This is one of those topics that I find interesting because there's no predictable next step, unlike the weekly cycle of Israel bombing Lebanon or the Trump admin covering up Epstein files.

I think the war must end. It's far too costly to last forever. The US has severely depleted its ammunition reserves, and it seems clear that they're hurting more than Iran at this point. We don't have a lot of information as to how badly the regime is hurting financially with the blockade of their oil, but judging from the skirmishes between the two parties, Trump keeps bluffing and Iran keeps calling it. Ultimately, the Iranians simply have to survive to maintain the upper hand in the conflict. Their speedboat fleets and drone swarms are enough to retain their position.

The Iranians are doing a little better than surviving, though. They keep taking out US radar installations in the ME, which are extremely costly, not easily replaced, and create significant strategic vulnerabilities for any further US campaigns.

The problem on Trump's side is that this is as close to a must-win scenario as he can get, for a couple of obvious reasons. One of them is that the Strait of Hormuz has become a household name, and any further Iranian blockades or tariffs will essentially be total repudiations of his foreign policy success, as well as US military reputation. The embarrassment would be comparable to Reagan pulling back the Marines after the 1984 barracks bombing in Lebanon - an admission that the US is too weak to dictate Middle Eastern politics.

The other problem is that Israel has puppet strings on Trump and, to this point, have made him dance any number they want. But those puppet strings may be fraying at this point, because the battlefield reality is the ultimate power in the world, not Israeli propaganda.

So will Trump actually concede to Iran and try to sell the resulting disaster to the American public? I think this is the most likely option, although I am having trouble seeing how he'll do it. Any finalized deal will include retention of nuclear material and at least partial control of the strait, and the Iranians won't keep quiet about it to help Trump save face. On the contrary, they will rub it in his face constantly. The idea of Trump letting this happen to him is crazy, but "bluster then quietly withdraw with a face-saving deal" was his exact MO with the Houthi bombing campaign last year.

The other option is that Trump goes scorched earth and annihilates Iranian power, water, and oil. Iran would then retaliate in its dying breaths with annihilation of oil refineries and desalinization plants in Israel and the Gulf states, giving us $10 gas and tens of millions of refugees, among many unpredictable consequences. I would've thought this would be inevitable given the iron grip Netanyahu has on Trump, but now I'm not so sure.

Either way, it seems the US-Israel axis is on the way to a big fat L.

By white, I of course mean Gentile. Essentially this is someone whose life and beliefs have been molded by Jewish propaganda, starting from Robert Maxwell's control of Macmillan textbooks to omnipresent media narratives to college indoctrination as the coup de grace, followed by healthy doses of Atlantic, NYT, etc articles to keep up the message.

I have found that these people are almost universally arrogant. The uneducated ones are hicklibs that act like they're better than everyone in their hometown because they hate God and capitalism and/or appreciate fine wine or some other faggy activity, and the educated ones are some of the smuggest pricks around who prize the success they achieve from conforming to political culture and act like they're better than everyone because they make good money, or at least inherited it.

In both cases, I think the key underlying delusion is that white libs are in control. For all their recitation of racial propaganda, they seem to think that Jewish libs are just these enlightened Eloi-type creatures that spread political and artistic insights to help the cause. Hence the arrogance: they act like that because they think they actually call the shots.

As the Israel-Jewish coalition becomes more and more open about exercising its power, however, it will likely act as a wedge issue to shatter that delusion. There's no superiority in being someone's pet.

Uncharitable video making fun of his recent statements, but as far as I can tell there's a lot to go on.

• claimed demon attacked him in his sleep and he still has the claw marks a year later
• implied Trump was the antichrist, then denied ever saying that
• repeatedly claims that Trump is some kind of demonic force
• talked about his dad being in the CIA, then claimed he never knew his dad was in the CIA until he died in 2025
• brought up political violence, then claimed he didn't bring it up

Somewhat odd to say, but to me the most concerning statement on that list is claiming Trump is the antichrist, then explicitly denying he said that. The dude is on the record on his multimillion viewer show saying exactly that. What makes him think he can lie about it? Or is he not lying and he genuinely deluded himself into thinking he never said that?

Same thing about his dad and the CIA. How he can claim he was ignorant of the CIA connections is insane for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that he is on record - on another multimillion viewer podcast - acknowledging that his dad was, in fact, in the CIA.

A lot of people have concerns about Tucker being a fed. I'm not sure how these things fit into that, because it seems like he's on the verge of going on a Jordan Peterson benzo arc. More broadly, people who tend towards the "alt-right" seem to be getting increasingly nutty these days. I even see it on this forum.

As everyone has heard by now, an F-15E was shot down last week in Iran. The E model is a two-seater, and both crewmembers ejected. The US immediately launched a massive recovery operation. One of the supporting A-10s was subsequently shot down and had to ditch in the Persian Gulf. One (or two) C-130s broke down at an improvised landing strip in Iran and had to be destroyed. We may find out about other losses as well.

The first lost crewmember was rescued in about a day and the other was just rescued last night after a prolonged firefight with Iranian IRGC, paramilitary forces, and civilians looking for a bounty. Here are some points:

• Prima facie, the shootdown proves that Iranian air defense is not totally dead yet, contra Trump's ill-timed claim last week. The current thinking is that they have abandoned whatever radar-guided SAMs they have left and are exclusively using heat-seeking SAMs.
• At the same time, the American response proves that Iranian air defense is spotty at best. In the recovery operation, American helicopters and C-130s, which are far more vulnerable to SAMs, were flying low over the crash area constantly in broad daylight.
• There is also a threat from Iranian MANPADs (shoulder-fired SAMs). Those would have shot down the helicopters, so it seems that the Iranians are being very choosy as to where they deploy their resources.
• American special forces landed in Iranian territory, got to the pilots first, and fought off a huge force of IRGC and paramilitaries to successfully accomplish their mission. America still has the edge in a ground engagement, especially at night.
• A decent number of civilians in the area were apparently motivated to capture the pilot, and the claim is that the Iranian government had to lie to them that the pilot was captured elsewhere in order to calm the crowd. This detracts from the claim that the Iranian people are itching to overthrow the regime. I am not sure exactly what ethnicity lives in that area.
• The first shootdowns of American aircraft are noteworthy, but they are not exactly out of the norm. Even when the US steamrolled Iraq in Desert Storm 1991, about 30-40+ aircraft and helicopters were lost to enemy fire.
• At the same time, the shootdowns prove that Iran is resilient and not ready to roll over. They have survived the shock and awe and are adjusting their tactics.

So in summary, we the goyim are still really good at waging war, but Iran continues to survive and make the war costly. This is still looking like a possible spreadsheet defeat for the US as we continue to rack up expensive losses of equipment and ammunition.

At the same time, Iran is a civilized country that depends on complex infrastructure, and they won't be able to defend or absorb the powerplant and oil strikes that Trump is threatening. They will, however, be able to bring down a lot of the Gulf with them.

There's three options that I can see: a ground invasion or strikes on critical infrastructure, or both.

The most that a ground invasion could do is secure a beachhead to be able to strike the interior of Iran more easily. Maybe a temporary airfield or something. Even though the US keeps moving a few thousand troops into the area every few weeks, the idea of taking Tehran with a force that size is pure fantasy. The invasion of Iraq took 300,000 troops in 2003 and was staged across an open desert border in Kuwait to roll across more open desert. On the other hand, Iran is surrounded by mountains on all four sides. You are not going to conquer a country like that with a tenth of the force. On top of that, the military industrial complex hasn't had enough time to come up with good FPV drone countermeasures.

Alternatively, the troops could be staging for raids on Natanz or Fordow or whatever nuclear sites they hyped up recently. There is also the possibility of linking up with belligerent ethnic factions in Iran to balkanize the country.

Option 2 is what Trump threatened - kill the power and water in Iran. There is virtually nothing the Iranians can do about this. The military is obviously the best-equipped entity in Iran for utilities shortages, but the surface world will quickly descend into humanitarian chaos, and their days are numbered at that point. Naturally, the downside is also the humanitarian chaos. Millions of people will be at risk, and we will see yet another Israel/US-provoked wave of refugees.

A very small silver lining in this scenario is that Iranian chicks can actually be pretty hot. They are the ancient Aryans, after all. And that's about it for the upsides.

edit: after considering more perspectives, the Iranians do have one last card to play if we go for their critical infrastructure: destroying the desalinization plants and oil fields of the Gulf oil states. This won't save them, but it will make Trump's win into a classic Pyrrhic victory, to say the least. Oil prices will go absolutely bonkers, and so will the economy.

Resident Evil: Requiem has been highly successful both in terms of sales and online response. Some RE guys like Synthetic Man have been moderately critical, but still called it an OK game. On social media, the main characters have been very popular. Leon was literally designed as a silver fox to appeal to women, and Grace, despite being flat as a board and stammering her way through everything, is still pretty and kind of like the antithesis to a girlboss since the whole point of her character is being less physically capable than Leon. The market is ready for a girl that actually acts like a girl.

For example, one of the easiest ways to tell Leon apart from Grace is that it's a lot harder for her to shoot the Requiem revolver. This has led to memes.

So both conservatives and libs like the game. What's the problem? The shippers. Somehow people got into a social media war over whether Leon should have married Claire or if Grace was "for the queers," or something else. During the war, people started referring to old games, and it came out that the shippers hadn't played any RE game before the remakes. Annoying, but not surprising. But then, it came out that the shippers hadn't even played the remakes, or any RE game ever, and openly admitted this because it's "ableist" or "elitist" to expect them to buy a game to call themselves a fan.

"Tourists" is a term that originated from anime (afaik) that describes people who start watching something because it's popular and generate moronic opinions and demands because they think they're just as influential as people who actually care about it. But it seems that most tourists in gaming just watch livestreams or youtube videos and don't actually play anything.

So if that's the case, then do they even watch anime, or paint 40k figures, or do anything except yap online? Previously I assumed that anyone devoting time to a "fandom" would have at least touched the content once, but the reality seems to be even weirder than that. There are legions of people out there who assimilate their hobbies entirely through social media. "Tourist" or "colonizer" don't seem to be quite as accurate anymore. You can't even call someone a tourist if they never actually visit the place of tourism.

Suddenly all the engagement with gay shipper posts and "make female space marines" and how people take disagreement as an existential attack is making a lot of sense. Online discussion is literally all these people have. They don't derive any enjoyment from the thing beyond opining on it. Of course they're going to destroy the fandom.

The lack of buildup in the press has been strange. Normally an administration would prep the public for military action with a few months of war/atrocity propaganda, but the PR has been so lazy that we just ended up bombing Iran on the weekend and half the country wasn't even aware we were trying.

I'm not talking about the military buildup. Obviously a lot of people knew that Trump was staging the Navy in striking distance of Iran, but I feel like that was underreported in the mainstream, considering the scope of the attack.

The closest we got was the color revolution protests around the New Years, but even that was a lazy effort. We heard reporting about thousands dead, but there were no media symbols to rally around like dead Kuwaiti babies. Some kid posted a video about killing himself. Mike Pompeo just bragged about Mossad starting the protests as if he forgot they were supposed to be legitimate.

It's like they don't really care, or perhaps that they've resigned themselves to losing the 5th gen battlefield with the younger generations, so they don't even bother making the case to them. The boomers, on the other hand, are in the tank no matter what - every boomer I've talked to thinks the strikes are exactly what we should be doing - so maybe they figure that's all they need for now.