Post/intra war thoughts (iii)

For form's sake

OK, so no need for a whole big thing at the beginning. A lot of this is stuff I’ve said already.

1. Esoteric Bibi-ism is true. There is no military solution to the predicament of Zionism just as there is no diplomatic solution to the predicament of Zionism. There are military solutions to specific problems just as there are diplomatic solutions to specific problems, and that’s it. Yes, in some sense, it is intolerable to have countries and/or paramilitaries in rocket-range that believe you shouldn’t exist, but tolerate it you will nevertheless have to do.

2. Israel is over-reliant on its airforce because it is extremely casualty averse; for that reason it can’t function as a military superpower even though in other respects its armed forces are pretty awesome. In fact, it can’t even act as a local enforcer.

   

   

   bro

   This leaves you with only two options (a) somehow stop being so casualty averse or (b) give up pretensions to being a military superpower. I’m not saying you have to choose (a), but I am saying you have to choose (a) or (b). There isn’t a third option where you just get to kill infinity civilians and it’s completely fine, and if someone tells you can, it is very long past time to stop paying any attention to them.

3. Speaking of which, this is an interesting video for a whole bunch of reasons, but the main one is the obvious:

   People like the guy on the left are not rare. They’re not a majority of Israelis, they are probably not even a majority of right-wing voters, but they are the core right-wing electorate. To call this magical thinking is technically accurate, but it underplays the profound sickness of the intellect exhibited here. These are people deep in a murderous and fantastical daydream irresponsibly allowed to fester for decades by the Israeli state and, with complete and total justice, an object of revulsion and disgust to all mankind. All who see them wag their heads. It’s important to be clear about this: disenfranchising these people is a life-and-death matter for the Israeli state. The mechanism for doing so used to be esoteric Bibi-ism and that’s fully spent, so now you need something new, and stat. This is not a joke or hyperbole at all. None of the guys on the centre/left have an answer to this because they are a joke.

4. Back when I did my first ever podcast, I was broadly sceptical of the claim that Hamas had done October 7th in order to thwart the expansion of the Abraham Accords, but it seems that it’s pretty much true. So Hamas won, and they won big since they’re on course to crash our relations not just in the region, but with humanity at large (see what I wrote here which is perhaps partially vindicated and partially not).

   

   Still looking for the bottom

5. Bibi is almost certainly going to lose the election now. I think Otzma will get a boost too. However, I think the center will regret winning these elections. A lot of bills have been racked up by this government and will shortly come due. When they do, we will talk ourselves into believing we were this close to regional hegemony if only we’d kept pushing. The great thing about military Zionism is that, no matter how much it fails, you can always explain it away on the grounds that we weren’t militaristic enough. You can always kill more civilians, you can always attack more countries, you can always send Breslov terrorists to seize one more hilltop. It’s forever possible to retard-max just that little bit extra. Every failure to convert the success of the IAF and Mossad into strategic advantage is met with ever more frantic antiquarian appeals to the Oslo Accords or to insufficient barbarity in 1948, in a way that makes American libs’ obsession with redlining and Emmett Till look reasonable. The only circumstances under which they’ll admit that ‘yes, we tried it our way, and it didn’t work’ are circumstances under which we’d all be dead. I call this the anthropic principle of Israeli rightoidism, a concept you might consider adding to your arsenal alongside blood libel parallax and the law of merited ethnic cleansing.

6. There are two whitepills. The first is that the medium-term impact of the war will be to increase investment in infrastructure for the production of and transport of oil and gas around the world, as well as to accelerate diversification with renewables. Iran played the Hormuz Strait option well, but actually it wasn’t all that bad. It was bad, but not anything remotely like as bad as it would have been even 10 years ago. If they play it again, it will be even less of a big deal, and eventually it won’t be a big deal at all. Iran is still a crap country, without even the ability to consistently provide water to urban centers, with 77% inflation, an economy in advancing collapse and multiple secessionist movements, whose average IQ sucks, and whose smart fraction substantially lives in California and cheers when the country is bombed. Things look grim right now, but this is the peak of Iran’s power unless someone comes in to buttress it. If Israel plays its cards OK, it will still win the generational war. The second, connected, whitepill is that, as well as eroding the ability of Iran to hold the world hostage, the inexorable decline of the Middle East as a proportion of the world’s energy supply will mean that, one day, most people around the world can just stop thinking about this stupid region and its stupid people with their stupid fights about stupid nonsense.

Those are my takes and they’re not grade A, so maybe consider this the first NonZionism open thread.