i imagine the Gulf states must be rethinking the whole arrangement now. They thought they were untouchable under the American umbrella, but now they see they’re in fact the ones who will be absorbing most of the damage from the war. And if the US can’t protect them, then making peace with Iran is the only way forward.

Absolutely, the whole premise was that nobody would have the audacity to fight the US directly. There is a famous poker saying that you don’t bluff someone who can’t fold. Iran couldn’t fold because their survival as a state depended on it. So Trump’s made the worst possible blunder, trying to bluff against an opponent with no exit and maximum stakes.

I only learned about this myself recently as well.

this is basically what we have in Canada right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasformismo

Aside from Iran starting to charge a toll and control traffic through Hormuz, this is the other most consequential outcome of the war. All the infrastructure that the US spent decades building is now useless. Iran proved that none of these bases were defensible, and they destroyed billions, if not trillions, worth of radars and other high tech equipment, not to mention the cost of building these bases themselves. The entire US position in the region has now collapsed, and there’s no going back to the way things were before.

And yet here you are continuing to make a clown of yourself. 🤣

https://archive.ph/fjOIs

amazing

Exactly, and the war on Iran is going to act as an accelerant for the whole thing. It exposed the limits of American military power, and that there’s a severe economic cost to aligning with the US. So, even countries in the American orbit are being forced to hedge out of sheer necessity. As the western economic order continues to break down, we’re going to see more and more dog eat dog behavior from western capitalists.

I wonder if we might be hitting an inflection point where NATO no longer serves American interests. It used to make sense during the Soviet era because it kept Europe in American orbit. When USSR was the biggest geopolitical challenge to the US, keeping Europe in the American sphere of influence was critical. However, modern Russia doesn’t pose any sort of ideological challegne to the US, and China is seen as the new ideological adversary.

In that context, Europe doesn’t really have the same value to the US. On top of it, the economic dynamic is very different today. Back during the Cold War, the US was by far the biggest economic engine in the world, and propping up Europe was worth the cost. However, today, China is the bigger economy in productive terms, and the US simply cannot offer Europe anything competitive economically. Europe needs affordable goods that China manufactures, it needs renewable energy, and the ability to export its own goods to a nation of 1.4 billion people. So, if the US can’t offer a convincing economic alternative to China, then it will inevitably lose political hold on Europe going forward.

If that is the case, then there’s little value to continue dumping resources into Europe. Hence why I think we’re seeing the US changing its strategy to open predation. The US successfully destroyed European economy by cutting Europe off from Russian energy and imports from the Gulf. As input costs in Europe continue to climb, companies are starting to flee, and a lot of that business ends up going to the US where energy costs are a third of what they are in Europe.

Should the US leave NATO, then there would be a panic they can exploit as well. Europeans will be desperate to arm themselves, and given that Europe lacks a serious military industry of its own, a good chunk of that money would end up in the US.

So, that’s what I think is happening. The US is basically taking a scorched earth approach here by knee capping Europe to make sure it doesn’t turn into a competitor aligned with American adversaries, and grabbing anything of value that’s available in the process.

There is no better proof of NATO being a terrorist organization than Rutte himself.

It would be a good start, but what’s really needed is mass unionization and mutual aid that could be used to organize stuff like general strikes. Work stoppage is the only thing these ghouls understand cause it hits them in the wallet.

No, you’re not children, you are grown ass adults. You have a direct responsibility for what your country does. None of the theatre like these protests and approval ratings accomplish anything. If you can’t remove a mad kind within the framework of the system, then your whole system is broken and needs to be torn down. I blame the American public who allows the horrors that the Burger Reich commits around the world to continue. You are complicit.

I expect we’ll see this start happening outside the US. At the end of the day, energy is a cost for capitalists that are outside fossil fuel industry, and they want to bring their input costs down.

I really do think we’ll be moving towards contract based languages to work with LLMs. The LLM can construct the contract from natural language, and then the user could verify that’s what they want, and it gets implemented by a deterministic compiler.

You mean when everything stays the same, but the theatre of voting is going to be deprecated?

Yeah you totally got me. I bet you win a lot of arguments in your head like that.

Seems unlikely given that would mean accepting that Iran won the war.

After all the atrocities the west committed against Yemen, they really should follow suit