alt Hacker NewsIs it the case that if someone doesn't do something some time then they can't do that thing? Like, if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him and said "dunk this!' and Lebron said "no, I'm not willing to" does this mean Lebron can't dunk?
Because personally, I'd still take Lebron on a basketball team even if he wasn't willing to dunk the ball that one time.
Replies
tardedmeme • today at 11:04 AM
It's more like you ask a paralyzed person to lift his arm and he says he doesn't want to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/discovering-that-...
> if you were playing basketball and Lebron James walked by and you threw the ball to him
Yes, this is a terrible analogy for the war in Iran. Hugely unpopular, costing Americans vast sums of money daily, headed for possible catastrophe. Very much not a low-stakes "Lebron walks by" situation.
Better analogy with Lebron would be: championship game with a title on the line. He gets possession as time runs down and the team needs him to score or make a play that scores. It's not okay for him to then say he's fully capable of scoring but doesn't want to at just that moment for reasons.
NB: this is not to say the US military couldn't cause untold damage on the region. This is obvious, anybody can look at recent history to see that the US military is more than capable of destroying a country in the region.
Rather, this is an object lesson that war is politics by other means, and here we tried to do war without any politics and it has not gone well for us.