Bradley Campbell

This is a brazen pre-admission of genocide against the Iranian people, which would obviously be a war crime. Madness.

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale. So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake. Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him. Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.” But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset. Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail.

"I didn't realize Faulkner lived to see electricity." "Really? William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, died in the 1960s, did Hollywood screenwriting?" Oh, FAULKner.... I was thinking of Homer."

It’s fine not to know anything about literature because who gives a shit, everyone should find their own happiness, etc but it is funny when people say stuff like this, framed as if they have lots of other totally knowledgeable takes on Faulkner.

Same with the sinking of the Titanic. Virtually no one has heard of it since it falls in that period that might as well not exist in our cultural memory.

Same with the sinking of the Titanic. Virtually no one has heard of it since it falls in that period that might as well not exist in our cultural memory.

In our cultural memory, 1866-1928 might as well not even exist. Lost decades, despite virtually the entire modern world as we know it conceived and built then.

A lot of people don't know that the American West was tamed and eventually civilized during this period--and not without a little violence and excitement!--because Hollywood refuses to make a movie about it.