Will Stancil

I hated it so much at 16. So much. Total contempt from word one

Juno at 22: annoying movie, Jason Bateman’s heel turn is bizarre.

Juno at 38: actually devastating, also he’s clearly a manchild grooming her Jesus Christ.

Knocked Up at 22: Seth Rogenc is hilarious, she’s gotta chill.

Knocked Up at 38: this man is an actual irresolute degenerate? Leave him?

Okay, a related question: works that hit one way when you were young, and then very differently when you were older? The standout here for me is the 2007 Pregnancy Movies: Juno and Knocked Up. Can’t think of movies where my feelings towards the characters shifted so much with time

if only that were true :(

This is also a great and relatable answer even though it doesn’t really bother me viscerally

There Will Be Blood

Hegseth appears to be literally high on power in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen from any other military leader

Just huffing his own cringy propaganda

The best soldiers are the toughest soldiers. The toughest soldiers are the ones willing to massacre unarmed innocents without remorse.

Hegseth thinks way to be Good at Army is just go on camera and says the hardest thing you can think of, except he’s a sociopath and so he understands “sounding tough” to mean “explicitly describing your willingness to defy all moral and legal boundaries and murder people for no particular reason”

Remember how this guy lobbied hard to get a pardon for a war criminal who slaughtered children? Turns out that’s literally his entire philosophy of armed conflict

But this gets it backwards, right? The challenge of the strait is not that you can’t get ships through, ships are going through right now. It’s that you need a ton of ships to go through and pretty much 100% of them need to make it, because no insurer is going to gamble on a billion dollar loss

It has to be the most extraordinary feat of gaslighting in history

“I have no intention of starting a war with you” I say as I airstrike your entire government into dust, sink your whole navy, destroy your air force, and demand your unconditional surrender

this just isn’t workable or practical

I street park

The age of the SUV is over

Now is the time of the Fit

“Unite the anti-Trump coalition | Easily win” is a banger of a slogan tbh

The U.S. made this class of stunningly stupid, pudding-soft MAGA parasites who have managed to move through life without ever encountering genuinely meaningful pushback. This led them to starting this wildly dangerous war in Iran - and looks like their reality distortion field is no longer working.

Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent.

With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

“MAGA’s fundamental shared quality is a total lack of theory of mind for other people” is a theory that keeps getting validated by reality - look at almost every decision they’ve made in the war with Iran, and how they seem constantly surprised by the unanticipated actions of other parties.

also, like, look at a map of Iran! It’s all mountains! Just a whole country of mountains! I’m not a military strategy expert but surely that’s Bad For Invading, right?

but if they can sink a US warship why can we be sure they can’t sink a giant floating oil tank

Yeah again with the caveat that I am 0% knowledgeable about this sort of thing it’s really hard to see any non-political solution that isn’t “total conquest of Iran around the strait,” which a. will take a long time and make things worse until it’s done, and b. probably still doesn’t fully secure it

I mean is it even really true that you can keep Hormuz open if you’re willing to dump massive resources into it? You pretty much need a 100% success rate at intercepting any kind of attempted attack, right? Is that possible, if we can’t even protect our own guys in that area?

Ultimately the only way to make it safe is a political resolution where you can be relatively sure the Iranians won’t shoot at the ships… are we REMOTELY moving that way? Or perhaps the opposite way

The leap from “protecting 5 ships” to “protecting 100 ships” seems pretty significant! And they just have to get lucky once to truly bone the whole world.

And I know precisely zip about drones or ship defense or ocean shipping but it just seems obviously true that the closer you get to full traffic through the strait the harder everything gets to protect? If there are dozens of ships a day you’re just saturating the area with potential targets

This is what I can’t wrap my head around. People keep saying “Oh it’ll work itself out” but… how? Give the ships wings? Destroy every drone in a hostile territory the size of the eastern US? Kill every living human within 100 miles of the strait?

No but it seems like crank nonsense

Honestly the key to making good predictions isn’t being especially smart but understanding that there isn’t some kind of invisible fencing around outcomes that prevents them from departing from the familiar. A car accelerating at a cliff edge will go over the edge if it doesn’t stop or turn