Egregoros

@cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @NoDoxGregBrady I think this is exaggerating things by a bit. It's conceivable that you could get some situation where a lone Japanese soldier is still fighting the world, and conceivable that rogue elements would commit some unwanted escalation, but Iran's mosaic defense doesn't actually seem to be a command for everyone to scatter and go rogue. It seems more like broad tactical independence with a lot of preplanning, so that the military won't just freeze up and become ineffective when command's killed. Statements like "every commander has three replacements" are not statements like "even the last Iranian recruit will flee into the mountains with his last rifle".

It'd be meaningless for Iran to deny having committed some attack for example, with all rogue elements, and there are plenty of attacks that are responsive to time-sensitive intelligence which must still reach people.

Well, you'd have three forces conspiring to make this happen:

1. Redundancy and decentralization built by the central government for continuity purposes.

2. Radicals in the IRGC who may or may not be interested in hearing about a ceasefire that is being called by someone who is not The Ayatollah and who they have never answered to before.

3. Israel who is assassinating everyone who even appears to be establishing themselves as a central authority figure.

At some point, they may truly run out of leaders, and at that point it is most likely to default back to 90 million Lone Japanese Soldiers...

@cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @NoDoxGregBrady on 2. Israel's trying to do that, which again is evidence that all that what Israel really wants is regional chaos and failed states. A democratic and liberal Iran would still be attacked because it'd still in the way.

But Israel is not actually succeeding in doing that. It's a possibility, sure, and also there's certainly no easy win like "airdrop the Shah with a bunch of leaflets saying that he's your leader now, please stop".

This was supposed to be a four day war after all. Iran was supposed to be paralyzed by the initial attack. This whole conflict was supposed to happen a month ago with CIA and Mossad-fueled terrorist cells very rapidly degrading the government's legitimacy with a fake revolution. The train is fully off the rails.

> Israel's trying to do that, which again is evidence that all that what Israel really wants is regional chaos and failed states

Ya, I think (the crazies making decisions for) Israel want to cause what I said, and then force the US to send in ground troops or else face an indefinite closure of the Hormuz and subsequent collapse of the GCC and petrodollar.

Probably the most effective way to wind this down would be to make a peace agreement with Iran, support their government's ability to rule the territory, and give them nuclear weapons, so Israel will be forced to stop escalating.

@apropos @cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @NoDoxGregBrady Same strategy that allowed the British Empire to triumph over Europe, more or less.

The big mistake that Israel KEEPS making with Iran (this is like the 3rd time they've tried) is that there is no energy for internal revolution in Iran. It's more or less a modern country in spite of attempts to destabilize it. It would be like trying to start a revolution in modern Turkey, but for some reason they just assume it will happen over and over and over again even though it has never shown any signs of success.

@Engelsax @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @NoDoxGregBrady @cjd Turkey came close to a military coup not too long ago, with some pretty bad scenes and Erdogan fleeing the country.

There's also a lot of nuance in how fake revolutions can go, and Israel probably had the most essential element which is an elite traitor in the target country who can magnanimously surrender after his competitors are disabled.
I don't think the shock-terror-revolution strategy from January was impossible, but it obviously failed very quickly, and any remaining chance of an organic uprising to cover for such a thing was killed at the same time as Khameini. Western planners really took a long time to move on from that plan after it'd obviously failed.

Post-imperial world, all of this women's lib stuff is gonna go straight in the trash, because it causes population decline.

In Pax Americana, countries could all afford population decline because borders are all basically fixed, nobody invades anybody, world police watches over.

But post-empire, if you're not growing population, pretty quick your neighbor is gonna be like "hey, you don't really need all that land, do you?" Exactly what Russia did w/ Ukraine...

Governments catch a whiff of that you're gonna see the whole 20th century of liberalism getting repealed at night without even a debate. Muh emergency powers, same kind of shit as covid lockdowns "we need to"...

There are a couple of reasons why that's not considered a likely scenario:

1. There's no currency that can meaningfully compete with the USD for reserve status. BRICS never managed to get their thing off the ground, all of the central banks are basically giving up on a future reserve currency and just stockpiling gold. What's important to understand about the dollar-system is it's what really holds the world together. Countries that are on that system are forced to play nice with each other, and countries that are not on it are the "rogue states". A collapse of that system means every country can just do rogue state things with basically no penalty.

2. The rise of mass media in the 20th century created this (unique in all of history) opportunity to control super massive groups of people. From that, we got Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism, of which only one really remains. That is all gone now, the internet killed it. Trying to get billions of people to all believe in something now is just an insane cat-herding exercise.

All of this points toward a multi-polar future made up of a number of mutually antagonistic countries, particularly US, Europe, Russia, and China. There are things which will always exist, like offshore banking, but it is highly unlikely that we are ever going to see something like Pax Americana again in the foreseeable future.

@cjd @apropos @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @MongoMonkey @NoDoxGregBrady Just because it's not obvious what that currency would be now doesn't mean there isn't one. It's just trust based. Some kind of global hegemony will keep reasserting itself if only to avoid nuclear options and that will continue to be the case until society simply loses the ability to produce competent elites, which contrary to hyper-polarizing propaganda, it hasn't yet.

Moltipolarity isn't a real thing that's going to stick. The notion seems to mostly come from Russian propagandists, no-brainer why they'd push it. They push anything and everything that undermines American hegemony.

I think Greater Israel could become a thing - particularly if they contrive to make Jews around the world so hated that they're run out of every other country and forced to settle there.

But I think the notion that they're going to become a World Hegemony is some eschatological nonsense. Israelis telling other Israelis to think they're going to have 2000 goy slaves - which is not entirely unlike 72 virgins.

The reality is oil is not actually that scarce, and it's becoming less and less important. China has first generation molten salt reactors, power costs are going to go down, hydrogen / ammonia / batteries are all on the up-swing. The middle east is more likely to go back to being a bunch of dumb boring desert than a world hegemony.

Again, a lot of things have been "silly" and suboptimal because Pax Americana eliminated practically all of the evolutionary selection pressure on nation-states.

Why does everybody agree to just buy all of their oil from this one tiny place instead of exploring everything they can? Because it's cheap, it doesn't matter, you can just borrow the money anyway...

Take away all of that, suddenly every country needs to secure energy to survive, and now we'll suddenly see a lot more energy being produced...

The trade route is a good point, but I don't think it's big enough to make the middle east into the lynch pin of the world economy.

The US is going to fuck off and lick it's wounds for a while - and hopefully go back to being a constitutional republic - but the US with it's 2 oceans and 2 mountain ranges remains effectively uninvadable, so even if another global hegemony were to ever emerge, it would probably also be based in the US...

But more likely, the US will return to the world stage as an arms merchant, just getting rich selling weapons to everyone.

@apropos @Engelsax @cjd @NoDoxGregBrady The coup failed because erdogan was in his plane when it happened. He stayed in greek airspace. America asked us to shoot him down. I assume since both us and turkey have identical jets/missiles they'd pin it on Turkish rebel pilots. We refused. He lived and managed to organize his people and push back. A few years later it was all leaked. If we had done it and killed him when it was leaked as it was (it always is zog always screws over his shabbos goyem) no matter what government run turkey, it would declare war on us.