is nonsense too. I'm repeatedly trying to start a conversation about actual geopolitical realities - ergo the 'root causes' - but you've been pretty much categorically ignoring them. — Tzeentch

I have little time these days, but I am "fully in" the geopolitical theorizing.

However, has extremely good points.

A better framework that brings the two arguments together, as I argued for quite some time on the Ukraine thread, is "grand strategy mediated discourse".

Decisions are made by individuals in a network, which are usually best modelled by factions we usually call "special interest" today.

In these decision making processes everyone uses strategic language. For example, if you represent the arms industry and all you want is to sell more arms and have more wars and tensions to sell more arms for short term shareholder value, you're not going to just say that; rather, you're going to translate your interest to sell more arms into grand strategy language.

It's called rationalizing.

Of course, some parties in the decision making process will actually care about a US empire "as such"; for example, a lot of analysts are hired to analyze the world and the interests of "the US" and simply do that job. However, even then, what they come to define as "US interest" is going to be shaped by more powerful players that may have self serving definitions. So, simply because you're an analysis and your identity is serving US interest, doesn't mean you therefore come up with some plausible definition of what US interests are. If it becomes the institutional status quo that defeating Iran is US interest, then you'll start just repeating that as that's what's expected of you.

Point being, "US strategy" is not an accurate model of what drives decisions. All sorts of interests go into policy and government decision making, of which genuine concern for strategy is only one component, and even within this component of some plausibly impartial attempt at "US strategy" there will be a diversity of opinion.

So there are genuine attempts to argue for "US interests" within the establishment, but everyone else is going to present themselves as doing the same thing.

In this case of the 12 day war, the main faction pushing for a US war with Iran in the US establishment is obviously the American Zionists (often duel citizens). Now they want a US war with Iran for Israeli-Zionist interests but they nevertheless present that as US interest.

They've pushed hard for a war with Iran before, and didn't get it, so that in itself informs us there's other factions that disagree that a war with Iran is in US interests and / or their own interest (such as own political or economic interest). For example, the arms industry wants to sell weapons, but they don't benefit from a war's that are too big and chaotic. What they want are arms races, specifically technology driven arms races where they make the most profit, not actual resolutions to conflicts or wars so big that it disrupts the global economy (people need money to be able to buy your stuff). Arms industry doesn't want to get nuked same as everyone else.

Then there's the pentagon, US intelligence agencies, and other US institutions. Pentagon may simply have no viable plan to defeat Iran, so they may hear the rhetoric but then those analysts who identify as objective try to formulate as plausibly objective view of Iran and plausibly objective evaluation of a giant war with Iran. If the results aren't good there's going to be pushback from any general that either also identifies as representing some sort of objective US interest or then doesn't want the embarrassment of losing a war.

There's also diplomatic factions within all these institutions that don't see war as the primary tool to advance US interests, but rather diplomacy is (war being a last resort).

We put all this together, and the original plan to invade Iran was clearly as a next step to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran is in the middle. For that to happen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have had to go well, they don't.

Obama's elected, there's a giant push to carry out the attack Iran plan, but Obama disagrees that's a good idea, goes with diplomacy instead.

As @Benkei points out, there's no evidence this change in policy to negotiate a resolution is somehow a cynical ploy to keep Iran from developing. Definitely it's a plan to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but the only way to do that is a process of phasing out the sanctions.

One of the fundamental reasons to favour diplomacy (in which Iran also gets some of what it wants, that's how diplomacy works) is that war with Iran would be simply too costly for the US and may not even succeed in at least regime change in the short term. The US may simply lose a conventional war with Iran simply because it would be too costly to win (require a draft for example). Iranians fought an 8 year war with Iraq, so there's no good reason to assume invading Iran would be easy and it could turn out to be so difficult that the US gives up. In addition to the prospects of very clearly failing to topple the Iranian government, there's all the regional chaos Iran could cause; straights of Hormuz and all that.

I could go on, but the point is there's lots of inputs into decision making. Obama decides diplomacy is in the US interest. Then Trump gets elected, undoes Obamas deal not to then immediately start a war with Iran, but because he hates Obama so much. Of course, Zionists don't want a diplomatic resolution with Iran, they want war even if it greatly harms the US (they see Israel as winning in that scenario), so they get to work on increasing the tensions with Iran. However, overall they are losing, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't going well, and Trump starts the withdrawal from Afghanistan process; that's really not good if you want to attack Iran.

The war we just saw, notably, was not started by the US, but directly by Israel. This isn't the Zionist preference, but a plan B of starting the war themselves and assuming the US will join in.

That also didn't work, so shows the limitations of Zionist influence in the US government.

And here the courts got an ample amount of this rhetoric after the Hamas attacks. Yet I think the real threat is ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. — ssu

The current Harvard estimate is 400 000 Palestinians "missing", in addition to starvation and all manner of trauma, in particular to children, from physical wounds, concussions to every possible developmental disorder.

We, the West, have essentially been torturing about a million children for about 20 months, and by simple proportions 200 000 children are among those "missing" but could be a higher proportion if children are less likely to survive the weapons used.

Ethnic cleansing of simply moving the Palestinians I don't see how that could be a worse crime, since if they are still alive the situation could be reversed by the world or then at least compensated.

For example, had the Nazis moved the Jews and other undesirables to the camps but didn't starve and kill them, they would have suffered a lot less and then returned home. So I don't see how ethnic cleansing, that is not also genocide, is a worse crime than the suffering we are seeing live streamed.

That they know their suffering is live streamed and the world does nothing is an additional trauma.

But for their proxies in Gaza being annihilated, their nuclear facilities being devastated, their being under attack by the strongest military force on the planet, their enemy being a 3,000 year old civilization that is relentless, and that they agreed to a cease fire, Iran's got them just where they want them. — Hanover

Palestinians did not protect Iran, but Iran tried to protest Palestinians from genocide. First of all.

The nuclear facilities are civilian facilities, everything important was already moved out or can anyways be rebuilt. At least one influential faction in the Iranian military has been pushing for the development of nuclear weapons, they wouldn't do that in civilian facilities.

The civilian program (in terms of weapons development) is only needed to develop enrichment designs, not even equipment. This stuff isn't very large, it can easily be built anywhere (such as a military bunker), and Iran has Uranian mines so all it needs is understanding the enrichment technology, which they have done by developing about 6 generations of centrifuges.

Each generation of centrifuge is more efficient than the last, and more efficiency means you need either less machines or less time, and in both cases less energy.

They already have enriched to 60% which in terms of time and energy is 80% the way to weapons grade (the enrichment is more efficient the more enriched you go).

The limiting factor for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon since decades is not technology but diplomacy.

Iran needs to project stability and rationality to its partners, such as Russia, and that's done by being stable and rational. Now, simply capitulating on civilian nuclear development is not stable and rational and is terrible diplomacy vis-a-vis Russia as Russia maintains non-Western states have the same sovereignty and can develop civilian nuclear programs (Russia also sell civilian nuclear programs); and it doesn't even increase stability because having the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon and counter-strike Israel is a better deterrent than having no capacity. However, rushing to develop a nuclear weapon out-of-the-blue is also not stable or good diplomacy. Russia would likely join in sanctioning Iran as it's simple destabilizing and would lead to accelerated proliferation (Saudi Arabia getting the bomb etc.) if not a nuclear first strike by Israel.

So, for decades Iran has pursued the most stable diplomatic position of developing a civilian nuclear program that also serves as a deterrent to war with Iran.

By striking Iran in an act of illegal aggression, moreover assassinating top commanders and scientists, it removes the diplomatic obstacle for developing nuclear weapons.

Iran can now easily sell the narrative that it's Israel and the US that are out of control, not responsible actors, and they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves from these maniacs, same as North Korea.

The US' advantage in applying diplomatic pressure on Iran was in presenting themselves as the "responsible adults" and Iran as the reckless party that shouldn't have nuclear weapons, and we're simply not going to talk about Israel's nuclear weapons.

This war completely reverses that diplomatic status quo.

Even worse, by having this war, Iran can remove all the nuclear material it had under observation in a civilian program to hardened military sites for the development of nuclear weapons. So that physical obstacle, that the Uranian is being watched and to remove it would trigger a diplomatic and then likely military crisis in which no one has sympathy for Iran, is also removed.

Oh, I don’t agree with that. I think the disabling of the Iranian nuclear capacity is crucial. My point rather was scepticism about Trump’s motivation. — Wayfarer

It is in no way disabled.

The main capability is the designs needed to enrich uranium; those obviously aren't destroyed.

Iran has developed multiple generations of homegrown enrichment designs and expertise. This sort of technology is really finicky and you need trial and error to optimize things.

In addition, there's no indication that Iran's stockpile of 60% enriched uranium is destroyed, so it's safe somewhere. Enriching to 90% only requires 20% of the energy using the same centrifuge technology (you just run it for longer to get to 90%), which all indications are Iran moved to safe locations before these strikes.

Iran also has its own uranium mines. So, it has the knowledge and expertise needed to enrich uranium to weapons grade and also has the uranium.

Therefore, the only ways to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon would be by agreement or invasion and occupation.

Dropping bombs, but not invading, is the best way to guarantee Iran develops nuclear weapons.

Every Israeli that leaves Israel and doesn't return is a fatality in economic terms.

Israel hans't banned people from leaving (except rich people on boats) because people are excited to stay. That's the biggest win Iran is achieving in terms of security metrics. Less Israeli population, less power, less skills, less threat in the future. And this economic cost of missiles blowing up infrastructure, laboratories, ports, disrupting normal life, removing the "sense of Western style safety", is in addition to the economic costs Israel had already incurred due to operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, along with boycotts due to those actions.

Israel is a small country that has millions of citizens with duel nationality that can easily leave, in addition to something like a million ultra-orthodox citizens who don't serve in the military and many don't really work, then there's the Arab population that are there but not necessarily committed to the Zionist project.

I don't know what information you have been following, but Israel's initial decapitation strike did not work; commanders were replaced, Iran retaliated. Sure, people died but their replacements maybe more effective.

Then Iran has struck Israel with missiles and drones every single day since. If Israel owns the skies over Iran, why aren't they able to disrupt and suppress that?

Iran defeated US and Israeli missile defence, about 5 layers, day 1 and even that level of performance (that does not prevent missiles falling) cannot possibly be sustained.

The reports are Iran has successfully moved all of its enriched uranium and critical enrichment equipment to safer locations.

Israel can strike Iran too, sure, but nothing of critical military importance (which is all under ground).

And considering everything important is under ground, what would actually have a chance of seriously disrupting Iran's military capability would be mass bunker bustering. If the US is now out of the war after dropping 6 giant bombs on non-military-critical civilian infrastructure, that means Iran is basically military safe.

Israel can destroy civilian infrastructure, including prisons for some reason, but that doesn't degrade Iranian military capability and is basically just wasting ammunition, and Iran can destroy civilian infrastructure too.

Maersk has paused going to Haifa; that is a pretty big disruption.

And in the long term view, this sort of war is far more damaging to Israel's economy than it is Iran, not simply because Israel is smaller in size and population, but Israel is driven by the high tech sector and there's not only destruction of laboratories Iran has already achieved but this sort of long term disruption causes many "knowledge workers" to leave, along with lots of other duel citizens. Iranians, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere and the oil will still be in the ground when the war ends.

Weak and pathetic would be Iran unable to strike Israel: missiles intercepted, launchers interdicted, no common and control.

Iran is defeating Israel and US missile defence.

As for this recent attack on US bases, seems the gamble was Trump would take that as a win and not escalate further. In this sort of escalation game, doing nothing keeps the tension, so once you've "responded" then the other side has the option to deescalate.

However, Iran sent missiles, I heard 40 missiles but it's hard to verify, at Israel as an immediate response.

Iran has demonstrated it can survive mass assassination of commanders and then retaliate the same day (after Israel's initial strike), keep hitting Israel everyday, defeat missile defences of US and Israel, clearly manage to deal with continued covert activity in Iran, and generally unite the people.

If this is the end of US involvement, then Iran in the final analysis Iran deterred further US involvement and can keep striking Israel to missile exhaustion, and once that happens Iran can produce cheap drones to keep sending at Israel as well as the odd ballistic missile.

Israel has no advantageous end game it can perform by itself (nuclear weapons being not exactly advantageous).

The situation is difficult to evaluate as there's strict censorship now in both Iran and Israel, so it's difficult to know what's going on, but we do know Iran can and is continuing to strike Israel and Israel missile defences and air power can't do anything about that.

So already a massive win for Iran, even if more Iranians have died.

I honestly had zero clue if Iranian ballistic missiles would work as intended, that they could manage to fire them off, and in large numbers day after day. It's impressive. Not easy.

I had to verify it directly on Truth Social, be sure it's not a prank, full message:

Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired — 13 were knocked down, and 1 was “set free,” because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their “system,” and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — Trump

If this is true, turns out the code is that ALL CAPS is a bluff (that's likely to work because ... all caps, what can you do) and normal punctuation is supposed to be trustworthy.

Wars over, CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Honestly, I think we can go ahead and wrap up this whole philosophy business.

Medvedev has a reputation for making extreme statements, though. It's hard to say whether they're actually serious or just looking to provoke chaos/a reaction in the US-Israeli camp. — Tzeentch

US and Israel have teased if not directly threatened nuclear weapons use, so Medvedev / Russia is at minimum just counter threatening for the deterrent effect.

Obviously threatening nuclear weapons use is not some sort of special right of the US and Israel and others can do it too.

Israel and the US need to take into consideration that Iran is supplied with nuclear weapons, including North Korean, but also needs to take into account that even after a nuclear strike on Iran that Iran could nevertheless complete development of a nuclear weapon and strike back. It would be diplomatically horrendous obviously for Israel to strike Iran with nuclear weapons, but that may not even prevent Iran developing nukes of their own and counter-striking.

Without nuclear weapons, I really don't see how Israel could potentially resolve things on their own. When your opening move is assassinating negotiators, it's difficult to declare that everyone had fun and to just call it a day.

If the US also can't force a resolution due to anti-air supply by Russia and China, very quickly the only option left is nuclear weapons.

If Iran (and Russia and co.) can successfully deter Israel from using nuclear weapons then it's really not in a good position.

For example of why keeping it "symbolic" is not a risk averse move, Trump's statement about Iranian retaliation was literally all caps and categorical:

ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT. — Trump

So faced with these kinds of statements, you'd find some other non-attacking-US way to retaliate if you wanted to avoid escalation.

If you don't want to avoid escalation, then that would only be reasonable with assurances from Russia, such as may have been provided in the Putin's meeting with the Iranian foreign minister this morning, on the subject of air defence.

Regardless of the state of Iran's current air defence system, Russia can provide more. Just as Russia essentially wiped out Ukrainian air defences in the first days of the war and had air supremacy, but then with the West's help Ukraine started to regain air deterrence, shot a few planes down, pushed Russia's planes back to operating behind the line of contact, Russia could potentially do (assuming their systems are good enough) the same to the US in Iran.

NBC News’ Richard Engel says the nature of the strike and the well-defended target indicate Iran’s retaliatory strike was a “symbolic attack.” Qatar was also reportedly informed ahead of the attack. — RogueAI

We'll have to see how Trump responds.

Why I (personally) would avoid such an attack if I wanted to avoid escalation, is that Trump may anyways react to the "symbol" the same as a non-symbolic attack.

And if you reached out to the US to try to be reassured that your symbolic attack won't cause further escalation ... how exactly would you trust anything the US says about it?

To me, situation seems beyond trading symbols, but I definitely could be wrong. We'll have to see what Trump does tomorrow to see what direction things are going in.

In addition to this attack, Iran is still striking Israel, so pressure is anyways quite high to go to war with Iran, so why add a symbol to the mix if you wanted to deescalate.

Ah, I see. Iran wins if they get beaten to a bloody pulp but manage to avoid complete annihilation. Right. — RogueAI

Yes that's the spirit.

Obviously the Iranian people don't win in such a situation.

Your claims about air supremacy are fantastical. Neither U.S. or Israel have lost a plane yet and I will be very surprised if Iran ever manages to take one down. — RogueAI

Then why don't we see ballistic missiles being intercepted in boost phase? If you have air supremacy, you can just fly around and B-line to any ballistic missile launch and shoot at those missiles when most vulnerable.

That's not happening, so my conclusion is Iran is able to deny airspace to cover their ballistic missile launches. If they have sufficient deterrence, Israeli planes would just leave the area. If they didn't have deterrence, Israeli planes would be hunting for launches of ballistic missiles.

However, regardless of Iran's capability, Russia and China can supply more, and I don't know what Iran's plan is or decision making criteria. All I can say is that if I was making decisions for Iran I wouldn't escalate with the US unless I had assurances of anti-air supply from Russia and China.

Now, I have not said that what follows from all my points is that Iran will therefore win an air war with the US.

My main points are:

1. If Iran is trying to escalate, or even simply risking escalation, with the US, it's only a reasonable thing to do with in a state of belief that Iran will be supplied with air defence from Russia and China (that they "got their back") and also in the state of belief that those systems will work.

2. All Iranian critical military assets are under ground, so Iran maybe preserving anti-air capability. They clearly have a lot of ballistic missiles that work, so they may have also a lot of anti-air missiles.

Of course, there are other potential explanations for Iran's actions, and it's possible that no system on the planet could defeat US air power.

However, if you were Russia and China, defeating the US in a large air battle would be something you would probably want to do, so they may try. If the cost are to Iran, they may have little reason not to give it a go.

Iran is not going to militarily win against Israel and/or America. — RogueAI

Bombs don't win wars. Since Israel attacked Iran first and its objective is regime change, if Iran survives that's a win for Iran in this context.

This claim that Israel has air supremacy and flying over Iran at will I find incredulous, as then we'd see ballistic missiles being intercepted in the boost phase, which I've seen no evidence of.

What I find more likely is that Iran is using its air defences to cover ballistic missile launches and letting Israel bomb non-critical military asset as much as it wants. Everything military-critical in Iran is under ground ... so Israel bombing the surface is mostly just attritting Israel capacity. Any fixed asset Israel could just strike with a standoff weapon if you did manage to deny the air space to aircraft (i.e. there's no point expending surface-to-air missiles and exposing radar to protect fixed assets on the surface; even if you were successful they just send cruise or ballistic missiles of their own). Concrete buildings cannot only be rebuilt (mostly at lower cost than Israel spends to blow them up), but they aren't assets critical to war fighting so it doesn't impact the war outcome anyways.

Iran is huge, the surface area and mountainous region of essentially one entire Rocky Mountain chain in addition to one whole France, so Iran will focus air defence to ensure ballistic missile launches aren't intercepted in boost phase.

They would turn their radars on to check for planes, and reserve their anti-air capability for any planes that come at them. If there are no planes, they can launch, if planes come at them to intercept launch they don't launch and try to take down the planes. If they have established successful air denial bubbles (i.e. SEAD), those won't cover much of Iran, so Israel can still go around bombing plenty of other stuff, as well as use plenty of standoff missiles systems to make strikes anyways even covered by air denial systems.

However, regardless of Iran anti-air capability, Russia and China have far more than Iran. If you keep supplying Iran with radars and missiles, you'll eventually find ways to take down US planes and then keep doing it even if those systems get destroyed also. Iran may have a limited anti-air stock, but Russia and China can provide far more equipment and missiles. And they can keep producing them and resupplying Iran even for years! Could be the Ukraine of the air that we're still talking about in 3 years time!

Israel and the US have flipped the on-switch to war with Iran, nothing can force Iran to switch it off other than actual defeat, which would likely require a ground invasion and millions of troops. It is to Russia and China's advantage that Iran simply never switch the war off, not their fault there's a war, and so Russia and China maybe quite persuasive in their reassurances.

Iran also has reasons to never switch off the war, in that Israel may just attack them again later so letting them recover serves no military or political purpose.

If peace with Israel is not possible, because they keep on assassinating lead negotiators for example, then Israel turning on a formal war is a better state of affairs.

Since Israel air capacity is limited (for example compared to the US), the smart thing to do (considering the US may join the war), is to collect as much signal intelligence on the F-35 and prepare a giant air battle if and when the US joins the war.

That Israel can blow up concrete buildings meantime, assassinate a few professors and commanders and the like, is a reasonable cost to pay.

In order to "win" against a US lead air war, Iran will need to prevent the US from establishing true air supremacy to carry out a truly massive bombing campaign. As we see with Russia-Ukraine, even with limited resources (that are continuously re-supplied by the West) Ukraine can prevent Russia from establishing air supremacy and this is how Ukraine can stay in the fight.

If Iran (with Russian and Chinese backing) can make a similar situation in Iran, of limiting the US to standoff strikes, then they essentially "win", as there isn't even a ground game and nothing much is going to be accomplished with only standoff munitions against a country of 90 million people.

Of course, maybe stealth is essentially magical technology that nothing can touch.

But, assuming Russia and China have carefully studied this technology and are confident they have systems that can defeat it, then enticing the US into a giant air battle over Iran and defeating the US, would be an absolutely massive geopolitical shift.

Therefore, Russia and China, assuming they have geopolitical ambitions, would be preparing with Iran for such an air war and then to sustain it with resupply (which is super easy to do considering Iran connected to Russia by the Caspian).

Considering Iran would be in a far worse position if it were to completely lose control of the air -- so its missiles intercepted in boost phase and susceptible to way more bombing and interdiction of everything it does -- if I was Iran I would only escalate with the US if I had reassurance from Russia and China that they will supply air defence systems for a giant air battle and then long term battle of air attrition.

Without such an assurance, I would try to keep the conflict limited to Israel, inflict maximum damage over the short term, and deplete their air defence to make the susceptible to drones. In a mutually missile-depleted scenario, Iran has a massive advantage due to being far larger in surface area and population.

Iran coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties, according to three Iranian officials familiar with the plans. — NOS4A2

Iran may want to keep things as friendly as possible with the gulf states, but nevertheless escalate with the US.

So giving advance warning to Qatar isn't necessarily indicative.

Also, if you don't want to escalate with the US, you don't need any symbolic strikes at all in this situation (as that anyways risks further escalation), as you can just keep striking Israel to demonstrate capability and willingness to strike things.

It could be some weird logic or then part of some negotiated theatre with the US (give Trump a further optics win of "they could do nothing! nothing!").

But weird logic and diplomacy scenarios seem unlikely as trust and diplomacy with the US is at zero.

Trump is also erratic and unpredictable so there would be no way to be certain that Trump would view retaliation as symbolic, or not take extreme issue with the symbol anyways; he's already used extreme language about any potential Iranian retaliation. Therefore, if you want to avoid escalation you'd probably conclude you simply don't need to strike US bases at all, and just keep hitting Israel, if keeping it localized is the goal.

If you want to keep it local with Israel but want to deter further US strikes ... then you need real deterrence and not a weak symbol (which just invites more strikes), so you'd want to sent US service people back in boxes, show trump the domestic political consequences of further war.

How would that happen? Nothing going on in the Middle East will change the fact the U.S. military is the strongest in the world, the U.S. economy the richest in the world. — RogueAI

If Iran "wins" this war with Israel it is a massive boost for Russia's and China's lead counter-order, further eroding US credibility. However, it's only a proxy failing, like Ukraine, and the US empire could "put it behind us". So would be a big victory for Iran, but further improve Russia and China's position as being able to credibly back opposition to the US.

However, if the US went all in on Iran and then Iran won a conflict directly with the US, that would be a fatal embarrassment to US power and technology, as well as massive damage to US stockpiles, military and domestic moral etc.

Americans coming back in boxes in an unpopular war that in addition America loses, would be catastrophically different than just Israel losing the war with Iran.

Of course, they would still need to win the war with Israel and then the US to realize such geopolitical gainz.

So, I'm not saying that's what they want to do, but if they think they could "defeat" the American war system in Iran, then the firs step is to take advantage of US striking Iran to escalate with the US.

Obviously, escalating with the US isn't good for actual Iranian citizens; that should go without saying.

Iran has fired missiles at US military bases in Qatar and Iraq — CNN

Concerning this retaliation, one of the most important details is that it comes after Iran's foreign minister meeting with Putin (I think literally this morning).

This is Russia-China's opportunity to essentially unseat the US as the world's leading power.

I feel it unlikely that it is simply face saving, because they could just keep hitting Israel if they didn't want further escalation with the US.

They don't need to "show strength" (both domestically and internationally) by hitting the US, as they can just keep hitting Israel with more missiles to accomplish that.

If they didn't want further escalation they would just repeat JD Vance's "we're not at war" and be like ... cool

Missiles on the way according to random social media posts.

Honestly have no idea what's real and what's AI though, we'll have to wait confirmation .... just confirmed on CNN, so seems happening.

Sounds more like Libertarianism, not socialism — Harry Hindu

You literally just put a few sentences before dictionaries as the ultimate arbiter in this discussion:

All of philosophy is contained in language which Merriam-Webster provides guidance for using. — Harry Hindu

And when the definition of a more authoritative dictionary is provided (the one Google uses and provides as the top result) ... you just dismiss it entirely and you know better than the English professors at Oxford.

Sounds more like Libertarianism, not socialism. — Harry Hindu

What exactly is the point of contradicting the dictionary?

Sure, you can use symbols arbitrarily for your own private use — Harry Hindu

There are endless additional meanings to words that have technical meanings in specific disciplines and tradecraft, colloquially referred to as technical jargon. Some of them are in dictionaries if they are common enough, but very few.

Philosophy also has technical jargon. For example using "obtain" to refer to something that is an actuality to differentiate with truth value of a proposition (about those things that actually exist). That definition is not provided by google's citing Oxford Languages, and whether it appears in some dictionary or another does not matter to it clearly having a specific meaning and use in a philosophy context.

It must be that the are using anarchy as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, not as defined in your "Marxist Dictionary". — Harry Hindu

Not all of philosophy is contained in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Furthermore, a dictionary's goal is to list the most common uses of a word, and not many, if any, meanings specific to a tradecraft or discipline.

Nevertheless, the philosophy of anarchism is provided by the Oxford language dictionary that is used by google. So, if you googled "define anarchism" you literally had to skip over Google providing the definition right at the top, which is:

Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
anarchy
/ˈanəki/
noun: anarchy

1. a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.
Similar:

2. the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. — Google citing Oxford Languages

So I hope this resolves the mystery of the dictionary, and that definitely in many context anarchy simply means chaos (what it originally meant) but in other contexts it means a political philosophy, most notably without hierarchal government.

But key word being "organization" so clearly the idea is not some sort of chaotic free for all.

You're leaving out the part where the socialist goal is for the state to be the only owner of property - privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world. Government property isn't much different than private property in that the government still has to defend it by force. — Harry Hindu

That is not the "socialist goal". Definitely the goal of some socialist projects, but even then that was not the final objective but some transitory tactical necessity on the way to communism. Also an important caveat, property in this context is the means of production and not consumable resulting products, which can still be owned by individuals in most socialist schemes. Other socialists want more workers owning the businesses they are working in, and not state ownership.

Unclear what you mean by the state owning everything, but still privately owned and not shared with the rest of the world.

Then why do so many people on this forum conflate anarchy with libertarianism - as in do whatever you want? — Harry Hindu

I have not seen this conflating, so please provide examples.

However, anarchy is one political philosophy that is derived from or compatible with European libertarianism. We don't hear much of this because the debate for religious freedom (that your Lord couldn't decide one day you're a catholic and the next day you're protestant), also the basic principle that actions that don't harm others need not be policed, choosing your own profession, selling your flower at the mill of your choosing or milling it yourself! (and not the local Lord's mill), women not being the property of men, and the other original "liberties" that made someone a free man or women instead of a serf, and made someone morally autonomous instead of ordered about by kings and priests, was obviously won by the libertarian side in the debate with feudal moral and political hierarchy and people-ownership.

Where freedom comes to mean "do whatever you want" is because you can keep building on this concept of political freedom, making you an equal in society with equal rights and equal vote, to come up with consumer freedom of "do whatever you want" in the sense of "buy this thing you don't need because you can do whatever you want as a free person!".

"You're free, do whatever you want" is never meant as some categorical claim, but only makes sense in specific contexts with assumed limits: "You're free, do whatever you want, buy this legally available item and have a good time", or "You're free, do whatever you want, so have sex with whoever you want ... but make sure it's consensual and also not with animals and not in public and oh yeah not with a child and so on".

"You're free to spend your own money", "you're free sexually" is clearly never meant in common discourse as some sort of total freedom. You are obviously not "free", in a legal sense, to spend your money on hitmen. You are not "free", in a legal sense, to place no limits on your sexuality.

The original meanings of freedom and liberty were in contrast to feudal structures that don't exist anymore, so most people today don't really have a clear idea of what these words are supposed to mean in any political sense, except in contrast to dictatorships (free world vs dictatorships people still clearly recognize the difference; but the words no longer really hold much meaning as differentiating political philosophies within Western traditions themselves, as essentially no one advocates for theocracy, or absolute Monarchy, or we all become serfs again and so on, so liberty and freedom are essentially the only game in town and is incorporated in essentially a feel good way into political campaigns and shampoo commercials).

I understand your point.

My point is that we don't really want to have inflation on the term genocide or it to be a popular derogatory adjective as "fascist" or "nazi" describing something that it isn't. With genocide we are talking about the intent of total destruction of people. — ssu

If we agree on the basic physical facts, then we are more or less in agreement.

The reason to use the word genocide is that is that the crime of genocide is defined in international law as those acts you're talking about committed with the intent of destroying a people:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

So, once the Nazis started systematic murder with the intent of destroying all the Jews (as well as other groups such as invalids) they were committing genocide. How successful they are at completing the objective would not impact the definition of the crime of genocide. Had they been stopped earlier by the Soviets and only succeeded in killing 50 000 Jews at that point: still genocide.

What is normally the difficult to prove part is the intention. As mass chaos and violence and death can be presented as carried out for some other goal.

For example, the US government will argue that if mass deaths occurred in Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and so on, that the intention was to achieve democracy and not destroy a people, in whole or in part.

Which is of course an entirely plausible argument as we may have many things to critique about US foreign police, the CIA, pentagon, and so on, as well as question whether the intention really is "democracy" or more mundane imperialist objectives, but I think we (definitely you and me, if not others) would certainly agree that the American people and government simply aren't genocidal (in the 21st century; they probably would be if political groups, such as communists, was in the definition of genocide but that was left out exactly to avoid that discussion). Americans, on the whole, simply don't have a culture of wanting to exterminate whole groups of peoples, and that has been reflected in US foreign policy in the 21st century.

Now, in this case of Israel, the "difficult to prove" part is simply not present. Whereas other cases the controversy is concerning the intent, especially institutional intent (such as even controversy of "the proof" that Hitler really did order and know about the Nazi genocide) Israeli culture and Israeli politicians, ministers, generals and so on, openly declare their intent to destroy the Palestinian people, including all the children are also enemies and must be destroyed.

How the laws concerning genocide are written is that the threshold of mass killing to be a genocide is super low (as the goal is to prevent genocide, and so trigger responses at a low threshold) and that the difficult part to prove is the intent..

Israel openly declares their intent to commit genocide, then go and do exactly those genocidal acts (such as mass killing and starvation) that they declared was their plan.

It's like if a murder happens and there's lots of circumstantial evidence pointing at one suspect and a lot that can be debated, plausibly denied, not at all a clear cut case ... but then the murderer keeps on confessing to the murder, keeps on describing exactly how he or she committed the murder, explaining why the murder was necessary and doing everything possible to disambiguate the situation. The debate is over about the circumstantial evidence once someone explains in detail how they committed the murder, why they committed the murder, boasts about committing the murder, and they are the only plausible possible suspect based on the material evidence that does exist (even if not conclusive in itself; maybe one plausible deniability scenario is "an accident" ... well difficult to maintain if the suspect keeps on declaring "it wasn't an accident! I killed that piece of shit!").

Hear hear! :100: :up: :heart:

Now the clergy that rules of Iran can really go back to the times of the 1980's when it was in war. The idea that Iran's regime would fall because of this is an example of the utter stupidity now so prevalent. I mean really, think of yourself and your country that you live in. If two foreign countries that are thousands of kilometers away from you suddenly started bombing your country, why would your response be to attack your own government? Nope. Iran will try to transition to a wartime economy now. — ssu

We are in full agreement on the military analysis.

The only intrinsic advantage (all else being equal) an invading force has is the initial invasion when taking the defenders by surprise, as it's super costly to mobilize if then turns out there is not a war. Furthermore, aggressor can just wait for demobilization and attack then, so it's really not an easy situation for the defenders to be in.

"Easing into" offensive action has zero military advantages as we are seeing.

But obviously all the military planners involved know that so it's difficult to make sense of what exactly the plan was. The only theory that fits all the data is magical thinking driven by Netanyahu's personal problems and enabled by fanatical religious fervour of his political allies.

Yet you should give a thought here also to why is Iran, of all countries, so hellbent to be against Israel in the first place? — ssu

The alternative view is that Iran supports the Palestinian cause due to real sympathies. Since Israel maintains Palestinians as an occupied people without any rights, the Iranian policy to support them doesn't go away. If Israel made a liveable peace with the Palestinians and other neighbours then Iran would no longer be "against them", even if they didn't agree with the peace terms it would no longer be their problem.

Iran also correctly identifies Israel as a Western colonial project with the fundamental goal of dividing Islam, which was explicit Western policy after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The West could have kept the Ottoman Empire intact; there's no intrinsic reason why a polity must be broken up simply due to military defeat; the reason was to remove the possibility of geopolitical competitor from reemerging down the line.

The general strategy of strife and chaos in the Middle East proposed by @Tzeentch is definitely correct; where I have doubts is that recent Israeli actions in Palestine and elsewhere are fully an extension of that policy compared to Israel's own policy (that then rides on and also exploits the Wests general policy).

Well, a lot of countries have a lot of resources that the neocons don't control. International trade is for that. In the end, the resources of some country don't justify war, because those resources never make wars actually profitable as in the end they cost a lot more than just to buy the Goddam resources by trade. Neocons and other imperialists give as reasons the natural resources of some country as a valid reason to invade them, but in the real world this never goes out so simple. — ssu

Exactly why I say the US is not pursuing some rational grand strategy from the point of view of some coherent Imperial interest. These resource wars do not accomplish anything and only weaken the US' real power base which is presiding over the global trade system and being generally admired.

The toppest level view of what we see happening, I would propose is that after the fall of the Soviet Union the cold warriors had nothing much to do in any rational US imperial project and so pushed for and succeeded in making new conflicts in order to, more-or-less, entertain their sense of importance. To use a tired analogy, they still had their hands on the Cold War hammers and they couldn't help but use them. A better understanding of what we call Neocons are the more violent faction of the cold warriors who need new violence to find meaning. Hence the desire for full spectrum dominance, war's at all times, such as with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and clandestine operations all over the world to control political outcomes.

Of course they need some nominal reason for the war, such as resources, but they obviously have not been profitable wars, but they keep doing it as the real reason is to satiate their psychological need for conflict in which it "feels cool" to get together in secret rooms and discuss what to do; whereas in peace time that just doesn't feel so adrenaline inducing, kind of boring actually. Pathologically psychotic people can only go through the fantasy so many times before they develop the inevitable need to act out the fantasy.

Which brings up an important dynamic of what's happening now, is that the Cold Warriors are all super old, and they can't stop the younger generation slowly taking over (due to things like dying), and so there's now people like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance in positions of power, who went and actually fought in the Neocon wars, so regardless of their personal ideology and objectives, they at least live in reality and not the Neocon fantasy. Right now these factions have reached the compromise of "blow at least something up, but not fully engage in a disastrous war; and really big explosions! Fucking HUGE ASS explosions!".

Just encountered this channel today.

This guy predicts a ground invasion of Iran by the US:



The reasons being that:

1. Iran wants a US ground invasion
2. Israel wants a US ground invasion
3. American people and military planners don't want a US ground invasion
4. Donald Trump wants a disastrous ground invasion of Iran and a US civil war at the same time

And therefore, 1, 2, and 4 are going to get what they want.

Interesting point (though very unsure if accurate points), Israel's goal is to help collapse the US empire (such as getting it into an unwindable war with Iran) as it stands to inherit the US military infrastructure in the Middle East and so dominate the region for many generations to come. A sort of Charlemagne to the US's Pax Romana.

It's unclear to me how that would technically work, even just considering the supply chain issues, but certainly some version of it is possible if the entire region is in smouldering ruins.

The whole theory seems far fetched to me, but seems interesting to reflect on.

He also claims to predict history, so we will have to watch his career with great interest.

In other news ...

Pakistan condemns Trump's Iran bombing after nominating him for Nobel Peace Prize — Reuters

Just what genocide? — ssu

The genocide is an openly declared policy such as starving the entire population and bombing every hospital and university, and horrendous crimes in themselves even considered in isolation to mass murder, such as sniping children, proudly boasted about by the perpetrators.

There is nothing to analyze or debate about these facts. It is as clear as anything taken for common knowledge such as the sun shining upon the earth.

If you want to live in denial about it, then you weld your soul to the fate of these evil doers. So I'd consider it carefully if you entertain the possibility of an afterlife.

Or if I misunderstand you and there's multiple genocides to consider at the moment, you're just asking which one I'm talking about, then in that case I am referencing all the genocides currently being perpetrated by Israel.

I agree with you. This is Likud party's main line: there doesn't have to be any peace with the Palestinians, there can be a perpetual war as far it is low intensity and doesn't cost too much. And that has worked for decades now, whereas trying to do a peace with the Palestinians has been represented as utterly impossible, because it failed. — ssu

To make some sort of plausible attempt at peace, Israel would have to stop its settler activity.

That would be the bare minimum of Israel stopping at some line in the sand and then trying to negotiate some modus vivendi around that, which may include things like offering compensation for land already stolen and obviously some pathway for Palestinians to have rights; obviously 2 state solution being the only viable option if it's assume Israel "needs to be race superiority based in Jewishness".

And that's the bare minimum. If the US federal government was still kicking native Americans off their land today, you think they wouldn't still be resisting that? You think it would be the native population that "can't accept peace" when the US government keeps chipping away at their land. And that's just the land, imagine if the native Americans had also no rights.

This is the main issue that Trump in his ineptness doesn't understand. The only options are limited strikes. Trump should ask himself, just how long did he fight the Houthis? How long? 30 days and that was it, and they are quite alive and kicking. — ssu

We agree here. Also why I think this really isn't "Trump's war" but Netanyahu needed an escalation for his own problems, thought he could get Trump to go along.

The evidence that Trump and US elites broadly speaking didn't want this war is that there's no shock and awe. If you actually through you could smack Iran down from the air you'd go all in day 1, maximum air power, try to collapse the command and control, try to collapse civil society, absolutely pedal to the metal to establish air supremacy on all of Iran and keep hitting every possible military asset and especially convoy of any kind.

When analyst talked about a war with Iran being hard to win before, it was assuming maximum and relentless shock and awe.

Limited strikes by Israel (due to simply being way smaller) and then limited strikes by the US is the absolute worst strategy, as Iran can now transition smoothly to a total war system, and even better now after the US strikes knows exactly what these bunker busters can do.

So this idea that Israel has "softened up" Iran, mentioned in the mainstream media, is just widely naive as to how warfare works. Why Ukraine lost 20% of its territory in like a single week was because it did not transition to total war (as that's costly if you aren't sure a war is coming) and Russia maximized the advantage during that transition.

Point being, maybe Trump did understand it, and why he didn't just go and preemptively strike Iran, but he's not in a political position to just leave Netanyahu high and dry.

He maybe screaming for peace now precisely because he is able to understand generals explain that they can't do much, a message he's likely to believe considering they couldn't even defeat the Houthis. Whether the generals were over enthusiastic or he was overenthusiastic, it's hard to imagine the experience increased his enthusiasm for an air Vs mountain war.

This is behind the absolute stupidity that the neocons have spread for many decades of Iran being an existential threat to Israel and the US. The politically incorrect and utterly out of the Overton window is the fact that Iranian nuclear deterrent would be to deter Israeli nuclear deterrent, not to be used in an all out attack on Israel. Why would Iran want tens of millions of it's own citizens to perish? There's no reason.

The fact is that if Iran would have a nuclear deterrent, the US response would be similar as it was to North Korea. Bill Clinton was the last president that truly thought of attacking North Korea in the similar way as Trump has now attacked Iran. Americans too are sane in the end: they attack and occupy countries that don't have a nuclear deterrence capability. Unconditional surrender, occupation of the whole country and regime change are exactly the things that countries with nuclear weapons will opt to use them against. — ssu

I agree with all this.

Iran, like Russia, represents a lot of resources that the neocons can't control, so both they and their predecessors are psychologically damaged by the existence of Iran. They are used to being able to "do something" when they don't like someone or what's happening in a country.

Israel needed an existential enemy to justify its militarism and refusal of a 2 state solution and obstructing any peace process generally speaking. At the same time, by maintaining the conflict with Palestinians and Hezbollah and Iran, they are naturally on friendly terms, then Iran can turn around and say they are therefore Iranian proxies and no peace is possible until Iran is destroyed.

When this dynamic started, Iran didn't even have any ability to strike Israel, but has clearly developed the capacity since, so became a self fulfilling prophecy that Iran became an actual threat which certainly Israeli warhawks ideal scenario is the US go and destroy Iran.

The problem is it's just super difficult to do and the US just has no good reason to do it.

So, what really motivated this Israeli attack on Iran is either magical thinking or then a gamble, mostly for Netanyahu's personal reasons, that clearly hasn't worked. Maybe a case of becoming over confident in what the Mosad can do after the "brilliant success" of blowing up commanders and children with pagers.

This all just shows how stupid this war is and how Trump has been lured into a war that in the end won't give him that victory he so eagerly wants.

And anyway, especially the vice president is going batshit crazy in trying to deny just what has happened: — ssu

Yes, further evidence they all know they can't get any good military outcome with Iran.

Just normal friendly blowing up your stuff but totally not a war. Amazing.

Maybe Netanyahu's gamble was that he thought they could show Iran "wasn't so tough" based on the idea that decapitation strikes would cause mass panic and disarray, and also that Israeli missile defence was already "good" and US hand would be forced in providing its own missile defence in the region, so certainly results would be stellar.

If Israel could show the war was easy to win, then Trump would want to come in and mop up.

Not clear why they would think that would happen (seeing as True Promise 1 and 2 already demonstrated Iran can penetrate the missile defences), but could just be old man syndrome of not really understanding technology.

If they only wanted more tensions for domestic political outcomes or distract from Gaza, then they would have started a more limited cycle of strikes and retaliation, such as we saw before but just one notch up.

We've debated at length this issue before, and I'm still not convinced these Isreali conflicts / genocide are some sort of grand US strategy.

You wouldn't need an AIPAC and endless Israeli lobbying and intelligence operations to influence US politics if it was all rational US grand strategy.

For example, contrast with Taiwan which is clearly US grand strategy to keep independent of China, we never hear of Taiwanese lobbying efforts to keep the status quo, much less increase the conflict with China.

Of course, Israel will align its goals with as many US elite faction goals as possible, such as simply having wars to sell weapons generally speaking.

Who I would argue was following some sort of rational US grand strategy was Obama, who made the nuclear deal with Iran and talked constantly of pivoting to Asia to contain China. Which is what follows rationally from a goal to stay the leading power: confronting the rising economic super power which is easily identified as the competition.

The other thing Obama did was try to restore American soft power after Bush, which he successfully did and there was clear advantages to the US system for doing that, so having it severely damaged under Trump 1, then further eroded under Biden, then jettisoned entirely in the first months of Trump 2, is not achieving some rational objective.

So I just don't see how it's a rational strategy to get into a war with Iran which there seems no pathway to victory on, and if Iran "wins" the conflict by simply surviving it will be in a far better position in the region to thwart US and Israeli interests.

Feel free to argue otherwise (I of course don't exclude there is some sort of master plan driving events), but for me a better model to explain what is happening is Israeli race-superiority settler fanaticism, Netanyahu's personal political problems, and a weakening and disastrously corrupt imperial core that can no longer assert imperial grand strategy interests over special interest factions that compose the US controlling elite.

Any powerful enough special interest gets what it wants and endless money printing satisfies all the elites generally speaking. They all (the actual major players) have yachts off Monaco, cabins in Switzerland, bunkers in New Zealand, and can all see the bigger picture that if the US does over extend and collapses they'll be doing pretty fine.

In this context of a cognitive collapse of US grand strategy the US system is erratic and essentially driven by random gyration encounters other powers it can't do anything about. They don't know what to do about Putin, so run over a decade of propaganda to "take him out" as that's what they normally do with someone they don't like, they then takeover Ukraine as that's something they know how to do, but then Russia invades and all they can do is prop Ukraine up but do nothing decisive (as it's good money for the arms industry and it "sounds good" to bleed Russia, but welding them to the Chinese for the foreseeable future is terrible grand strategy) as well as act opportunistically such as blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipeline locking Europe into buying US LNG.

I definitely see how various US elite factions profit from these events, but I don't see how it's some sort of rational plan beyond that short term profit / prophesy seeking. It's nonsense strategy we'd expect from a corrupt, easily manipulated geriatric mental case, just as the current strategy is what we'd expect from a corrupt, easily manipulated narcissistic megalomaniac.

Once few weeks (or less) have gone and Israel and the US halt their strikes and declare victory, all these MAGA people will rejoice victory and the wisdom of Trump and deride those who opposed this war. Of course, likely Iran will continue to adapt it's defenses and simply then get the nuclear weapon and the clergy will stay in power in Iran. After these attacks, the young generations of Iranians will remember just how Israel and the US attacked them, hence the evil nature of the US doesn't have to be retraced back to the Pahlavi regime and the ouster of Mossadeq, which is old history for the new generations of Iranians. If Iranians had an 8 year war against Saddam Hussein, then this generation isn't going to be softer either. And then the Iranian nuclear deterrent, likely with ICBMs, will simply be a "non-issue", just like North Korea. Because that's what the US does when the country actually has nuclear weapons that could possibly strike mainland US. Bibi's Israel has opted for perpetual war already, so they are totally OK with this. — ssu

Possibly, maybe even probably, but there's a few things that can go wrong with such a plan that are worth considering.

Israel has no way to normalize due mainly to the genocide.

The extent of the damage Iran has done can't continue to be suppressed if the war ends. Of course we don't know the extent of the damages, but it does seem pretty significant based on what we know.

Whereas the US can do as you say, as the war is far away and easily forgotten in the next news cycle, that option isn't available for Israel, so if the war didn't accomplish anything and was super destructive Israelis may not be so happy about that.

Israel has pursued a strategy of intentionally having no off ramp, so unsurprisingly finds itself with no off ramps.

Then Iran need not cease striking if Israel and US cease striking and if they continue striking then Israel will likely have to continue responding.

I believe Netanyahu said the quiet part out loud the other day that a long war favours Iran, that's what Iran wants. So there maybe no way for Israel to just "turn it off" now that its started.

The reason this war favours Iran is that even if missile interceptors were super effective (which they don't seem to be) Iran can likely outproduce ballistic missiles compared to interceptor missiles (which are more expensive and several are fired at each target).

If we ignore missile defence (assume both are depleted); in terms of Israel's strike capability, Iran is far bigger in population and geography so can absorb more destruction (along with being more accustomed to hardship and less snowflaky Westerner psychology to begin with).

Even if exchanging comparable damage, Iran is so big that most of its population aren't effected psychologically or economically (they keep having normal days as the bombs are out of sight and out of mind for the most part), whereas incoming missiles can be seen from essentially anywhere in Israel and economic activity is focused in a few major cities; so doesn't take many missiles every day / night to completely disrupt normal life for most Israelis.

Given these advantages, Iran has no incentive to just call it quits, and also Iran and China have every incentive to push for the war lasting as long as possible (to absorb US capacity, attrit weapons, damage diplomatic position, and so on).

The US has an armed forces of over 1 million with roughly quarter of a million based outside of the Continental US. Of those less than 40 000 are stationed in the Middle East. Hence there's no land invasion happening. And no regime change, actually.

So along the invasion of Iraq, this is one of those stupid wars the US gets itself into. — ssu

Agreed.

Moreover, there's really no way to conquer Iran. 90 million people, and a geography that similar to 1 entire Rocky Mountain chain in addition to 1 entire France.

It's just not feasible for the US to conquer Iran without going to full total war, drafting millions of people, which is obviously not happening.

However, whereas Trump can get bored and walk away from the situation, it's not clear how Israel can just call it an "oopsie" and turn off the war and restore the status quo ante.

Nuclear weapons I would argue are no longer a feasible option now that the US has struck Iran.

So very unclear how Israel can get out of the war now that they've started it (and by the most antagonistic means of assassinating civilians, including professors, in their homes).

They already manipulate, surveil, imprison and suppress western citizens and if these wars happen at a low cost for us, we will be overwhlemed forever by manipulative/controlling/murdering apparatuses that right now have turned on Gazans, but another day may turn on ordinary Europeans and Americans. — Eros1982

Agreed.

Nothing diplomatic offered to them by Bibi and Trump. — Eros1982

Their strategy is to make diplomacy impossible.

Israel elites (not just Netanyahu) make diplomacy impossible by assassinating diplomats and making sure to break any word they do give, because they don't want pressure for a diplomatic solution.

Specifically they don't want pressure from American Jewish elites who aren't as fanatical and pay a cost for Israel's genocide and warfare. If diplomacy was an option then powerful jewish voices may pressure US and Israeli politicians to cut it out. The way to solve that issue is to make diplomacy not-an-option and therefore further escalation the only option that can be discussed.

As for Trump, his strategy is to make diplomacy impossible simply by having the psychological need that anyone he's dealign with (that he doesn't like) accept humiliation as part of any agreement.

However, so far at least, if he doesn't get his way then he mostly just walks away from the situation and focuses on people he can humiliate. For example he didn't get what he wanted in the Ukraine-Russia war, so just walked away. He couldn't subdue the Houthis, so just walked away.

As with most narcissists, a challenging battle is not the goal but only preying on weaker parties.

When there is a war in the Middle East the first thing a sensible citizen should do is to drop all US based media outlets and turn on British ones, for more honest and unbiased information. Reuters and BBC may not be perfect, but they are definitely less censored than their US counterparts. — Eros1982

That's a bit of a laugh honestly. Maybe slightly less propaganda than US media, but if you're looking media that is not propaganda there are plenty of independent analysts around. I'd start with Chris Hedges.

However, in terms of reporting from events on the ground, fog of war and disinformation / psychological operations make that pretty difficult.

For example in this recent US strike on Iran, what we don't know:

a. How effective the bunker busters were.

b. In the case they were effective, if anything important remained there or was already taken away.

c. If the Iranians tried to shoot at the B-2s but failed, can't shoot down B-2s at all, can shoot down B-2's but that capacity is already degraded, or then can shoot down B-2s but did not for diplomatic reasons (US says where they are going to strike to avoid actual damage, in return Iran doesn't shoot down the planes), or then Iran can shoot down B-2s but chose not to in order to assess the potential of these weapons systems (if existing architecture of similar sites are good enough, or they need to go deeper). Then all the same questions can be asked about Russia and China, as they could bring in missile and radar capacity for the purposes of trying to shoot down B-2s if they wanted to (do they want to, not want to, can't, or won't for diplomatic and/or assessing the weapons reasons).

d. What impact the strike has on Iranian enrichment and nuclear bomb production (which is almost certainly coming; hopefully when it does Israel will need to cease and desist from reckless warfare and genocide).

And there's similar unknowns about pretty much everything: how effective US / Israel missile defence is, how many missiles remain, and likewise Iranian ballistic missile effectiveness and how many of their missiles remain.

The only information we can be pretty certain of is clearly verified video evidence or then events all parties agree happened (such as this recent US attack on Iran). From this we know Iran and Israel are definitely attacking each other and both doing damage.

I always felt things like people getting giddy about buying new cars or going on package holidays or the creme de la creme, christmas just somehow made me balk and bristle. — unimportant

We have similar experience. When I was 16 I tried to opt-out of the commercial side of Christmas, started calling it Arbitrary Gift Day and asked people not to get me anything ... people then got me presents anyways and then resented me for years (as I bought nothing as I said I would) my oldest sister resents me to this day about it, and we almost have not spoken since (I'm now 39).

This was all very shocking to me as my concerns about the environment, labour conditions in China, were clearly well founded and that everyone else also believed. My family is super "left" so they weren't denying climate change or explaining to me that child labour was a natural and healthy market process between parties in engaged in mutually beneficial transactions.

So, I didn't even think people would take issue with my moral stand.

What I learned was that for most people consumerism is not viewed as a vice, which to me was clearly obvious anyways even if it was sustainable and ethically sound labour conditions ... clearly a vice to consume things you don't need only for temporary pleasure. Maybe not a serious vice depending on these issues, but it's clearly never some sort of virtue.

Rather, for most people in Western society, consumerism is essentially a spiritual experience, and the family dynamics that occur if you stop consuming are essentially the same as if you are in a super religious family and not only stop going to church but inform everyone you're now on the side of the devil and fully committed to satanism.

Times when I have felt I had found my type of people is in counter cultures, perhaps another nod to small anarchist style communities, but sadly these seem to have been stamped out in direct correlation around the rise of social media. Any theories on this? — unimportant

Again, same experience on my end. I've spent a lot of time visiting experimental places here in Europe, religious, "anarchisty", non-profits, or otherwise, and lived in an eco-village for a time (then they rented the space I was in to someone else for more money). I've also visited places like Auroville in India and spent many months in Mexico and Cuba (Mexico for the anarchist, Cuba for the communists). Spent some time in "intentional communities" in San Fransisco as well.

The problems are always financial and interpersonal, along with cartel and Fidel Castro based problems (who's an interesting character but also problematic on some issues).

The main problem in West is financial. When normal people had purchasing power, free or inexpensive education, could buy land etc. then it drives intentional community migration. When people are more constrained financially then the migration pattern reverses and becomes really hard to start and sustain such projects. And if there's no migration pressure in this direction (as people have students loans to pay off for example) then the interpersonal problems that arise, and lack of financing to smooth things over, causes the breakdown of these communities.

To make mattes worse, industrial farming is subsidized, uses illegal labour to get things done (as Trump has no problem informing us), so it's also difficult to compete economically as an organic farm. Margins are tight so the only model that works economically is either the corporate approach, just applied to organic farming, or then the family farm model (where you have the same financial interest as your spouse and can benefit from entirely legal child labour of your own children). If you try to make a community with different financial interests, so not a healthy spouse relationships, then tight margins is a recipe for unending financial disputes.

To make matters even worse, these places attract people who are not motivated by any ecological or ethical consideration, but are in search of new tribal relations. Which is of course perfectly fine to be in search of, but it can then easily give rise to unresolvable differences in values, and this is even worse than the financial tensions. It can take a lot of resources to house, nourish and deal with someone's incompatible moral system, and when these communities are founded they want to be welcoming and help people, but these kinds of terrible experiences easily destroy the whole thing.

To give one typical example, one eco village I visited had a community building "open to the needy", and it simply became a drug den and the community members (who built their own eco-houses on the property) would never go there, and then of course this created all sorts of problems with the police as well, and also community members fearing for their lives; I went to check out the building and there was easily over 1000 empty alcohol beverages of one kind of another, lying around or in big garbage bags lying around, and a whole assortment of drug abuse paraphernalia.

Point being, it's not easy to translate values into practical action and in our society if there's no financial model for it it's very difficult to sustain.

However, even if these social experiments aren't sustainable, they are still super valuable as it is often these random personal initiatives that prove things are possible and build momentum for changes to government policies. Obviously the government paying for things is a financial model. Churches do a lot of this stuff too. For example, here in Finland it was churches and secular non-profits that pioneered the "home first" model to deal with homelessness, which then created the experience, learning and data necessary to change government policy to "zero homelessness".

The difference with the eco village is that the churches and non-profits involved had money and obviously know dealing with homelessness is complicated; so they have a plan and don't just naively make a space available to the wider community; the eco village wasn't planning to deal with substance abuse, but assumed people interested in ecology would be interested to stay with them and learn about organic farming and sustainable building practices and so on.

As a general rule, trying new social things is very complex and simply maintaining that complexity has a high cost that people usually don't realize at the start.

Why is it that society at large sees no problem with this vapid existence and on the treadmill of working to buy useless things that doesn't fulfill them long term, thinking that the antidote to their ills is just to get more money to buy the bigger thing, and on and on? — unimportant

We can learn about the history, but at the end of the day it remains a pretty big mystery why people do what they do. As I mention above, it seemed obvious to me that consumption was anyways a vice and I thought everyone believed the same thing, so it's not so clear to me why I learned that lesson but a surprising amount of people learned the exact opposite lesson in the same culture.

Likewise, everyone starts to believe the system is not sustainable (there wasn't really any denialism about it in the 90s; Al Gore was vice-president and he talked about it and seemed to be "dealing with it"; the denialism industry was really started under Bush) ... so there's not really a controversy at that time, and this is also Canada which is very "ecological branded" and big national value ... so again, it's surprising to me that I am the only person that is really alarmed about it.

If a doctor told you that your hearts not sustainable in your current lifestyle ... genuinely seems alarming and seems to imply your heart is going to stop if nothing is done about it, and seems the same situation that experts are telling us that every thing around us is not sustainable in our current lifestyle and everything is going to stop if nothing is done about it. Sounds super alarming.

So again, not sure why no one else was alarmed by this information, but it seemed to me that my interest in mathematics habituated me to accepting logical conclusions. That's sort of the process of learning mathematics, building the habit that what "feels true" turns out is simply not true if it can be proven wrong by clear and irrefutable steps. Indeed, a lot of proofs are done by assuming the opposite and seeing where that leads (to mathematical Mordor, that's where it leads), and a lot of mathematical results are "almost can't believe it" kind of things, and especially the mathematics that's difficult to learn. Likewise, mathematical truths are timeless, so if things are true now they are true also later, and so for me it only mattered if our system was unsustainable or not, and not how long it could be unsustainable for.

So that's my little pet theory of why I was alarmed enough to change my behaviour concerning our shared environmental predicament, whereas plenty of others who believed the exact same set of facts did not even consider the idea there was anything in the slightest to do about it, but ultimately it's pretty mysterious why some people do one thing and other people do another thing.

The postmodernists seem to have the most insight into how things are working psychologically, but they are also bark raving mad and so also cannot be trusted on that account. My view of postmodernism is like shrooms experts telling me how shrooms work while high out of their minds on shrooms. Both the best source of insight in some ways, but also potentially delusional.

Why do most of society come to the defence of capitalism and say 'it isn't perfect but it is the best system we have' and just balk at any alternatives you might suggest as idealism at best or worse, dangerous and deviant? — unimportant

Again mysterious, but why the phrase was coined "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".

During the time of much of the anarchist classical anarchist writings were produced from what I can read of the social milieu at the time things seemed a lot more unsettled so were people a lot more open to these different ways of living at those times? Sure anarchism/communism was hated too then but there seemed to also be a lot more fervent followers whereas today people, while not happy with their lot, and there is general malcontent, they would blame anything but capitalism for their grievances. — unimportant

Yes, feudalism was very communal and fresh in people's memory, and the transition to industrial capitalism is ongoing and no one knows where it will lead, so if the system can change it stands to reason it can change again. On the ownership of land, obviously doesn't make all that much sense that the previous government top officials (the lords) get to just keep all the governments land. So there's also clearly issues of dispute over all these fundamental matters that are not part of a new status quo that people just accept. Serfs lived on the land and had plenty of rights to the land and also within the feudal system, so even in normal Western jurisprudence they should be bought out of their rights if they are to be kicked off the land. So people obviously lived the enclosures as unjust both in personal experience and intellectually.

Peasants wanted to keep being peasants for the most part and also have the skillset to be peasants, so it's not so easy to control them.

Today people are accustomed to the status quo and have only the skills for the status quo and no one remembers the "before times".

The state is almost sacrosanct and they will bicker back and forth about Left of Right under the current narrow band of politics they would dismiss anything more radical. — unimportant

Agreed.

The state is in people's heads first and foremost, and it is a powerful state of mind.

One last note, the free rider problem is not a fatal blow to "opt-in" systems.

At the extreme, say someone does not want to contribute in anyway to society as a whole, the solution to this problem is that everyone has a patch of land they can live in a subsistence way, and even trade, if they want.

Whereas the typical prisoner today hasn't actually been presented with any plausibly reasonable social contract that they can sign, such an explicit social contract can be made with the responsibilities and the benefits, and you can be given the option to self-sustain (as part of your inheritance as a member of society) if you wanted to. Of course, anyone who does simply not agree to the social contract would very super likely still expect medical care if they were to become sick, but we have already demonstrated that universal healthcare is possible with a high percentage of free riders.

And it would be this sort of system where you really don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to that would be an example of a social structure without coercion, but with agreed rule sets for what we would call "normal life". For me, why I talk more about effective power and not non-coercion, is because the decision process I view as fundamental, and the goal to create effective equality in decision making processes of society, and such decisions could very well result in coercive measures on dissenters; obviously that would be a last resort in a anarchist society but we can always contrive extreme situations in which coercion is the only viable solution.

To add to all these discussions of the state, power, decision making, community and so on, I think it is useful that I explain my own school of anarchism. Since your area of interest is large and historical I've tried to answer as much as possible from a perspective of "most anarchists" at given periods of time.

Most schools of anarchism and communism approach the issue from a psychological perspective, in that we (the people of earth) are psychologically "not happy" in industrial-imperial-capitalism, and what would make us on the whole much happier is to live in real communities where we decide things together. There will still be problems but they will be "our problems" that the whole community has an incentive to solve in a healthy and durable way, unlike a bureaucrat hundreds of kilometres away. Worse, these psychological problems give rise to all manner of vice and crime which makes the whole thing worse.

The problem with the psychological approach is that there exists the rebuttal that "it's just how it is and people will just need to get used to it", or in technical speak that the transition to industrial-capitalism is inevitable, likewise the imperialism that creates and sustains it, and the transition is difficult but the situation is the same as transitioning form hunter gatherers to farmers. Obviously hunter gatherers were not psychologically and physiologically adapted to be farmers, but they "got used to it". The transition to farming was inevitable due to population pressures (in this line of thinking). Farming is a response to reaching the carrying capacity of ecosystems with hunter gathering and so trying to increase the carrying capacity rather than fight to the death with more powerful neighbours, and a so a similar argument can be made about industrialism. Centralized industrialism outcompetes local and largely autonomous economic systems as a basis for human life, the trend is inevitable and therefore people will simply need to adapt to these new economic and social structures; just as hunter gatherers adapted to the new agricultural conditions and vastly different social structures that emerged to manage agricultural life.

In concrete terms, maybe we are simply fated to live in giant mega-buildings, powered by nuclear fusion reactors, that we never even leave, as such a system simply outcompetes all other forms of economic organization.

In short, the evolution argument of what we are adapted to can always be countered with an even more evolution argument that the new conditions we create are uncomfortable because we are not adapted to them but we will then evolve to be adapted to them. For example, with agriculture came terrible diseases that sometimes wiped out 50 to 100 percent of communities infected, but the survivors evolved to build immunity to such diseases and continue on with the agricultural experiment. We changed out conditions something our social and individual immune systems were not compatible with, creating problems and then we adapted to those problems to be more adapted to the conditions we created.

Therefore, of central and critical importance to all these conceptual consideration is what is actually feasible in terms of engineering.

In particular, is the industrial infrastructure sustainable and if not can it be made to be sustainable and retain its centralized industrial character?

For, if our current system is not even sustainable and can't be feasibly made to be sustainable, then that is a fatal flaw to the "we'll evolve to adapt to industrialization" as that would require industrialization being a sustained practice we can adapt to.

To bring things back to Star Trek, faster than light travel maybe an attractive concept psychologically ... but is it possible? And as long as things stay at the concept level then nothing is ever resolved. For example, how many different concepts of faster than light travel have you encountered compared to how many actually exist? Obviously at some point technical feasibility trumps psychological attraction. Being able to teleport by "blinking" myself to anywhere I can think of is very psychologically attractive but extremely not-technically feasible with our current understanding.

The political debates of the 19th century can be more easily understood as these kinds of conceptual debates without any technical means of resolving the differences. There's not really a theory of ecological limits and science is viewed as simply this bestower of essentially magical powers with zero drawbacks. Therefore, who controls this great power is the primary issue.

However, now that we are reaching the material limits of the industrial system, what are even the feasibly sustainable technical modes of human society that we could develop from our current situation? Is a more fundamental issue than what political system is best.

Only some technical systems maybe viably compatible with our environment in a sustainable away, those which we could feasibly reach an even smaller subset, and only some political systems maybe compatible with such technical constraints.

Hence, my long technical adventure to all these issues (for example if fusion is feasible and will solve all our industrial problems with more industry, maybe best to work on that, and so on for every single technical proposal available) to eventually conclude local solar thermal energy is the only technically viable source of energy that is abundant enough to feasibly power both the transition to and sustaining a locally based economic system (and really any sustainable economic system at all that involves billions of people), and such an economic system naturally gives rise to a flattening of the natural democracy within any social system (creates leverage locally that naturally balances the leverage of any centralized structure; that we may imagine still take care of various large scale problems such as managing our nuclear waste, making computers, research universities, and even things like space travel if people remain convinced by the proposition).

However if you feel it would not get the attention it deserves in this one do not let me stop you making a dedicated one. — unimportant

Definitely continuing about police is entirely relevant to the discussion.

In any modern political discussion, such as we are having here, "the state" gets mentioned in abundance. And particularly relevant to a discussion about anarchism and communism because essentially all schools in both philosophies will agree that they don't want the state; that it's the state that is the main cause of our social ills and the differences between the many schools are mainly about how exactly to go about getting rid of the state and what exactly is best to build in its stead.

But what is the state exactly? We are so used to the state, it is so omnipresent in all our actions and considerations to do essentially anything, that it's both obvious what it is as well as distant, foreign and strange at the same time.

What the state boils down to is: the police force and standing army, a bureaucratic system that controls society with these too primary tools, and an education system that "teaches" everyone that the system is entirely normal and how to "behave properly" within it.

Why you can have very different cultures and very different political systems (in terms of how decisions are made on paper) but the exact same state structure that is extremely consistent in behaviour across cultures and times.

"Getting rid of the state" therefore boils down to getting rid of the police and standing army, bureaucracy and education system, as is practiced to maintain a state. Of course, the legitimate functions those institutions serve will need to be addressed in some non-state-based way.

So, for example, what could replace police and standing armies is community based security (devolution of security), what could replace bureaucracy is a system of inclusive councils where citizens have equal effective power in decision making on the issues that concern them, and what could replace education is self directed learning, as much as feasible, so children build up their own understanding as intellectually independent and autonomous spirits pursuing their natural curiosity, rather than "taught to behave" and their natural curiosity repressed over essentially 2 whole decades.

To bring back an analogy this does strike me as sounding very similar to the open source idea of federation. With many jumping from X to Mastodon, apparently the Fediverse works very much how you just explained it, where there are smaller hubs of self-hosted servers with their own communities, which can also communicate with other hubs. — unimportant

Yes, the general concept is free-association, and so the general goal is to build a society where people are as not coerced as possible and so any organizational structures are built due to people deciding it's a good idea, and that each "political unit" maintains their ability to simply drop out of any system they disagree with. In other words, if you want an individual to participate in your organizational scheme (for example build a computer factory that will require a large amount of resources and labour from many different communities), you need to convince them with force of intellect and if you fail they may just stay in their hut and tend to their own garden, and likewise you will need to convince communities to contribute to the scheme by force of intellect.

If anyone is not convinced they don't contribute and the idea is there is no option to force them.

There's a bunch of technical words to describe the differences in decision making structures, but they are all very weird, like devolution (why that word, unclear), so I coined the term "natural democracy" in my book Decentralized Democracy that attempts to go deep into all these subjects.

By natural democracy is meant the "people power" and leverage each individual in a society actually has.

So there is a natural democracy in any society that exists independent of the nominal structure (be it feudalism, dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, a tribe or anything).

One top level view of the state therefore is a structure that minimizes most people's actual power and maximizing the actual power of agents of the state (such as bureaucrats and police). By power is meant real effective influence over outcomes. For example, a president of a state can be overthrown by the effective "natural democracy" of the real power regular people have, but clearly has many "levers of power" available to prevent that from happening; those levers of power in turn (generals, ministers, top bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs, billionaires, media organizations, chiefs of police, and even mafia bosses etc..) have far more effective power than regular people commanding their own smaller set of levers of power, and so on.

The president in the above example being simply one person who clearly has more effective power than regular people, but isn't necessarily "at the top"; could be lower down, and intelligence chiefs and billionaires at the actual top, but obviously, but the president is obviously far from the bottom.

So, each level in the hierarchy of state power depends for its application on the lower levels following orders or otherwise being influenced from the top (deals, coercion etc.), so how to parse anything that is probabilistic to evaluate value (in this real effective power) in the actuary sciences we bring in the concept of net present value. So the real effective power of an individual in society who depends on subordinates following orders or then striking deals with other powerful members, is simply the power assumed by that happening multiplied by the probability that it actually happens in discounting for any decay over time we maybe able to "price in" (if a president is elected, then their real effective power must discount the fact they can lose the next election).

But the main point is that the lower the probability people actually do follow orders or strike deals, the lower effective power you actually have. When people one or two rows down on the hierarchy decide not to follow orders and appropriate their actual power and ignore nominal constraints, that's then called a coup.

The basic criticism of this state structure from anarchists and communists is that there is no nominal structure that actually prevents abuses of power.

Therefore, anarchism and communism seek to create a social structure in which the natural democracy is as flat as possible (all individuals have comparative real power; aka. compactly equal capacity for physical violence as well as real influence in society) and then build up methods for dealing with bigger and bigger problems without state like structures in which individuals placed in charge of those processes have vast real effective power to determine outcomes (see Stalin).

Why then so much focus gets placed on the means of production, is because the people who control how things actually get done in a society, and in particular how a society reproduces itself (for example, the education system and how children are taught / formatted) have the most amount of power to determine the structure of society. If a few people have vast real effective power: surprise, surprise, they use that power to make sure they have even more power in the next iteration of the social structure (by both radical reforms on occasion as well as continuous incremental changes).

Insofar as regular people do nevertheless have a greater effective power together, due to numbers, then the state structure must prevent them from exercising that power by ideally making them want to be repressed and love their oppressors, but failing that resigned to their fate and inactive, and failing that divided against each other and ineffective, and failing that coerced by the threat of state violence, and failing that in prison, and failing that dead.

I am not really familiar with the meaning of the term federation; only from Star Trek but it seems something I should learn more about! I recall it being used in The Conquest of Bread in the first few pages. — unimportant

Federate simply means some process of voluntary association and collaboration, such as the federation of planets in Star Trek.

Why we don't have decentralized federated systems is not that "they don't work" or then developed into centralized systems, but mostly due to imperial conquest. People in a decentralized system do not usually simply give up their local autonomy to create some centralized monstrosity. But what does regularly happen is that a group as a whole realizes they can conquer and subjugate other groups either out of fear they will be conquered first (by either who their conquering today or then some more distant enemy that they fear will have the upper hand if they don't stock up on the conquering) or then simply because it seems anyways profitable to do, and once this process starts these society's can easily become both highly effective at conquering as well as dependent on more conquering for their society to function. These imperial structures then expand and conquer other groups, and then immediately apply themselves to the problem of maximizing their power over these conquered peoples for the indefinite future (i.e. start building the institutions of a state); through this process of conquest and subjugation people lose their old habits of federated association (as it takes a lot of time to develop a culture of complex decision making that processes the inputs of large amounts of people; once that culture is lost then it seems anyways more efficient that decisions are made centrally by bureaucrats of one kind or another) and is not trivially easy to re-learn (the old federated structure may have been the result of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years of cultural development).

That reminds me of another thought I had been having. In order to know thy enemy what is the history of capitalism and how did it avail over others that, as you mention above, could perhaps have come to be instead? — unimportant

Absolutely essential.

Capitalism is essentially the continuation of the feudal power structure and imbalances while converting to an industrial economy, in replacing land ownership with lot's of money and in particular who makes the money. Almost everything that happens in an industrial economy requires financing that requires loans and if you control that system of loans then you control the means of production and how society reproduces itself.

The land doesn't need to be owned directly by the people at the top in order to control society (such as in feudalism) it's just important that communities don't own the land and are therefore able to develop it as a community with voluntary labour that does not require bank financing. Again, it's a divide and conquer strategy in that the land is divided up and that prevents local economic forms from developing that are independent of both large scale industrialism and the financing necessary for its development.

If people developed as a community systems of "staying alive" that were autonomous locally then communities would not only be able to develop without financing but could opt out of contributing to larger structures if they disagreed on either practical or moral grounds. If enough communities followed suit, and indeed a majority, there's little a central bureaucracy could do about it.

Did capitalism exist before the industrial revolution? I am getting through The Conquest of Bread and in that I recall them indicating that it did indeed spring from that. Isn't that a difference between the Communist and Libertarian views? that Communists peg it as a recent phenomena due to our stifling ourselves with concentrated power and not using the technology in the right way whereas Libertarians wish to view capitalism as an extension of the natural order of hierarchical man and evolution and thus just, as such. — unimportant

The components of capitalism are all developed within feudalism before the transition to industrial imperial capitalism (aka. the Industrial Revolution).

The automation of work was developed mostly by monasteries because they had access to books and mathematics but also motivated to save time on chores in order to pray more, the financial system of fractional reserve lending was developed to accelerate conquest of lands (you can lend out promises for gold you don't have if those promises finance ships to go steal more gold from indigenous people to then make good on your promise, before your competitors that are not using that shortcut; as long as more gold is inflowing from colonization than outflowing in coupon redemption, aka. "money", then the system is stable, and with industrialization gold in this equation is substituted by commodities of any form).

The crucial moments in locking the capitalist system as we know it today are first the land ownership; overturning feudalism could have easily been accomplished by just taking away the land of the lords just as it makes no sense today to let a president keep the land the country owns (land ownership could be a public utility and so land use determined by public interest considerations), then the financial system (banking could be a public utility and not generate any profits at all for a small set of private individuals, much less allow a small set of private individuals decide what gets financing and what doesn't), maintaining imperial domination (one way or another) of "former colonies", breaking the union movement globally, and then lastly the social welfare state (despite the flaws of not doing the previous 2 things it's nevertheless possible to create a social welfare state within capitalism, which does happen in some countries, but not enough for a new sort of system to emerge globally, such as had the US adopted nordic welfare state best practices, even 10 years ago; world would be totally different today).

and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy.
— boethius

This explains you, I guess. — AmadeusD

The statement does describe me as well, of course the full statement without taking out the start which reads:

If you don't actually believe it, then you are not interested in truth but simply feeling superior to your "idea of who prisoners are", and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy. — boethius

Which also applies to me. "If", key word here, I was not searching for truth and went around asserting things I did not even believe to be true in order to support a cruel power structure that happens to act in my interest, then the statement would apply to me as much as anyone who chooses power (whether real or vicarious) over truth.

Instead of saying "no, no, I'm authentic, I really believe what I stated, convicts broke the social contract and the only alternative to the current system is exile" in which case you're still obviously wrong but at least not bad faith, maybe you could learn something about how either prisons work or then language works (if you meant your general statement to be incredibly restrictive, just don't know how to use your words to say that), or then, instead of that, retracting the statement and apologizing for bringing obvious pro-cop (and likely racist, but feel free to explain a non-racist basis for your point of view) propaganda to a philosophy debate that may frustrate or then "establish psychological dominance" over people who can see the injustice of the police and prison system as is generally practiced but can't articulate it easily (for example children) but simply doesn't work on people who A. know the subject and B. know how basic reasoning works and C. aren't intimidated or confused by bold assertions of obvious falsehood.

Please quote where I suggested this (or even mentioned it as a topic???????) — AmadeusD

I write:

Of course the main evil of police is the whole justice system of essentially disappearing citizens from the community and imprisoning them without possibility of work, generally in a process without any effective rights for the poor. — boethius

To which you cite me, so it's very clear what you're referencing, and then respond:

This is an utterly bizarre way of characterizing protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract. Exile is less humane, but more on-point. Would we want that? — AmadeusD

Contradicting my point that people are put in prison with no effective rights to the port.

i.e. That what I describe as injustice you describe as justice, and the alternative for all these people would be exile.

You write pretty clearly when dismissing concerns about how just prison systems are, but then suddenly you have no idea what we're talking about when I point out your claim is essentially not worth responding to. And clearly you don't want to expand or support your claim, so seems you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to.

I agree with boethius on the origins of police and while it's related I think it better in another thread? — Moliere

Yes, seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. The police and the standing army are the two ingredients necessary to even have a state, and I feel there's not enough attention paid to the history, theory and contemporary practice (and alternatives) to these systems.

Thanks also for the encouragement, I do appreciate it.