I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions
Also, it's against the guidelines to allege or speculate about astroturfing (as is anything that is tangential to the primary topic), but we welcome emails (hn@ycombinator.com) from anyone who notices anything that seems suspect, and we're happy to investigate.
Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes.
I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
People on both sides of any topic are welcome to participate here and express their points of view, as long as they respect the guidelines. If you see users who "police it against honest reporting about their crimes", you should email us to point it out, as the guidelines ask.
Making sweeping claims like this without including any links so we can know what you're talking about serves only to poison HN.
I think that's called "disagreeing".
What I'm trying to say is that this is an intentional part of their strategy. They know what they're doing.
They probably have a small detachment assigned to every popular-ish website. For the long tail, they have bot farms.
This has felt like a super postmodern interaction
Could be that these are being farmed but at a state level it might be easier to outright purchase aged accounts
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.
I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
It's already common practice to buy aged accounts with good reputations, so even that doesn't mean much.
At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.
For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
And that's certainly the deathbed of any hopes to a mullah regime change. They will come out stronger than before.
My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNGFC7-t68 [video][16s]
In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it.
[1] - https://lobste.rs/
So if you are a democrat, and you want to make change, you need to behave exactly like conservatives do. Elections are decided by vibes, he who can attract the biggest social following through whatever means, wins.
WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter who you are replying to or what it's about.
HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please show a sincere intent to treat this community and its guidelines with respect if you want to keep participating here.
What would you replace Israel with? What would happen to the current population?
Its a propaganda machine that works very well to target the very impressionable people out there. I mean, students are going to protests and destroying their futures by getting arrested to show support of Palestinians, who would absolutely stone them to death if they found out that any of them smoked weed, and even more so for the lbgtq students for simply being gay.
So really, Israel vs Palestine shouldn't be an issue at all if you believe in actual change.
Eisenhower explained why in his farewell address.
And that's only the ones the FBI didn't "somehow" fail to collect.
And that's only the ones the FBI didn't "somehow" fail to collect.
Without having to wait for the history books to do their thing.
No matter what you think, there is no way for him to avoid these hearings
Even the leader of the "left wing" opposition has recently explicitly stated that Israel was gifted the entire region from the Euphrates to the Nile by God, so they would have a right to own the entire region, but that this must be balanced by security concerns and tactical realities. This happened in response to the US ambassador's explicit public remarks in the Tucker Carlson interview that also asserted Israel's God-given right to the entire region. Note that this region, from the Euphrates to the Nile, includes about half of Irak, parts of Syria, most of Lebanon, parts of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt.
# HN Block Karma View
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news.ycombinator.com###karmaThe thing is, as sudden as this seems to the general public, this is something that takes months of planning. Having served in the Navy for eight years, I know that this kind of thing doesn't necessarily happen overnight. That doesn't mean it _couldn't_. The US military certainly does have the ability to plan a strike very quickly.
But, most likely, this was planned behind closed doors. Based on the reports, I bet this was probably planned shortly after Trump took office. It just so happens that it's a good distraction from the Epstein files.
I hate the direction this country's government is taking. It sucks. I just want to leave at some point. I don't want my family to grow up here anymore.
What I find worrying is the standard tactic seems to be to do negotiations, let the other side assume there is hope for a other solution - and then attack hard all of a sudden. Already the second time. It might be effective short term, but it erodes what is left of trust negotiating with the US.
>Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand
It may not work but it's not a bad objective. My mum in the UK is a Bahai and a lot of those are refugees from Iran because they say be nice and tolerant and the Iranian government imprisons or kills them for so doing. Blasphemy etc. The are not a good lot.
[T]he War Department will not be distracted by democracy building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation building.
- Pete Hegseth, December 6, 2025[1]
Works out great for Netanyahu though as is customary. He can be PM for a while longer and stave off his own impending trial and imprisonment. If this goes well for Israel, he might even get that pardon that Trump campaigned for tirelessly.
Think about it. If someone actually bombed or invaded the continental US you'd have woke libs cheering for Donald Trump.
The Iranian regime may fall, but it'll be like Iraq. We'll get something like ISIS out of it, or worse, and the place will be a complete basketcase of civil war for 25+ years. Or we'll be there for 25 years in another "forever war." Bravo.
My theory is that Israel has dirt (Epstein files maybe) on Trump and holds him by the balls. The second idea is that this is an obfuscation campaign to have the public opinion forget about Epstein, the state of the real economy, the falling approval rates, or all of the above.
So we're going to war with Iran based on election fraud conspiracies from MAGA?
0: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1161475725227...
Within the current structure, we need to implement ranked/scored voting to break the two party system and the implied complete control it has over our government. It's so much easier for big money to control the narrative, control the candidates, and play off extreme polar politics when the voting system makes people choose the "lesser of two evils".
Were I king for a day in the US, and could only do one thing to help America, changing our voting system to some kind of rank/scored system would be it. Ending gerrymandering and Citizens United are also important but honestly less so than this.
> "Epstein files: DOJ withheld documents about claim Trump sexually abused minor"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/epstein-trump-doj-garcia.htm...
Will it even make a single newspaper or talk show this weekend?
Huh? If anything, he'd try to put blame on "Antifa" and "the radical left."
I think this is a scenario Steven miller fantasizes about while playing with action figures but that’s the closest it gets to being real.
Sure derogatory terms for liberals, as you term the left, would support the armed forces if China invaded hawaii but expecting them to also support Trump is fantasy. Like supporting America and supporting Donald Trump are entirely different matters and usually divergent.
Judging by how they responded to the assassination attempt(s) on Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I don't really believe that.
Social media is brain poison.
My point is that an outside force coming in will help the current regime and/or the ideas behind it. Even if the current regime falls, democratic or pro-Western ideas in Iran will be seen as aligned with the invading force and rejected by many people who might otherwise be open to them.
Is there anyone who likes being invaded by a foreign power, ever?
Do you think the people fighting ICE in the streets of Minneapolis would welcome a joint Chinese+North Korean decapitation strike on Washington and cruise missiles flying over Portland?
If president Trump doesn't declare martial law, start a civil war, military coup or change the constitution of the USA, he will stop ruling in 3 years. We can wait that long.
As the recent wave of protests in Iran came after the 12 days where Iranian regime was dealt a massive blow, I think your analysis is wrong. Iranians consider this an opportunity. Also, the scale of violence unleashed on the Iranian public by the regime is staggering; it’s not about the regime being simply “unpopular”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c748l0zv4x8o
Just look at the fallout from the Epstein files where at best we can hope people will be embarrassed into resigning their current position.
Can we follow the age old adage WWJD?
What would (Xi) Jinping do?
Make himself dictator for life and purge his party of dissenters?
Much nuance, wow.
Israel attacked Iran
Israel attacked Lebanon
Israel oppressed and kidnapped Palestinians
World is getting destroyed by couple hundred Israeli and US maniacs, by the way, all of whom are connected via Epstein
> DEATH TO AMERICA
in the streets like blood-thirsty lunatics, something for which there was no equivalent in the US even after 9/11 (mobs chanting "Death to Muslims/Islam"), let alone doing so with governmental encouragement as happens in Iran?
Do they not realize how many Americans aren't pro-Israel and aren't invested enough in the Middle East and its politics, proxy wars, and human rights abuses to want the US to support Israel in military action against Iran, except for their nuclear ambitions, and regularly professed eternal hatred for our country?
https://www.thejournal.ie/iran-agrees-in-breakthrough-talks-...
Current stance on negotiations is a miscalculation IMHO, they likely wanted for negotiations to drag on for a long time.
>justtrustmebro
That they'll never, in some capacity, attempt use them against the country they weekly collectively chant death to?
EDIT: thanks, dang, for the
> posting too fast
cooldown, for all of my four posts.
> perhaps we could negotiate a peace deal in which israel and iran both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
I completely agree with you. Isreal has better relations with its neighbors than its ever had, has destroyed Iran's proxies, and given its obvious conventional military supremacy and lack of regional nuclear-armed foes and US-backing, its nuclear stockpile is just a destabilizing force in the region, and them voluntarily disbanding it would earn them a great deal of goodwill and a moral highground.
If you see a sudden uptick in protests in a country the US/isreal see as an enemy, you can bet its probably just the step in the playbook preceding military action
It’s not new, you just started paying attention now.
Israel and the US: You serious?
Iran: Yes.
...
Iran, after being bombed to a slightly earlier point of the Stone Age than they've spent the past ~50 years: We are working hard trying to find the guy responsible for this.
FAFO, as they say. Meanwhile, literally the entire Middle East and the rest of the world besides Russia will be happy to see these clowns gone. Bon voyage.
please, can somebody in the US or Israel have an "are we the baddies" epiphany?
> defending the mullahs wasn't exactly on my bingo card, but here we are...
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
It may be infeasible to do it, or bad idea because of geopolitical or similar reasons, but no - in Iran's regime case - we are not the baddies.
And Iran? Every single time it’s just performance art. I’m already sick of watching it.
Besides, Iran has been heavily sanctioned and blocked by the U.S. and Israel for so many years that its impact on the global economy is basically zero. So what the hell is there to dump over?
Oil prices? Venezuela’s situation has already been dealt with. The U.S. can produce its own oil, Canada still has plenty of oil, and Russia is still selling at bargain-bin prices. Iran and the surrounding major oil-producing countries are barely even moving in sync, and there’s basically no real incentive for anything major to happen to oil. So why the hell would the market drop?
As for all this fearmongering, I’d say go harder. Seriously, make it as apocalyptic as possible, so my gold can moon, I can pick up cheap Taiwan stocks, and short crypto, so I can completely clean out all the people panicking in fear.
In earlier strikes Iran signaled it did not want to escalate. It warned US bases prior to its attack, and sent small symbolic strikes to pacify their base, while trying to de-escalate through all diplomatic channels.
This time it looks different, Israel/US have targetted their president and political (religious) leader. There is hardly a more existential threat you can imagine for the current regime, so it will do everything in its power to strike back. If you put someone with his back on the wall and start a firing squad, don't expect a non-response.
Beyond that it's the middle east, last time US tried regime change we had two decades of violence with 1m Iraqi's dead and ISIS rampaging in the region. It's a human catastrophe that people are worried about, not just stock markets. To come here and talk about your stocks is insane.
I'd think they emit slightly more than a cow's fart.
Clinton bombed Serbia for 1/100th the severity of the Epstein files.
PotUS told Iran "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors.
Iran chose to FAFO; "Or else" has now arrived.
I don't like Trump and based on past bad experiences I'm not sure it's wise for the US to start a war in the Middle East.
I feel sorry for the civilians caught in the middle, e.g. the ~50 Iranian schoolkids that ate a wayward bomb. People can legitimately criticize the US and Israel for that mistake, but if they do they need to also criticize Iran ~200 times harder for killing tens of thousands of protestors on purpose.
I don't agree with people who think this war is illegitimate or Iran isn't the bad guy here.
Iran had 60% enriched uranium (hundreds of kilograms)
Weapons require 90%.
Not exactly there, but way past electricity generation.
Do we know that for a fact? or is it a lie just like Saddam's WMD.
> PotUS told Iran "Don't shoot the protestors or else." Iran shot the protestors.
Do you think Trump genuinely care about the protestors in Iran?
> I don't agree with people who think this war is illegitimate or Iran isn't the bad guy here.
Things can be more nuanced than the "good" versus the "bad" guys and bombing countries isn't always the best solution.
Maybe it's a good thing that Anthropic will no longer be associated with the US government's attacks in another six months.
"Here is 10 petabytes of signals intelligences, you can run queries, give me the hierarchy of my enemy, the house address of anyone within 3 degrees of separation of their leadership or weapons industry, the next house address they're likely to be at if trying to flee my strikes, and the time they're all most likely to be there. Then schedule drone strikes on the houses."
Will not one of you try to steelman this decision? Or do you truly, fully believe the entire US government and intelligence complex, supported by roughly 50% of your compatriots, are warmongering baboons?
then why the previous peacefull attempts were thrown out? I remember Iran agreed to limit the production or ivite the people to watch their actions, the US sanctions were even lifted in 2015. But then later reiplemented by the US for some reason.
unrelated to all of this, I don't understand what's the problem is with a country developing nuclear weapons. US can nuke Iran with ICBMs anyway if they try to use them?
Israël is threatened by Iran. Iran has been working on nukes. There have been negotiations but they haven't been definitive yet, and Iran has never been a trustworthy negotiating partner anyway. That is why this President ditched the last round of agreements.
That's the steelman. Reality is that half my compatriots are warmongering baboons.
Greetings from the European Union.
This administration's arguments do not deserve to be steelmanned.
I don't know if by 50% you're talking about left vs right, but I'm center left, and a decent number of center-left thought leaders support this action. I think the people who support this are a relatively narrow 25-30% of remaining neo(lib|con)s in the center, and the more left and the America First right crowd hate this. My guess would be loosely speaking Trump's base hates this more than the typical HN poster. Tucker Carlson for instance will be way more against this than anyone here.
Iran has been the grown up in the room for well over a decade at this stage and it didn't matter one bit. You cannot appease Israel or the US because that don't want to be appeased, they want to bomb Iran into a lawless wasteland. They could have switched to a secular liberal democracy and it'd make no difference.
A big chunk of the world sees the US as the biggest terrorist state in the world, followed up by Israel...
You seem to have missed the little detail the US is now at war.
There was a deal with Iran, but Trump throw it away because was closed by Obama and Israel did not like it...
Making a big deal out of Israelis—especially wealthy ones—having dual citizenship is a classic antisemitic tactic, used to sow the idea that they aren't "real Americans" or their primary loyalty is to another country.
Also: yes, Citizens United is a big problem. But phrasing your comment as if the primary problem with it is "Israeli-American dual citizens" pouring millions of dollars into politics is perpetuating the antisemitic ideas that a) all or most Jews are wealthy, and b) Jews are controlling our country/the world.
Whether or not you meant it as antisemitic, it played directly and very clearly into multiple antisemitic tropes that are frequently used to try to smear and harm Jewish people.
Anyway, here’s Trump himself detailing the extraordinary access to White House this lobbying bought Adelsons:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-salutes-mega-donor-mi...
Also the scale in which people were killed in Iran in such a short time (even if you believe the Iranian state media) was unprecedented. So there’s that too.
perhaps we could negotiate a peace deal in which israel and iran both agree to give up nuclear weapons and allow for IAEA inspections
Saddam had been selling dollars for euros and talking about shifting his oil to other currencies for years. 2003 put an end to that - it was literally the first thing that was done by the provisional Govt. was to make sure all Iraqi oil was sold in dollars.
The Petrodollar was not in jeopardy anymore, and for the post-1971 system, that was essential. Same thing is now happening with Iran and Venezuela. The real goal is - China must not be allowed to have substantial sources of energy that are not priced in dollars.
Lots of genocides have been carried out with primitive weapons, even recently. Remember, the protesters in Iran were mostly unarmed...
All this is just a excuse, when this whole war is about Israel's national security interest and hegemonic ambitions. The "negotiations" were entirely over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces - The protestors, human rights, democracy none of it were even mentioned. Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times over the last year to advocate for the protestors.
In the Middle-east theatre, no telling what will happen in East Asia.
* the weapons can annihilate the world and extinguish civilization in a few hours
* a massive asymmetry between the enemies in any metric is evident
* the strikes and battles are surprisingly of small scale, targeted and not decisive
Why on earth isn't the diplomacy used to solve the status after an imminent warning to make Iran an extension of Indian ocean with weapons of mass destruction?
Is the translation "Down with....".
Lets pray for the people of Iran we get rid of the regime this time, and eventually reach peace in the middle east.
One of the (many) pretexts for the war, at least from Trump seems to be that Iran 'interfered' in US elections. From the Washington post
'President Donald Trump shared an article about Iran seeking to interfere in U.S. elections on his Truth Social account a couple of hours after U.S. strikes began in Iran early Saturday.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the post read, with a link to a piece from Just the News, a conservative website from which Trump frequently shares articles. Shortly after, the president posted another article from the site, albeit unrelated to Iran; it was about the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani T. Willis.'
Does the US even have a functioning Congress left? Who will even believe such a preposterous lie? Even the most die hard MAGA supporter will find it hard to believe this fabrication.
It's like Trump doesn't feel the need to even maintain the fig leaf of a causus belli. He must truly feel that he is now the king of the United States to be so emboldened.
See Stephen Fry on attempted chemistry.
is not crypto going down on any "multinational"* war?
*war amid thai and kambodgia is not "multinational" kind of, just example of not any
Iran could have been contained and Obama was right on his approach. We don't know the details of the strikes, but I hope it doesn't go into a full blown war, but this will be another Iraq like disaster, and american people are getting tired of doing the bidding of Isreal, a country that is already mirred into doing a genocide. This war is already unpopular in pools. Iran's regime is terrible to its people, but this has the potential to be another disaster where countless of people could die.
For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has been one of the primary state sponsors of terror. Hezbollah is not an organic Lebanese movement — it is an Iranian creation. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are sustained by Iranian money and weapons. The Houthis’ missile and drone capabilities exist because Tehran supplied and trained them. Shi’a militias in Iraq killed hundreds of Americans with Iranian-provided EFPs. Today, Iranian Shahed drones are striking Ukrainian apartment buildings.
This is not passive instability. It is deliberate, systematic export of violence as state policy.
At the same time, the regime has consistently pursued a nuclear capability while publicly calling for the destruction of Israel and “death to America.” Even if one assumes deterrence logic would hold, a nuclear umbrella for Iran would dramatically increase its freedom to escalate proxy warfare across the region.
The downstream geopolitical effects are not hypothetical. Without Iranian drone and missile transfers, Russia’s ability to sustain certain strike campaigns in Ukraine would be materially degraded. Without heavily discounted Iranian oil shipments, China’s energy calculus shifts, particularly under sanctions pressure. Without Tehran’s funding pipelines, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis become far more constrained actors rather than semi-state militaries.
There is also precedent for preventive action against nuclear programs. Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor (Operation Opera) was widely condemned at the time; decades later, most analysts agree it delayed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions. Likewise, Israel’s 2007 strike on Syria’s Al-Kibar reactor (Operation Orchard) prevented the Assad regime from developing a covert nuclear capability. Both operations were controversial in the moment and regarded as stabilizing in retrospect.
Preventing a hostile regime from acquiring nuclear capability has historically proven wiser than managing it after the fact.
Yes, regime change carries risk. So does allowing the world’s most aggressive revolutionary theocracy to entrench itself indefinitely while arming proxies from Beirut to Sana’a to Moscow. The status quo is not stable. It is violent by design.
If a regime that funds terrorism on three continents, arms Russia during a European war, and openly seeks nuclear weapons is dismantled, history is unlikely to judge that harshly.
It will likely judge it as overdue.
Does anybody can trust andnegotiate with USA?
Has this been argued?
Now I really wonder if those protests were indeed fueled and funded by Israel, because we have seen videos of mosques being burned down by protestors, which is strange for Shia Muslim country, even if they don't like their government
How biased is the press? Iran slaughters 36k people in a week and... crickets. Israel refuses to let its hostages die while Hamas hides out in hospitals and schools and the world is against Israel not Iran.
>Trump urges Iranians to keep protesting, saying 'help is on its way'
stuff if pretty relevant.
Well, if the Chinese are smart, they will capitalize on this opportunity. They can prop up the Iranian regime with intelligence, weapons, and financial support the same way US & EU prop up Ukraine. The purpose would be to bleed US munitions stocks even faster than they already are, as well as increase attritional losses in platforms and personnel. China's stranglehold on rare earths and their export restrictions are making it more difficult for the US to restore its weapons stockpile. I'm sure China can crunch some numbers to identify the point of maximum weakness if the US is forced to sustain an anti-Iran air and naval campaign 30/60/90+ days. Then Xi can try to overlap that window of weakness with one of the two invasion windows against Taiwan (mostly due to weather in the Taiwan Strait). I don't think the PLA is dumb enough to try a full amphibious assault, but they could definitely initiate their blockade then.
The regime may be horrific, but the only route out was through supporting and encoraging change and opening up and progressive forces.
It's a country with 90 million people, and many groups and external influences. Could end up like Iraq.
and it's Europe that will experince the political chaos as result of pressure from refugees, not the US.
So you don't care about people forced to live under IRGC rule and their desire to export their Islamic ideals elsewhere?
Almost as amazing for world peace as when the US overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime and gave birth to the Islamic State.
Not a meaningful supplier anymore, Russia just took the designs and onshored the manufacturing.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/02/10/how-iran-gained-the-ab...
If China didn't anticipate the US attacking Iran after Maduro was deposed and the resulting impacts on their oil supplies, then they are asleep at the wheel.
I’ve always felt the US won trust and respect with these characteristics. It looks like we are now shifting strategy and I wonder where this will lead to.
Pre-emptive violence; not even justified with a narrative of escalating threat.
Bleak for anybody who knows their history.
So I don't think Israel has anything to fear there.
To be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that's why we're bombing Iran today. Just pointing out a data point supporting your hypothesis.
Neither the current administration nor Israel are particularly popular with the US public today, and those are correlated in that Israel has particularly lost support from Democrats and Independents in the US, suggesting that a change in power (legislative or executive, and especially both) in the US government could very easily spell much less favorable US policy toward Israel.
I mean, it is a pretty convenient distraction from the epstein files tho, so win-win for Trump/Netanyahu
I knew it was foolish, but I really was somewhat hopeful that the American regime’s stated doctrinal shift was true and they really were going to fuck right off from the world stage, even just a little. Naturally, we suffer the opposite.
“The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”
If you are in the US, pray that you are never weak.
You might've missed it but the "department of defense" is now "department of war'.
2. Islamists massacred them.
3. Trump said "help is on its way" ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/13/trump-promises... )
4. Now is the help.
---
Trump also said that when he says things he means them, unlike Obama's red lines in Syria (his words). When he said that, it was pretty clear he couldn't back off of attacking Iran.
I assume it took so long because he's going for regime change, not just a few bombings. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it took the US 5 months to launch a counter-invasion (mostly because of coalition building).
He says all sorts of things. Remember when Iran's nuclear facilities were "obliterated" and any "suggestions otherwise are fake news"? https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-nears-deal-buy-supe...
Also, the US News media silence on this is noteworthy.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=reuters+cm-302+missile&ia=w...
I think Trump would taco.
A carrier is fair game, especially when you shoot first.
There wouldn't be a coalition with half of Europe. Because of bridges burned.
What could threaten US carries are China’s DF-21D/26D – anti-ship ballistic missiles with reported ranges of > 2000km – and Iran is not getting them
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-carrier-killer...
It hurts my heart to see Americans destroying them (and the thousands of lifes).
The US is also doing this albeit fewer people.
Presumably, what he meant was 'No, new wars!'
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
Wow.
That's an interesting scope of collateral damage.
At this point, the pizza index is another vector of (dis)information managed by the Pentagon.
What a headline. Anybody else have this on their election day bingo card?
Midterms should be a blood bath though, right? Right? (insert Anakin meme).
1. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-rolls-the-dice-o...
people in the Middle East will literally starve
and china will run out of fuel - though they've gone mostly electric
Who on earth told you this?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Iran has sophisticated influence operations and will likely flood social media with disinformation designed to deepen political divisions and erode trust in institutions.
This advice serves even if you don’t believe the above. Be deeply skeptical of all viral content in the coming days and weeks, especially anything designed to change your opinions, or provoke outrage/fear. Verify before sharing. Expect deepfakes. Stick to primary sources when possible.
Israel and the US have already shown their cards in Syria. It is not peace they are after, it is regional domination.
Russia-Ukraine war is 1M+ combat casualties deep and is nowhere near finished. You are out of touch.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine, an area three times larger than the country I live in (the Netherlands).
I wish... But estimates say between 230,000 and 468,500 dead orcs.
Casulties, not deaths.
Why do we never learn from history?
bombing of: -N.Vietnam -Germany -Serbia -Sudan -Tunisia -England
Exception:
-Japan
That is not to say bombing doesn't have its uses in war. The bombing of the oilfields of Ploesti in Romania severely damaged the German war machine. But it took Russian boots on the ground in Berlin to effect a German surrender.
>The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission
Very foreboding.
And they will again appear weak and incapable, unable to help their allies
As for the nuclear threat, literally Iran said it was going to destroy Israel to the point it had a massive countdown clock in Tehran until Israel blew it up, so meh. If I was on the receiving end of that threat I'd make it a policy to respond to it, escalation or not. I make no claims of the accuracy of the threats past IAEA being unable to verify they aren't enriching stuff.
Doubt it'll escalate into WW3. The only other powers involved are Russia, who are totally hands tied with Ukraine if they like it or not and China is only interested keeping what's left in its sphere of influence later through their outreach initiatives. I suspect most Middle Eastern countries will be quite happy about this conflict as they have persistent problems with Iran as well from the Houthis, Hezbollah and tens of other factions. They won't want to say anything though in case their own citizens turn on them.
The cringeworthy thing is how the US gov are communicating this and that does the operation a lot of damage. It's really quite terrible. Sounds like it was written by a bunch of 9 year olds after too many sugary drinks. Urgh.
Thats because its not written for you and I. Its written for people who struggle to communicate at an adult level, which is a shockingly large portion of the US.
"Khamenei's body has been found and he is confirmed dead, Israeli official says"
<https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-crisis-live-explosions-te...>
Times of Israel: <https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-february-28-2026/>
Maybe she shouldve done that, but you can see why she didn't.
Then, there's no hope for America. Why bother running a candidate? Waste of money that could be spent on local elections.
The reality is, Kamala could have won that election. Quite easily as well:
1. Don't send bill Clinton to Dearborn to lecture people on how it's ok to bomb Palestine actually
2. Don't try to pivot right on immigration, instead turn hard left: argue for citizenship for all undocumented immigrants with no criminal history
3. Ignore all culture war issues, focus on affordability and nothing else. Promise to raise taxes for the rich, end subsidies for oil and gas companies, and stop sending billions to Israel and other American imperialist vassals
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Over 30% of Biden 2020 voters said arming genocide was going to affect their vote.
That's BIDEN VOTERS.
80% of Democrats wanted an arms embargo.
Arming Israel meant giving up millions of votes in swing states, in an election that was lost by extremely slim margins in those states.
And before you ask, it was also clear from polling that ending support to Israel would have cost nearly zero votes from her base.
And the reason the Harris campaign didn't know this is because they didn't want to know. Campaign staffers were instructed to mark anyone who raised Gaza as "no response". Attendees of the DNC conventions were literally plugging their ears and shielding their eyes from protests, or even laughing about them.
(I wouldn't support it any more in that case, but I would be more inclined to believe that its motivation might actually have anything to do with "Islamic rule".)
There is an absolute moral justification for this war. Saying that US is the aggressor here is an absolute revisionism of history. Let us not pretend that Islamic Republic minded its own business since its inception, and suddenly the US and Israel decided to wage war on it.
One example of IR's aggression is Beirut bombing in 1983 sponsored and planned by IR.
> Islamic Republic minded its own business since its inception
That's a straw man argument since nobody claimed that.
Just to anticipate another weak argument that is a non-starter, a war of aggression is also illegal if it is started under the pretense of caring about a human rights situation. This kind of justification is quite common anyway. For the same reason, preventive wars are also prohibited and immoral. Not even you want to live in a world where such wars are common, you're more likely merely arguing from the perspective of someone whose country you believe to be in a position of strength.
1. an under-reported fact pertaining to matters of military strategy. 2. The lack of coverage in the US News Media
BTW, you're also presumptuous AND mistaken about my nationality. As if nationality is a indicator or in your case a guarantee of a person's ideology.
I take that back, Trump doesn't believe in anything but himself, but he's surrounded himself in a blanket of Christian nationalists.
Trump has said numerous times he’s going to run a third time and there’s no indication the Supreme Court has any ability to stop him.
We’ll see how democracy holds up when people intentionally are derelict in their duties.
The whole of Europe is affected, it might seem contained only if you live very far away. Every European country is affected in one way or another.
It's not a stalemate if Ukraine ends up losing 30% of its territory. That's Russian victory.
Russian goals were:
- Quick decapitation - fail
- Change of government - fail
- Prove that majority of Ukrainians are phone Russians and the moment greater Russia comes everyone will see that Ukraine is not a real state - fail
- Make second Belarus out of Ukraine - fail
- Stop NATO enlargement, Finland and Sweden joined NATO essentially doubling border with NATO - fail
- Dissuade Ukraine from joining EU and make it pro Russian first - fail
- Prove that Russia is a great military power on par with US that can topple regimes at will - fail
- Make Russia strategically independent- fail, Russia is now completely dependent on China
- Destabilize EU - fail, Europe is united like never under US/Russia/China threat
This war will enter history as one of the worst blunders.
I'd call that both sides losing. Russia certainly did not achieve its geopolitical goals with that outcome.
Iran and Russia have various partnership agreements, but are not allies. And Russia has already demonstrated that it doesn't support what are, on paper, close allies in the CSTO, so not defending a non-ally strategic partner really doesn't move the needle on their credibility.
Normal people distinguish between Israel and Jews and call themselves antizionists. It's Zionists who blur the distinction.
There are several countries throughout history where the citizens have been absolutely obsessed with their own race and considered the crusader state to be the sole representative of it. It never ended well.
Most of the opponents of Israel and its policies in the US are either anti-Zionists who are not and do not identify as anti-Semites, or people who don't even identify as anti-Zionists just opponents of Israeli policy. And many in both groups are Jewish themselves.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/24/mapping-russian-att...
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
The world needs leaders that belive in Peace and freedom. The world and Iran are much much better without dictators like Khomenei. Especially for an "average Iranian".
Which they did just start to do.
Additional context: the comment above me stated 2m people have emigrated from Russia to Israel it’s more correct to say that they have emigrated from the Soviet Union
If the Dems caved to that they would've alienated 10 voters for every 1 student that might show up at the polls if it doesn't rain.
> student that might show up at the polls if it doesn't rain
Please don't do that. Your view of other people is quite sad.
(Crazy idea, maybe the people shouldn’t be left in the dark about their government’s war plans by having a deliberate legislative body debate and vote on it)
Can you clarify the "moral point of view", please?
> This is not even worth a discussion.
How do you know without a discussion that you are right?
> The fact that you need cite a terrorist attack from 1983 to justify an illegal war of aggression in 2026 instigated by a US president without Congressional oversight speaks volumes.
This is a straw man you just made. The 1983 event is to show that Iran was in forever war with the US through either 3rd parties or directly on the territories of other states.
> That's a straw man argument since nobody claimed that.
Now it seems we are in a strange situation. If it is a war of aggression by the US, the implication is that Iran was not aggressive towards US. But we know it is not true. So, which is it?
Also, how would congress authorization make US non-aggressor here?
The moral point of view is that a war of aggression violates the sovereignty of the people in the attacked country. The aggressor country's officials are not elected by the people of the defending country, nor do they in any other way represent the people of that country. They have no right to decide the fate of the people in another country.
> How do you know without a discussion that you are right?
I'm reasonably certain about that because I've studied philosophy and worked in ethics, though not specifically on any issues concerning international rights. I'm also overall a well-educated person with an intact sense of justice.
> This is a straw man you just made. The 1983 event is to show that Iran was in forever war with the US through either 3rd parties or directly on the territories of other states.
No it's not a straw man. You came up with the 1983 event, not me. It would have been a straw man argument if I suddenly had come up with that. My reply to your position is that there are no "forever wars" - this category does not exist in international right and obviously makes no sense. Once you start justifying your attacks with a "forever war" you're in the realm of historical justifications, and these are principally wrong. Why? Because you can find some historical justification for just about any war you want to start. The whole world would be constantly at war if historical justifications were used and deemed acceptable. They are not acceptable.
> Now it seems we are in a strange situation. If it is a war of aggression by the US, the implication is that Iran was not aggressive towards US. But we know it is not true. So, which is it?
I believe you're trolling. In any case, that is not the implication. Not every act of aggression is an act of war. However, the US military has just started a widespread bombing campaign, and that is an act of war. The US is the aggressor not just from an international rights point of view, they're the aggressor as evidenced by the speech of the US President.
> Also, how would congress authorization make US non-aggressor here?
Not at all, and I didn't say that.
Interesting. So, US intervention in WW2 was not moral? Germans did not consent.
> I know that because I've studied philosophy and worked in ethics, though not specifically on any issues concerning international rights. I'm also overall a well-educated person with an intact sense of justice.
And? So, you cannot be mistaken?
> Because you can find some historical justification for just about any war you want to start. The whole world would be constantly at war if historical justifications were used and deemed acceptable. They are not acceptable.
Great. Then no war is acceptable. Any action that is not yet take is in the past, and thus historical. Why respond?
You see, thinking in absolutes will take you only this far. The hardest issues to reason about are in the gray area, where you have to make a judgement call because it is not a clear cut issue. Unlike you, I realize that it's not a simple "aggression" but rather way more complicated issue.
> I believe you're trolling.
I am not. I am having an opposing point of view to yours. However, I am not basing my argument on my personal qualities as the most moral person in the world. I am trying to use universal values and reasoning.
However, looking at how the US president has abused power, silenced those who are against the draft dodging crybaby and his league of human trafficking millionaires, I feel this is yet another try to move focus from US domestic probs to something else. I see no honesty or greater reason for this attack or justification for it. While I'm no fan of Iran's autocratic regime, US is slipping towards into being one, as well.
US president has now active war operations in Venezuela, soon lightning the Cuba situation on fire as well, not to forget planning to take Greenland and Canada, too.
That's honestly not bad for the president of peace. Nobel committee should take a look at nominating this guy for a peace prize
I'm baffled at the lack of calls to boycott the Fifa world cup in US.
And at the double standards applied to Russians and Israelis in their wars of aggression.
I guess Israel can play the "October 7th" card at least which was an insane horror.
Since you are still a democracy find those people who make your policy decisions. It's not that yellow man.
Genuine question: who put Iran in their policy portfolio?
All of them are, even those that haven't had a show on TV.
There’s more to it than Trump being a TV show personality. Far too complex and insidious than a simple quip.
Of course, I agree that Trump is worse because, by removing the mask of civility and attacking others without first bothering to create propaganda and a narrative about how it is for the greater good and justice, he made the plundering and crimes faster and more efficient.
Whether you think the current targets are legitimate or not, the fact that the U.S. is going to war without seeking any democratic approval anymore is deeply troubling.
My point is, Ukraine war and the way it evolved shows that not having nukes is a bad position.
Not six months ago, Trump launched a strike that "completely obliterated" Iran's ability to obtain nukes. And then, either because he has the memory of a goldfish, or thinks that we do (both are somewhat true), he pulled out "a week away", again, at the SOTU. "We must attack Iran to destroy what I told you we destroyed last year."
Iran may be planning to do so. But this is just a boogeyman being used (again) by Israel and the US.
I would argue that funding Axis of Resistance from Hezbollah to Houthis is aggression too. Let’s not pretend that IR minded their own business, and suddenly was under attack.
And since then Iran has always been in US and Israeli crossfire.
You also need to try to understand their point of view.
There's no doubt Iran has promoted armed resistance and terrorism, don't get me wrong, but ask yourself how much of this is about their own safety and defence. It's not 0%, far from it.
Let's not pretend Iran is innocent please. Or Hamas either.
To be fair, this is the new standard. Russia has promulgated it through its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. China with Tibet and Taiwan. America with Iraq, Venezuela and Iran. The old rules-based international order is dead, and with it Pax Americana.
At most that was a couple of decades, it's not like that's an ancient status quo.
What do you mean? China has bought Tibet from the British. And what have they done with Taiwan?
It usually does. The argument here is about the proportion of the response.
If October 7th is an "insane horror", what words will suffice to describe the decades of far worse crimes committed by Israel?
Considering the scale of suffering caused by this conflict, October 7th was just a small blip.
Does your moral account provide some justificatory, non-antisemitic framework based on colonialism or oppression that allows us to sidestep the issues with Gazans’ support of Jihad, other extremist doctrines, and the extermination of Jews?
It’s kind of a rhetorical question, but it’s the least I would expect for someone to argue credibly about the morality of the conflict.
October 7th was the deadliest per capita terrorist attack since the Global Terrorism Database started recording in 1970 [1]. Globally, it's third on the all-time list (behind only 9/11 and one IS attack [1]. The confirmed death toll from Israeli social security data (not government press releases) is 1,139, which still makes it 31 times deadlier than the next worst attack in Israeli history [2][3].
You invoked scale. Those are the numbers. They don't say what you wanted them to say.
And for the record: one atrocity not excusing another cuts both ways. Nobody here argued otherwise. What was actually said (by the person you're replying to) is that you cannot use scale as your framework whilst hand-waving away the single largest data point in the argument.
If you mean the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, or the current death toll in Gaza — those are serious. But "decades of far worse crimes" doing the work of making October 7th a "small blip" doesn't follow. You can have a long ledger of serious grievances and still recognise that one morning where 1,139 people were massacred (including at a music festival, in kibbutz bedrooms, in bomb shelters) was not a blip. It was the deadliest single terrorist attack per capita since records began.
There is no moral argument for October 7th, and the reaction is disproportionate and unjustifiable - but inevitable. We should all be so unlucky to have neighbours like those, and nobody knows how we would all act if we did.
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...
[3] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
I have the opinion that modern world history is mostly shaped around each countries/population traumas that echo through society till today.
E.g. the biggest trauma of Ukrainians aren't even the events that are playing recently, but the Holodomor that happened 100 years ago. On the other hand the biggest trauma on Russian side is still the German invasion and war of annihilation happened during the second world war. As both sides see themselves as the victims and see the other side as the aggressor (or collaborator) and none has ever taken a step back to recognize their actions, they simply cannot communicate.
The biggest trauma of China is the century of humiliation where western powers and Japan went above and beyond any decency in their actions. Thus, Chinese society and leadership is all about never being dictated conditions and terms by foreign powers. They see themselves as victims of events that they don't want to see ever again.
The jewish Israeli population biggest trauma are centuries if not millenia of animosity, racism and violence coming from any side, last but definitely not least the Holocaust. Thus Israel is all about security at all costs, even if it means bending any sign of human decency. Again, they see themselves as victims and their actions will always go in that direction.
Sadly many parts of the world, many countries, many societies, are simply too scarred and unable to take a step back from the victim mentality and recognize their own actions.
Israelis are unable to recognize they are Goliath and not David from the longest time, they are unable and unwilling to say sorry, the last Israeli leader that tried, got assassinated by one of his own.
The arabic/muslim population in the area too see themselves as victims of the post world war 2 events, and they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events, including modern ones where they had to survive against hostile Arab coalitions aimed to annihilate them.
So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.
Europe is to blame, according to him.
Just a quick reminder, that Iranian and Hamas policy towards Israel is extermination. Palestine was never recognized by Israel or USA. Israel is not recognized by Iran.
So tell me, what parallels do you see between these conflicts? Human misery and destruction is hardly a common ground, and even in that, scale is incomparable.
What replaced Sadaam was the US, and that went horribly for everyone.
Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
I still can't believe we have to fight Israel's war for them. First the Iraq war and now the Iran war.
Jewish people lived there for the past two thousands years. Hebron massacre by Arabs happened in 1929.
> It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.
I think they have bomb shelters to save their civilians from bombs.
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.
Interesting how you are totally fine with murder of civilians as long as they are the "right" kind of civilians.
It's the Middle East. The birthplace of civilisation. Everyone can legitimately claim everyone else started every conflict in the region because war in Mesopotamia and the Levant literally predates history.
At the end of the day I believe in the primacy of the living. Crimes committed by and against those alive today are infinitely more imporant than those committed by and against their ancestors. I've seen folks take this shit back to King Herod and the Parthians, and it's not a bad historical argument. (The Romans intervened.) It's practically counterproductive, however, inasmuch as focussing on blame versus harm reduction and prevention is counterproductive in any conflict resolution.
One of the separations between the rich and peaceful and the poor and permanently warring is in capacities to forgive. Japan wouldn't be a better place if they committed terrorist attacks against their American occupiers, or decided that they needed blood for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And Americans wouldn't be happier if we decided to lob a nuke at the British in WWII for burning down our White House in the War of 1812. (France didn't ultimately profit from the Treaty of Versailles.)
> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when
No. Don't do this to yourself. I get the temptation. But it is the path to becoming a monster. October 7 was an insane horror. So were other things. Atrocities aren't signed; they don't cancel out, just accumulate.
The islamic republic of Iran has been slaughtering tens of thousands of peaceful protesters who don't want to live under sharia laws anymore. Hunting wounded in hospitals and executing them.
It's obvious there's a movement in Iran that tries to topple the islamist regime. In my city, in the EU, I see cars with iranian flags and I've seen iranian in exile call for the international community to do targetted strikes.
I'm not defending the strikes but let's not make it sound like the US is launching nukes on peaceful monks in Tibet either: we're talking about evil islamist regime that slaughtered tens of thousands of unarmed people a few weeks ago.
He could drop a nuke on Greenland tomorrow and they’d probably say they don’t want the sport to be tangled in political disagreements and if anything the World Cup can help everyone heal.
Of course, Netanyahu could counter those rumors by establishing a state commission if inquiry, but instead he fights tooth and nail to prevent this from happening...
When the other side is led by what you can easily sell to the world as terrorists, you're by default the good guys.
Sure, some incompetent russian fsb officer who got his place thanks to nepotism may miss that, but mosad, on border with one's mortal enemy? Give me a break, there is 0 logic and knowledge of the involved parties in such thinking.
But its expected, say soviet union went to great lengths to make state terror official and legal, justified and all by th books. Not sure for whom since all knew what chaotic terror was happening all the time and there was often no logic in who was next, but the face of the regime needed to have everything straight and square.
Anyway, those who actually care about the topic understand it well, its not some superbly hidden scheming bur rather facts in plain sight. The rest of folks simply don't care
Obviously, it’s the same stupidity that “allowed” the 7th of October attacks to happen. These people are way too scared and hateful of Palestinians to conspire with them like this. They allowed it to happen through sheer incompetence. They just let their guard down, quite literally.
If they could actually cooperate well enough to work together on something like the 7th of October of attacks, which were under active planning for at least two years and involved thousands of highly trained men, don’t you think they’d be able to cooperate on something positive too?
On the one hand, Trump is awful for the USA, and the world.
On the other hand, there is a possibility that the freedom-wanting citizens of Iran finally have a slight chance of achieving their goal.
The chance of something truly positive happening seems low. However, as someone who has, for years, watched what happens in Iran via the lens of https://old.reddit.com/r/newiran, I am allowing myself the slightest amount of hope. Iranian people deserve it.
Of course, there is a large chance of this blowing up into something really bad for everyone.
edit: This Ukrainian is currently live streaming with OSINT, and his takes align with many of my actual realist thoughts:
How is he guaranteeing immunity to members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard if they do nothing? Likewise, if he's telling the general Iranian public to simultaneously rise up and stay home, how does he plan to manage the hoped-for happy ending? In the event they succeed and topple the regime, are they just going to let bygones be bygones with the suddenly displaced IRGC while also giving Trump the keys to their treasury?
Trump said in the State of the Union [0]:
> in just over the past couple of months with the protests they've killed at least 32000 protestors
And just moments ago Trump says 'tens of thousands' [1]
Is this confirmed or conjecture?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l-iErpskb8&t=1h21m20s
[1] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2027651077865157033
Is that the same program that was totally obliterated in June 2025 according to Trump?
"Obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before"?
And just days ago it was discovered that documents involving FBI investigations into allegations by one or more victims against Epstein and Trump were not released by the DOJ.[2]
I trust Trump still has time to testify to Congress about his connections to Epstein like others have been doing.
Meanwhile yesterday:
>>>the U.S. designated Iran as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” and demanded that the country release any Americans in its detention.[3]
You just can't make this shit up.
1: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/trump-epstein-files-jamie-r...
2. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-t...
3. https://au.news.yahoo.com/us-designates-iran-state-sponsor-0...
Nor do I even know how to begin to grasp the enablement displayed by Europe as a whole. People constantly cite China’s “human rights abuses” (which seem to pale in comparison to all this) and rightly so, but continue to enable this blood thirsty and power hungry tag team to indulge in flagrant abuses of international law and general morality.
This is a sad day for level headed and empathetic humans across the globe. At which point do we accept that WW3 began quite a while ago? Because it sure as shit did.
Edit: fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but it’s my truth.
Iran has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and pragmatism throughout these aggressions on their sovereignty, starting with Israel’s strike on their consulate in Damascus.
I had added it to my `motd`; it would give me a chuckle every time I logged in.
One of the cookies I recall:
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day. [1]
And that's what I think of when I see this absurd new war.
- David LLoyd George, c.1916
The first wars were fought between tribes and then later between kingddoms for power/minor differences and trying to increase influence and alliances. Religion and race and many other discriminating factors are used for both sides to get support of the people, the people who are actually gonna carry the rifle and risk their lives and lose it, this drives the next war to redeem the losses of the first one, to take revenge.
This then creates a community which dislikes the other community and now we are here.
We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. … If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.
- Bertrand Russel in Skeptical Essays.
Humanity has had a history written with bloodshed but the problem right now seems to me that we don't know how to write future, we lack a vision for other prospects, it seems to me that we jump into the newest Hype on the block and its all so wishy-washy. Contrary to people saying its a western issue, I think its an whole world issue, its just that the west is particularly impacted by it.
Has there been a desensitization in things in recent years?
I know of atleast one leader (King Kaniska) who fought for land (Modern day Orrisa) and won and then saw the bloodshed and screams on the ground and decided to not repeat it and I think he spent later of his life trying to promote peace.
I am sure that there must be other leaders in the history of past as well but perhaps its the problem of history as well which can sometimes glorify wars.
I think the biggest problem right now is being noise. We have created machines so large that humans have lost dignity and are treated unfairly at scale in terms of Renting places at scale owned by shell companies who'd rather have it empty than give you affordable housing. Prices seem to be increasing and I don't think modern social media helps in giving people dignity quite the opposite at times and it's very likely someone is reading this who may have contributed to making the machine.
With this being a political thread, I see comments from both sides[0], I don't think I have too much to add politically to the discussion but perhaps I just wanted to treat out that its best we treat each other with dignity in this thread and in general because I do believe that's the only thing we can do which can bring change. It's gonna be extremely hard for people to treat others with dignity while taking sides which talk about wars killing people, but I don't know what else to say. Iranian censorship for its people but I am not sure if the current idea of America brings me thinking of liberation. One can wish for pure democracies in such regions but its gonna be extremely hard and even grass-roots movements of these can be shut down by intrusive forces whether foreign or govt itself and given that the region is extremely shaky relying on oil which can be extracted from ground leading to a less dependence on people themselves for Iranian govt.s being the reason why they can be so censoring. They have shown enough power to fight massive protests but as I said earlier, the current picture of America don't exactly give me the idea of bringing pure democracy in the region either.
My prayers to the Iranian people who are stuck between a rock and tough spot.
(there are no sides, its a circle, a circle of people who start wars and the people who fight wars)
I was quite surprised to see it that low... and also to find it is inaccessible for trading if a US national. Just looking at the platform it seems predominantly US driven so I gather many people are willfully attempting to breach the ToS (and probably lie to the IRS) when using it...
Trump speaks like a 4th grader and it is extremely effective.
The policies on the left tend to have a lot more nuance, which is much harder to fit on a hat.
Nothing like this is "officially discussed in Israel", unless you mean "repeatedly officially denied".
it would be very bad to be Cuba right now
considering when the midterms are and about how long it would take afterwards to move all the ships
I mean why would he stop with Iran?
All of the US is now a "constitution-free zone"
Yesterday Trump proposed that the US take over Cuba. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-...
Congress declares War.
Even Bush sought out Congressional approval and had a resolution passed before invading Iraq.
These guys are speed running the fascist playbook. Disregarding laws is one step.
Supreme court does not, so why should random Americans?
It is not like the high but malleable ideals in it mattered. Its only use is to be able to claim in abstract "we have these freedoms and protection" while the court system renders them void in practice.
50%+ have below sixth grade reading comprehension
October 7 happened under a Democratic president and continued essentially unchanged under Trump. Biden consistently lied about "red lines" and seeing a ceasefire [1].
The problem here isn't one party or one persident, it's America's commitment to imperialism, of which Iran is just one aspect. Since WW2 especially there has been so much regime change done or aided by the US as well as military action, it has it's own Wikipedia page [2].
And what did Kamala Harris promise to change about Biden's Middle East policy? Absolutely nothing [3]. It's a big part of why she lost and the DNC don't want to admit that so they're trying to cover up the 2024 autopsy [4].
Don't fool yourself into thinking anything would be different under a Kamala Harris administration.
[1]: https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/the-biden-admin...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/8/biden-vs-harris-...
[4]: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...
Iran is as imperialistic if not more. Why you are against US "imperialism" but for Islamic Republic's one?
But one the whole like precedents of the Trump Administration, was that we were going to ignore foreign entanglements, even if they could be perceived as being in our interests.
It’s wild to me how much Trump seems like Bush 2.0 when I think Trump was something of a reaction to Bush 1.0.
I did not not notice any opinions, one way or the other, from other American politicians. Correct me if I’m wrong ( with link, of course. )
Remind us of Ukrainian rocket attacks on Russian cities, that provoked Ruso-Ukrainian war.
You can't not know all of this, so you're either a hamas/russian shill or a useful idiot.
More than twice as many people died in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria than on October 7th.
My regard is thus: lobs less than half an intercontinental ballistic roll of paper towels at Tel Aviv
That's the policy being followed here. If you remember back a few weeks, Iran killed likely 30,000 of its own citizens. On top of that, they will not negotiate about medium and short-range missiles or stopping of nuclear production.
A power like that that happily goes after it's neighbors, directly or indirectly is a threat to everyone.
Is the US a threat because of its actions towards Venezuela?
There have been many arguments that the US' support of Israel goes against US interests [2], but that really makes no sense. It's not just Trump who has to be convinced to start a war for Israel, it's the entire defense establishment in the US.
And also in Israel. If fighting half a dozen wars all at once was really that bad for Israel, surely, someone would have put a stop in it.
Surely.
_____________
[1] Got that term from J. Mearsheimer, if you were wondering.
[2] Particularly the Tucker Carlson - Judge Napolitano - Col. Daniel Davies continuum of mostly conservative podcast hosts. Or those are the ones I follow closely anyway. They're all convinced it's all "because of the lobby".
I suspect a fourth column.
Seriously, I'm constantly amazed by how oblivious some Americans are. You got it all backwards.
Even if Iran gets 500 years to build out a proper technological economy, there's no universe where they're a threat to the US. All the players the US has invaded the Middle East to fight don't constitute a threat to Joe in Alabama. It's all about weakening potential threats to leave Israel as the only extant regional power, no matter the costs to American credibility, military stockpiles, finances ($10t so far, according to Brown University Costs of War).
The overton Window has shifted and this question will not go away.
But yes, i do think sometimes war can be a net positive for civilians over the alternative in the long term. Not often, but sometimes.
Get in touch with your local Iranian community. You’d be surprised how much they’re cheering the bombing on.
You might be surprised that people inside Tehran are shouting “get the mullahs out” and cheering us on.
I do think its on the higher end though as i dont think they would have bothered with a costly extended internet blackout if the number was small.
If this turns into a full-scale war or a civil war breaks out, we are looking at 1 million Iranian deaths conservatively speaking. Just look at happened at every single foreign intervention in the region - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia. How does a million dead Iranians help them? How does it help the Americans, and the world if oil infrastructures or shipping lanes are targeted ? How does it help the region or Europe when millions of refugees flood out, and armouries are broken open and weapons and insurgents flood the region (like it did with Iraq and Libya)? It helps Israel greatly though, since they take out their arch nemesis, their conventional military and the nuclear program. And they think can shield themselves from the chaos they create around them.
This sums it all up succinctly. Emphasis on the “hegemonic ambitions” part.
To wit, after Maduro was kidnapped and the exact same regime kept in place (minus selling oil to Cuba), and Trump openly said it was to control the oil, most of the reactions were pretending we live in a universe where the US does these things to spread democracy.
There were lots of reasons to do this. The massacre of 40k citizens opened the door.
Kinda like how Al Capone got busted on tax evasion? Capisci? Maybe no.
The world already know this. Having an agreement with the USA is a lot like having an agreement with Darth Vader. The terms of the deal can be altered unexpectedly at any time.
That doesn't mean that such agreements are worthless. They can still be of value to the counties making them. It is just that those countries have to take into account the unreliability of the entity they are making the deal with. Deals with the USA involve a lot of forecasting.
You don't go and rename a whole federal department to 'Department of War' when you don't intend to get into wars.
1. The U.S. and Iran had already negotiated and signed a nuclear agreement between our countries but Trump reneged on the already-negotiated agreement.
2. Trump claimed that his previous attacks on Iran within the last year “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before” - both direct Trump quotes. Trump was quite clear that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed like nothing had ever been destroyed before.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-...
They could have named the DOD the "Department Of Peace", instead they called it the "Department Of War", showing their true face and trajectory.
At this point it is really the people of the US to rise up and implement a Regime Change from within to change things for the better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_United_States_trea...
Yes. But do not think that the current regime in Iran is the one that overthrew the Shah. The current regime is the one that butchered and jailed the people who overthrew the Shah. It is of a less known fact, but it is the case.
> You also need to try to understand their point of view.
Sure. Every (even irrational) player has a point of view. Moreover, we can even try and understand it. However, it does not mean that we should not act.
1. The US "intervention" in WW2 was fully justified because the US was attacked. It's also justified to help another country that is attacked, for example the US campaign against Iraq during the First Gulf war was justified. Both were defensive actions, not wars of aggression. Preventive wars are also wars of aggression, though, and classified as such by international law. There are fairly direct equivalents of all of this in regular penal law.
2. I never claimed I cannot be mistaken. It's best to focus on arguments, not persons.
> Great. Then no war is acceptable.
War has at least two sides (often more). A war of aggression is never acceptable. You've got that right. That's also how it's viewed in international law. Defending against a war of aggression is always acceptable. Helping someone defend against a war of aggression is also acceptable. There is a third category, a military intervention by a broad alliance legitimized by some international body. That is in the "it depends" category but plays no role here. Now countries that start wars of aggression know all that and therefore often argue they're just defending themselves. I'm stating that this is a pretense and not a correct justification in this particular case of the US attacking Iran. I'm not planning to go into the details why this is the case, it is obvious enough anyway. Just to make this clear.
I have no comments about the rest of your comment, which, frankly speaking, to me mostly sounds like self-aggrandizing remarks. I was mostly referring to how established international law looks at the matter and your personal views interest me less. Have a good day!
Will there still be no possibility of ground deployments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war
The previous campaign lasted a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start. I'm not sure why anybody thinks it'll be different now or why Russia or China would bother going to war for Iran. That makes zero sense.
We did not move 1/3 of operational USAF capacity and 33% of our deployable Navy for limited strikes.
You can stop when you have no idea what you're talking about, you know.
Of course Russia or China won't go to war for Iran - nobody is saying that. They can get involved though, just as Europe is involved in Ukraine war.
One day later and they've doubled their predictions already.
> a whole 13 days and WW3 didn't start.
Also you moved the goalposts here. The quote was "no boots on the ground, over in two weeks."
That's a well debunked lie told by zionists for decades. Nobody cares anymore. Besides it's "israel" wiping palestine off the map.
> Let's not pretend Iran is innocent please. Or Hamas either.
Far more innocent than israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Square_Countdown_Clo...
The clock was programmed to count down from 8,411 days, corresponding to a 2015
statement by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who predicted that "Israel
won't exist in 25 years". He claimed in his statement that there will be nothing
left of the Jewish state by 2040. The statement was made in the aftermath of a
September 2015 nuclear deal that had a timeline of 25 years to complete. He
predicted that it would not take that long for Israel to cease existing.
Protesters annually chant "Death to Israel". The installation was part of a much
broader demonstration involving over a million participants, where anti-Israel
slogans and imagery were prominently featured.How can you debunk something that the officials of Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, and various Palestinian fractions were saying out in the open for years? Ddi you just make it disappear?
China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [1].
You may be thinking of Hong Kong, which the British invaded and annexed from the Qing dynasty [2] and then handed back to China in 1997 [3] under conditions that Beijing defaulted on in 2019 [4].
> what have they done with Taiwan?
Same as America has been doing with Greenland.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hong_Kong
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
No, I was thinking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Between_Great_Brita...
The way I understood this treaty was that the global powers in 1906 (Russia and Great Britain) accepted Tibet as part of China without the need for a war.
In the context of your comment, you say the US and Russia attack sovereign countries and you mention Tibet and Taiwan in the same sentence. Sorry but Taiwan has not been invaded by China, and Tibet was at the time internationally agreed as being part of China (not that I agree with that). Not the same ballpark sorry.
In a geopolitical context, the words and actions of the powerful are what count. And those words and actions currently point–uniformly–towards sovereign borders not being a red line.
Boots on the ground can happen at any time if Iran manages to either hit one of the thousands of US assets in the region or worse they resort to terrorism with a theatrical attack like 9/11 which ended up costing so many lives , money and freedoms ranging from TSA literally up your ass to the destruction of privacy online and offline…..and of course as we all know boots on the ground
To be fair, this is also explained by the Delcy Rodriguez strategy: the bastard you know trumps the bastard you don't. Israel could have become complacent thinking they had a deal with Hamas and, as long as they kept the money flowing, the Palestinians had no rational reason to attack. (Which they didn't. October 7 was a stupid move.)
Sure. The century-long peace following the Napoleonic Wars was also some decades.
Our default state, unfortunately, is war. But we sought to change that after the horrors of WWII (and the nuclear bomb), and it's worth nothing where those noble goals succeeded. It's sad that project is over. But something being sad doesn't mean it isn't true.
!!
https://www.ilgiornaleditalia.it/news/politica/765547/ddl-an...
Iran's theocratic regime just murdered tens of thousands of protestors, regularly organizes chants of "Death to America", calls the US "The Great Satan", sponsors terror organizations all around the region, has (through their Houthi proxies) cut off critical sea lanes in one of the most strategic areas, is very close to developing nuclear weapons (with enough HEU already to build maybe a dozen bombs), has extensive ballistic missile magazines and expertise, and is working on ICBMs explicitly to reach the US homeland.
But oh yeah, this is totally unprovoked and the US has no business attacking Iran. Right.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-stored-highly...
The IAEA estimates that Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to up to
60% before last year's Israeli-U.S. attacks - enough, if enriched further,
for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.
The agency and Western powers believe the bulk of that is still intact.
Washington wants Tehran to give it up.
The question is really whether negotiations were going on in good faith with the actual goal of realistic compromise.
None of us know that side, I would assume.
It was pretty clear the negotiations had stalled based on statements put out by Iranian officials.
This is especially false in Iran in relation to USA intervention, since both the democrats and the fundamentalists still remember how the USA & UK deposed their last democratic leaders and (re) installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, who both parts of Iranian society hate and remeber being oppressed by today.
But the clans are way, way weaker than they were when they did their coup against Mosaddegh, so it will be extremely expensive for the US to keep control this time.
The US then lied through their teeth to the security council about wanting to conduct a humanitarian operation and instead acted as the rebels' air force, helping them win and subsequently leaving the country in utter ruin.
Iranian officials publicly refused to give up their nuclear program, no need to trust the US here.
What's cosmetic about this?
And the DoW was the original name from 1789 to 1947.
Yet months of co-ordination and training between various disconnected groups / gangs / militias, was completely undetectable.
Issue is not lack of education among people, it is ideology they sign up to.
Hard to say. Under Obama we got the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
What's they're doing is both bad policy (IMHO) and bad politics. Why is it bad politics? Because this military action is deeply unpopular and you cannot outflank the Republican Party on the right about American imperialism. Remember when Kamala Harris promised the "most lethal" military? What does that mean? And why?
But hte other reason this is bad politics is for the reason you state: it cedes the political ground of being the "peace president" to Trump. Memories are short because he did exactly the same thing in 2015 eg [1][2] and again in 2020 eg [3]. The last one is particularly funny because Biden did exactly what Trump promised to do but the Trump still beat Biden over the head for it.
There's no consistency in any of this. Trump was never a peace president. We knew it was a lie at the time. We know it's a lie now. Nobody cares.
But when the supposed opposition party mirrors his policy positions and offers no resistance to anything that's happening, who are voters going to listen to? The guy who talks about peace, even though he's lying, or the guy who says nothing about peace and just thinks Trump should've consulted with Congress but nothing otherwise should change? Or, worse, sometimes Trump isn't being tough enough?
Then Senator Joe Biden in 1986 called Israel "the best $3 billion we make" and if Israel didn't exist we'd invent on to protect our interests [4] while Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State called Israel an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region.
The JCPOA was a rare W for Obama (who was otherwise the Deporter-in-Chief and the Drone King). Trump of course dismantled it at the behest of the Adelsons. Did Biden reinstate it? Of course not.
The best case for an establishment Democratic administration now is to do nothing while promising nothing and reversing nothing that ultimately brings in the next Trump, just as Biden/Harris did in 2024.
That's the long version of why I say there's no difference. In the short term there might be. Even that's debatable of course. But long term the ratchet effect only gets worse.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/donald-...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/donald-trump...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/08/donald-trump...
[4]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...
One of the reasons I didn’t support Trump because he was the America First non-interventionist. I’m lamenting the fact that Trump’s supporters who were betrayed. It’s Trump who’s the one who did nothing and will bring in more Democrats, or the other way around.
Spoken from the comfort of your cozy apartment, with the AC on, light music in the background and a drink in your hand.
Or perhaps there's still worse things we cannot imagine? With these people, one can never be too sure.
I have no special stake or knowledge of this, but Israel hasn't treated Gaza or Palestinians as their "mortal enemy"... more of a problematic-but-largely-contained source of rockets and hateful rhetoric, at least until 2023.
I've listened to podcasts discussing the Israel military. One thing that people need to realize is that the IDF and it's leaders are skewed incredibly young. The mandatory service paired with the fact that people often don't stay in service means that they have 30 year old colonels and 35 year old generals.
They don't have the sort of career and institution knowledge like the US military has.
Maybe trauma you are talking about it's just excuse to control opinion of voters and manufacture consent but under the hood its just all about power and being rich (not always but in many cases).
Take the Greeks (that's my people! Us!) and the Turkish. I guess people in the West don't remember this but the Israelis are not the only people in the Middle East who have a word that means "disaster" (Shoah, for the Israelis; Καταστροφή- Catastrophe for us), that when anyone says it everyone knows exactly which disaster is spoken of. They are not the only people who lost the land their ancestors inhabited for thousands of years (Ionia, for us Greeks), who lost their greatest city (Constantinople, the City), who lost their greatest temple that was turned into a Mosque (the Hagia Sophia). Us, Greeks, too, have suffered these ignominies at the hand of the Turkish. Our common history with the Turkish is one of war, destruction, violence and blood. So much blood.
Genocide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide Check. Ethnic cleansing? Check. Death marches through the deserts? Check, check, check.
And yet, since the Catastrophe, in 1922, we have been at peace with the Turkish, even through serious hot episodes in the Mediterrannean, like Cyprus. That's 100 years of peace, after 1500 years of history of war.
It can be done. The trauma can be overcome, if both sides agree to it. To quote none other than Moshe Dayan: if you want to make peace you talk to your enemies, not your friends.
Of course we can. People disagreeing with you doesn't mean they don't exist.
These are the Senate seats in play this cycle [1]. How many of those do you think would be flipped based on any foreign policy item?
If you're on this thread you pay attention to foreign policy. The notion that someone doesn't–not isn't informed, but literally doesn't to any degree–is almost more foreign than the strangest countries we read about. But the truth is most Americans have never ranked any foreign policy item as being in their top three issues since the Vietnam War.
We could change it if we wanted to. We don't because it's not personally pertinent or worse, it's boring. (And, I'd argue, because a lot of foreign-policy oriented activists are preaching for the choir versus trying to actually effect change.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
It is a lot easier to conclude peace if both adversaries have a plenty of "their own" land to live on and can sorta-kinda ignore each other while doing so.
I should also note that the proximity of the Greek islands to the Turkish coast has also caused friction over the years.
I don't see this any different to terrorism apologia (the trauma of 1mn dead in Iraq and another million in Afghanistan, for example). I guess, if the leaders wear suits & ties and hide behind the garb of democracy, then we should all understand why military they command commit crimes against humanity.
Every perpetrator of terrorism sees himself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation states.
The problem isn't the "trauma". The problem is the excuse.
> they are as well unable to recognize how scarred and traumatized is Israeli society from centuries of events
First, 400mn Arabs (or 2bn+ muslims) aren't a monolith or brainless zombies. Second, the "centuries of events" is just European guilt. Nothing to do with the Arab world.
> So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.
The sad reality (imo) about this truth is that the qualities needed to be a leader aren't empathy. There was a vid about it which went more into detail but When you observe leaders, you find that they are extremely weird and sometimes psychopathic.
To me it also feels like if a leader is emphatetic towards the other part, other leaders more extreme would spring up saying that he's an enemy from within or something equivalent to it.
The empathy of the leader is one of the most disregarded qualities. I would go so far as to say that leaders aren't even empathetic towards the general population of their own nations/community sometimes.
It's really sad but the Empathy you mention and cowardice can look the same to many & the Empathatic leader would get booted out of/not given a chance.
For example, within America itself, I feel like John mccain was a good guy and I would consider him empathetic in the sense that I remember seeing interviews of him saying that he and Obama just have some minor differences in policy making when there were people attending his rallies asking that they don't feel safe about Obama.
I am just gonna say that This leader of republican party was lost for what is now Donald Trump.
Oh I just watched the rally/interview again[0], when he said that you don't have to be scared of Obama, he was audibly booed by the public. (But also they clapped once when he said later in the campaign that Obama was decent person?)
It isn't impossible to have empathetic leaders but I do think that perhaps as a civilization, we would need to take class act/honesty/integrity more into account than we take in the current system which to me all across the world sometimes feel like picking the lesser evil/not-greater-good at times though I can only speak for myself.
Did you miss the whole “axis of resistance” funded and driven by Iran?
Just listen to their internal rhetoric, watch who they find and why, and it is clear. However, since it’s Trump who is bombing IR, people will defend the IR regardless of what the IR stands for.
Iranian officials made public statements refusing to give up their nuclear weapons program so they weren't negotiating in good faith either. Terrorists like the Iranian regime can never be allowed to have access to nuclear weapons for obvious reasons.
You do not enrich uranium to 60% like Iran was doing unless you have a nuclear weapons program.
But for some reason the Western world only sees the evil things Hamas does and handwaves IDF.
They're both evil.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o
Though I suppose you could say he's lying, it's staged etc. In the same way that the religious attribute every good thing to their god and every bad thing to their devil.
- Dutch
why are you lying
But 2016 was different because Trump was the first candidate in some time to run on something even vaguely flirting with being anti-war, as he actively called out the endless wars of the political establishment, and argued that America first should not involve us wasting our money bombing countries half-way around the world. It was a relatively weak position but even that was enough to get 13% of voters to declare foreign policy as their key issue, tied with immigration. And Trump ended up winning their vote by an 18 point margin.
Anti-war is one of the relatively large number of issues that Americans largely agree on, but the political establishment makes it impossible to vote for, because you'll never find a mainstream candidate running on a platform that aligns with public interest. So for instance 84% of Americans think that "the American military should be used only as a last resort", that Congressional approval should be required for military action, and so on. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
[2] - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/new-poll-shows-pub...
In general, yes. What fraction of Trump voters do you think would agree that Trump should face any consequences for bypassing the Congress?
Many Americans have a hero complex. Their national mythology post World War II includes them being the "good guys" against the "bad guys." That mythology needs a bad guy.
But then, history shows this sort always do.
Bombing of US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 was funded, and organized by Iran. Just take half day off, and read a bit on the role of Islamic Republic in Middle East in the past 40 years. I guarantee your stance of "US attacked first" will change to the "unclear" at the least.
This kind of thinking won't get you very far and won't ensure peace in the region.
That's for sure.
The Lebanese Muslims at the time were furious that the Sixth Fleet was constantly shelling Shouf. At the time the Phalangists, with Israeli help, had recently murdered 3500 women and children at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
There were and are plenty of grievances to go around in Lebanon.
Lebanese muslims are not a monolith. Shia and Sunni have very different opinions on things, and the 1983 barracks bombing was not done by the sunnis.
Anyway, what I am trying to say is that treating war with Islamic Republic today as some sort of consequence of the June 2025 is a mistake.
I did not say that Iran started its war in the shadows with US in 1983, I just showed that the scope of the conflict is not limited to the past two years.
Anyway this is missing the wood for the trees. The point is, the uniparty very much exists, despite the downvotes. Foreign policy, bailing out banks, bowing down to the military industrial complex are very much remarkably consistent uniparty positions.
Yeah, I agree that was probably a bad idea, doesn't make what I stated above any less true.
> 2. Trump claimed that his previous attacks on Iran within the last year “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before” - both direct Trump quotes. Trump was quite clear that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed like nothing had ever been destroyed before.
Yes...Trump lies all the time, that's nothing new.
Yes it does, it makes everything you said untrue. You stated Iran doesn't want to give up its nuclear programme, not true. Iran in fact already did agree to it, Trump then threw that in the trash.
Second, it shows the Nuclear threat wasn't the issue because he had a solution for it and threw it away. Then bombed Iran destroying it ostensibly, then continued bombing for regime change. So it's not obvious negotiations failed over nuclear which you stated, because it wasn't about nuclear.
Negotiations failed over dismantling Iranian power, mostly its ballistic weapons. i.e. give up weapons and make yourself defenseless to maintain peace. Like the Palestinians did with Israel, after which they're still being murdered daily, aid is still being blocked, and the west bank is increasingly being colonised. In other words an absurd ask from a sovereign country with multiple expansionist neighbours including one that bombed you and virtually all its neighbours last year.
JCPOA didn't fully eliminate the nuclear program, it mostly just kept it from getting too far along.
> Second, it shows the Nuclear threat wasn't the issue because he had a solution for it and threw it away. Then bombed Iran destroying it ostensibly, then continued bombing for regime change. So it's not obvious negotiations failed over nuclear which you stated, because it wasn't about nuclear.
Nuclear isn't the only issue either, but Iranian officials made it clear they would not give up their nuclear program.
> Negotiations failed over dismantling Iranian power, mostly its ballistic weapons. i.e. give up weapons and make yourself defenseless to maintain peace.
Iran isn't interested in maintaining peace, they want to continue destabilizing the entire region.
> Like the Palestinians did with Israel, after which they're still being murdered daily, aid is still being blocked, and the west bank is increasingly being colonised.
Last I checked Hamas has refused to give up their weapons.
> In other words an absurd ask from a sovereign country with multiple expansionist neighbours including one that bombed you and virtually all its neighbours last year.
Iran has repeatedly threatened the destruction of Israel, it's not surprising that Israel and the US are taking those threats seriously.
I'm pretty sure MAGA was always fascism. I mean, all the signs were there and people were sounding alarm bells almost immediately.
I don't like Trump. At all. I think he's a terrible president on the whole and a shameless opportunist. But I don't like one-sided politics and hypocrisy even more so, and I dislike hysteria. History and long term trends paint us a different picture of current events. Most people's horizons are limited to the shallow, tendentious, cherry-picked, and sensationalist news cycle, unfortunately, regardless of outlet. Should we criticize Trump? Yes. But we should criticize all leadership when they do what they should not be doing.
BTW, the Dept. of War was the original name from 1789 to 1947. Curiously, it was soon after the change to Dept. of Defense that people like Eisenhower began to worry about the Military-Industrial Complex. That should give us pause. The name change conceals the intention, and coincides with a hungry imperial war machine that WWII helped bring into existence. Recall that Americans were largely isolationist before that.
The far left loves to categorize everything at its right as "fascist". The infamous Berlin wall was the "antifascist protection wall". In Yugoslavia, you'd hear every day at the radio a rant about the "fascists", even though the country was communist.
There are many definitions of what "fascism" is. The best I think is to refer to the historical italian fascist government, to understand it.
Btw presidential immunity is not fascist, many countries have similar laws.
Honest question, but if this is not fascism, then what is? Aren't you also wasting the meaning of a word by refusing to acknowledge any application of that word?
I'd suggest you read about fascist Italy to get a sense of what fascism is. So far I haven't seen Democrats repeatedly kicked out of cars in Times Square after drinking a bottle of castor oil. Trump said that he wouldn't look to be reelected for a third mandate.
The Iran war is mainly a consequence of the Israeli influence on US politics; it has nothing to do with fascism, and it is in continuity with the previous administration.
So yeah, populism likely, a plutocracy (evidenced by the role of AIPAC in elections) but not fascism.
"Harris to Jewish voters: ‘All options on the table’ to stop Iran from going nuclear In pre-election High Holidays call, US vice president says diplomatic solution still preferable to keep Islamic Republic from the bomb, charges Trump won’t stand by Israel"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/harris-to-jewish-voters-all-op...
Most native English speakers wouldn’t see the parent’s use of quotes (quotation marks) as merely mention.
You absolutely do not need to double down on whatever it is you are doing here lol. Say you were wrong and move on.
>Can you provide some support for your moral position?
Yes, of course. A bunch of people from Europe decided to move to Palestine and start a religious ethnostate there. In doing so they expelled and murdered lots of local residents.
The surviving locals are understandably less than happy about this, and have continued to fight to defend their lands to this day.
Since then, the those people have caused far more harm to non-jewish Palestinians than non-jewish Palestinians have caused to the those people.
>allows us to sidestep the issues with Gazans’ support of Jihad, other extremist doctrines, and the extermination of Jews?
It's perfectly natural that Gazans would support the extermination of jews. In the extreme environment that Israeli jews force Palestinians to live in, it's fundamentally ridiculous to even describe it as an extremist position.
In a comfortable European context it's certainly extreme, but that's a fundamentally dishonest way of portraying it.
That's not a point about colonialism or occupation; that's a justification for ethnic extermination based on the conditions of the people holding the position. By that logic there is no floor: any atrocity becomes "perfectly natural" if the grievance is large enough.
In your broader argument you're describing a blood debt with no statute of limitations and no mechanism for resolution. Skåne (where I live) was Danish. Alsace was German. Most of Europe was Roman. At some point borders exist, people live within them, and the only available direction is forward. You haven't described a political framework- you've described a permanent state of war with no exit condition except one side's disappearance.
You just said it's perfectly natural to want to exterminate an ethnic group. Read that back.
This is mostly true, yeah. Do you not believe that humans act like that?
>In your broader argument you're describing a blood debt with no statute of limitations and no mechanism for resolution
Nonsense.
>Skåne (where I live) was Danish. Alsace was German. Most of Europe was Roman. At some point borders exist, people live within them, and the only available direction is forward.
Except Israel does not want Palestine to move forward.
There are approximately zero living people that give a shit about the things you mentioned, there are millions of living Palestinians who do care and suffer at the hands of Israeli state every single day.
How did you intend for this comparison to be even vaguely relevant?
>you've described a permanent state of war with no exit condition except one side's disappearance.
This is deliberately obtuse, Israel has had a plenty of ways to largely exit this conflict. At the very least they could've given all Palestinians Israeli citizenship and equal rights decades ago.
Of course, that's not really compatible with the ideals of the jewish ethnostate. I'm sure the Palestinians wouldn't seriously object though.
>You just said it's perfectly natural to want to exterminate an ethnic group. Read that back.
I'll repeat it if you want me to. We've seen it over and over again in history, it's hardly a new thing.
Considering how the jewish people choose to treat the Palestinians, it is not surprising that Palestinians want to exterminate the jewish people. It is a perfectly predictable reaction, and not some special quirk of the Palestinians.
It’s not morally credible to focus on the Jews’ actions alone, given the broader context of the conflict, Islamic conquest and domination. I don’t want to be patronizing and give history lessons, but antisemitism, Jihadism, and other Islamicist extremist doctrines predate the state of Israel by centuries.
> It’s not morally credible to focus on the Jews’ actions alone, given the broader context of the conflict, Islamic conquest and domination. I don’t want to be patronizing and give history lessons, but antisemitism, Jihadism, and other Islamicist extremist doctrines predate the state of Israel by centuries.
That's just whataboutism and has approximately nothing to do with the conflict started by the creation of the modern state of Israel.
The only people who you could reasonably blame besides the zionist jews are the other Europeans.
They couldn't operate them, all electronics were in Moscow anyway, nor afford to maintain them or even guard them.
At the very same time Ukraine's corrupted military sold out on the black market tens of billions of weaponry.
In your alternate universe, bad actors acquire and reverse engineer those nuclear weapons resulting in a world that's much more dangerous.
Ukraine would be better off keeping them and all of us would be safer.
Because as of now, bad actors (Russia, USA, China) have nukes. Ukraine does not and that is making Russia expand. Meanwhile USA is run entirely but bad actors.
Israel (allegedly? idk) has nukes. Did it stop October 7th? Did it stop Iran from firing ballistic missiles?
The war of today is not an open war (the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24 2022, but in 2014) where nuclear deterrence matters. Nuke will never help if the war is waged through proxies.
Citing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157393
> I've spoken with engineers who worked on nuclear weapons systems, the consensus is that the public is deeply misinformed about how they work, the dangers, and the implications of weapons being used. (...)
> The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.
> Fusion airburst bombs of the modern era are incredibly clean and radiation is only a risk in a very small area (tens of miles) for a short time (days to weeks). (...)
Instead believing in bright and peaceful future USA, France and UK promised. As Ukrainian who lived in Ukraine in 90s that felt like being on a frontier of the modern world, giving up the nukes. Oh, how full of hope we were.
Take for example the UAE, which has been hit by the Iranian response, who is essentially singlehandedly responsible for the genocide in South Sudan and it does so with the blessing of the US.
The UAE arms the RSF using arms they get from the US and steal Sudanese gold, which they launder through Dubai and Switzerland.
But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that everything Iran has done and is doing is "imperialism" (which, again, it is not), how do you even begin to argue "if not more [than the United States]"? US imperialism touches virtually every country on Earth. Iran at best has regional influence.
This is false, and you know it. But I will challenge you for others to see. Please point me to a statue of the international law that makes this "resistance" legal.
> Take for example the UAE, which has been hit by the Iranian response, who is essentially singlehandedly responsible for the genocide in South Sudan and it does so with the blessing of the US.
Interesting. You completely ignored that Saudis back the other side (SAF), which committed no fewer atrocities than RSF and co. Why do you single out UAE?
> The UAE arms the RSF using arms they get from the US and steal Sudanese gold, which they launder through Dubai and Switzerland.
I won't argue with that, but this is not the complete picture, and the two main warring sides in Sudan are supported by US-friendly regimes in the region.
> But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that everything Iran has done and is doing is "imperialism" (which, again, it is not), how do you even begin to argue "if not more [than the United States]"? US imperialism touches virtually every country on Earth. Iran at best has regional influence.
Two things:
1. Does the fact that IR's imperialism is regional, and anti-US, and not global makes it good?
2. It is imperialism -- IR through its militant proxies suppresses independent development of multiple states in the region. Can you explain to me how this is a good thing?
Sorry but it's 100% true [1][2][3]. REsisting foreign occupation and colonialism is well-recognized in several UN conventions.
> Interesting. You completely ignored that Saudis back the other side (SAF),
You mean the saudis back the actual government of South Sudan and not the rebels who are looting the country? Are you really trying to equate the two?
But let's, for the sake of argument, also condemn the Saudis in this case. This should convince you that the US only cares about selling arms and doesn't give a rats ass about genocide. That's my point.
> Does the fact that IR's imperialism is regional, and anti-US, and not global makes it good?
No, it makes it lesser. "If not more" was your quote. Definitionally, it's not. It's Middle East vs the entire globe.
> It is imperialism
It's resistance. Iran up until 1953 was a liberal democracy and the only reason it isn't is because of US interference, imperialism and adventurism.
> Can you explain to me how this is a good thing?
Resisting the imperial ambitions of a global hegemonic superpower is definitionally good.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_resist
[2]: https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/about
[3]: https://treaties.un.org/doc/source/docs/A_RES_2625-Eng.pdf
I'm still interested to hear of a better c.2009 peace plan.
So when is the US intervening in Ukraine then? Russia is literally doing human safari with drones hunting down civilians in Kherson.
Did you miss the absolute massive amounts of aid US has given ukraine?
Regardless, there is a difference between how war is justified and why wars actually take place.
I missed US bombing Moscow, like they are bombing Tehran at this moment.
> Nuclear isn't the only issue either, but Iranian officials made it clear they would not give up their nuclear program.
False, they were very clear they would give it up. Are you at all aware of what Iran has been saying through its diplomatic channels? Listen to what the neutral parties are saying, it's clear on this.
> Iran isn't interested in maintaining peace, they want to continue destabilizing the entire region.
Alright time to stop talking to you. You've got a very black/white child like view on geopolitics.
> Last I checked Hamas has refused to give up their weapons.
Hamas had one lever to pull: hostages. Hamas gave the last tens of them up in return for a cease-fire to stop the killing of at the time exceeding 100 thousand civilians (admitted by Israel itself), but Israeli killing and expansion has only continued. Iran set-up the deal, US tore its own deal apart and bombed it. Do you think these are parties to make another deal with, to give up any leverage you still have in the hope they won't reneg later and leave you worse off? Don't be silly.
> Iran has repeatedly threatened the destruction of Israel, it's not surprising that Israel and the US are taking those threats seriously.
As have Israel and the US, does it warrant a strike on these countries? Don't be ridiculous, it's rhetoric to the base. What matters is policy. Israel has expanded its borders, Iran hasn't. Israel has bombed Iran and assasinated its leadership, the reverse isn't true. Israel and US reneged on their agreements that Iran upheld.
Iran's nuclear program has essentially always been a weapons program, their public statements about their nuclear program being only for peaceful purposes have never been true.
> False, they were very clear they would give it up. Are you at all aware of what Iran has been saying through its diplomatic channels? Listen to what the neutral parties are saying, it's clear on this.
Just listen to the statements Iranian officials have made in regards to giving up enrichment[0], their position has been that they will never give it up.
> Hamas had one lever to pull: hostages.
Hamas holding hostages wasn't helping their position.
> stop the killing of at the time exceeding 100 thousand civilians (admitted by Israel itself)
When has Israel admitted this?
> Iran set-up the deal, US tore its own deal apart and bombed it. Do you think these are parties to make another deal with, to give up any leverage you still have in the hope they won't reneg later and leave you worse off? Don't be silly.
I think tearing up the deal was probably a bad idea, but Iran didn't stop building ballistic missiles or funding proxies either so it's not like the deal stopped their hostile actions entirely.
> As have Israel and the US, does it warrant a strike on these countries? Don't be ridiculous, it's rhetoric to the base. What matters is policy.
Israel and the US have never advocated for the destruction of Iran in the way Iran advocates for the destruction of Israel.
> Israel has expanded its borders, Iran hasn't.
Israel's border situation is a huge mess, but that's largely due to Palestinians refusing to in good faith negotiate a peace deal with Israel that would actually establish proper boarders. What does that have to do with Iran?
> Israel has bombed Iran and assasinated its leadership, the reverse isn't true.
Just because Iran doesn't have that capability doesn't mean they wouldn't if they did.
[0] https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2026/02/08/ir...
Colonization and occupation is not the same as "imperialism". Please show me where "imperialism" is regulated by the international law. Second, resistance still has to comply with international laws. So, blowing up a bus with kids going to school is not resistance, but terrorism.
> You mean the saudis back the actual government of South Sudan
The government of South Sudan committed atrocities of the same scope as the RSF! Are you letting it slide because SAF is official government of Sudan??
> No, it makes it lesser. "If not more" was your quote. Definitionally, it's not. It's Middle East vs the entire globe.
I would argue it is more.
> It's resistance. Iran up until 1953 was a liberal democracy and the only reason it isn't is because of US interference, imperialism and adventurism. > Resisting the imperial ambitions of a global hegemonic superpower is definitionally good.
I see now. As long as it opposes US, it does not matter who are the victims of the opposition because the opposition is against the US.
> The 'solution' explicitly allowed (by 2031) unlimited enrichment, burying centrifuges, and purchasing unlimited amounts of AD. Then no US admin could have possibly prevented an Iranian nuke.
It was an agreement for 15 years. It doesn't at all 'explicitly allow unlimited enrichment' after the 15 year period. It just means that the JCPOA's limits would drop, and the regular NPT limits would still apply, including monitoring and inspections, which allows civilian but not military enrichment, and allows the US' military options with full transparency as opposed to Iran not letting in any inspections in the almost 8 years since Trump broke the deal.
Plus with this deal you'd have control for 15 years, and a 15 year window to negotiate additional safeguards as you see fit, or resort to military options as they do now. While negotiating this deal you'd have an assurance they aren't and can't build a bomb, and can ramp up pressure, and maintain sincerity to allow the other side of the table to agree to further demands.
Instead Trump threw this control away in 12 years ahead of schedule, removing ALL safeguards for the last 8 years and next 4 years, threw away ALL trust in the US's sincerity to make and keep deals making future deals less likely, and making a military intervention much more likely to be required. It's an absurd idea to have cancelled this deal with the view to control Iran's nuclear weapon ambitions, but it makes total sense for a president that wanted to attack Iran later down the line and needed arguments to do so, contrary entirely to what he campaigned on which is that Dems would get into a military conflict with Iran and he wouldn't.
> Once the faction who tried to make an ally of Iran got voted out, JCPOA was going to go.
Absolutely absurd to think Democrats tried to make Iran into an ally. Diplomatic engagement with Iran (which is done by all parties and their enemies, e.g. China, Soviets/Russians etc) is completely different from making a mortal enemy into an ally. Just absurd.
> JCPOA was going to go. Negotiations then failed cuz Iran demanded 20% enrichment which was ridiculous.
Firstly the 20% was prohibited in the JCPOA. I hope I need not spend any further words and the picture is obvious to you now? If it's true that as you claim that, if Iran had accepted 20%, that it would've led to a successful negotiated deal with Trump, how idiotic is Trump then to have thrown away a deal 8 years ago that already capped it at 3.5%?
So if true, your argument makes no sense. But it's not even true. The mediators between US/Iran in the diplomatic talks in the last weeks noted explicitly and clearly that Iran was willing to agree to zero stockpiling and zero accumulation, and converting existing stockpiles into irreversible fuel, and letting in inspectors in full. i.e. zero existential crisis for its neighbours. They weren't willing to give up their drone/missile program, i.e. become a defenseless country ready to be eaten up a few years later with no recourse, i.e. maintain fighting power without being an existential threat to anyone. That's an entirely natural for a sovereign state.
It's entirely reasonable to accept this deal if you want to operate in international law. If you want to rip up an existing deal to prevent a weapon, then refuse another deal to prevent such a weapon, then lie about an imminent threat of nuclear weapons which your own intelligence agencies refute, and then attack illegally under international law with no international support, then yes by all means go for it. But don't think it's not obvious that it's all a big and obvious lie, which you seem to parrot cluelessly.
Second, had NPT been enough, why was JCPOA necessary? Because NPT was not near enough to stop a determined state. NPT 'limits' do not limit enrichment. They just state enrichment must be done for civilian purposes and leave no enforcement mechanism. JCPOA also had no real enforcement mechanism starting in 2026. Iran could have simply taken all the money, buy weapons (legally), reach the legal max (which is basically infinity in 2031, a bit less earlier), and pressed forwards immediately. There was simply no way to enforce (some people think _this_ operation is too risky! Now lets give Iran over a trillion dollars and years to prepare).
Third, you're just wrong about current negotiations. Iran explicitly demanded 20%[0], beyond the JCPOA and with no civilian use.
Look, JCPOA debates always end in the same way. The advocates are asked how the original deal was enforceable in any way past 2031 (or even 2026) and they have to deploy word salad because the actual answer is 'Iran could have easily built a nuke, inspectors just allow us to see it but they would have been no way to do something about it'. It would be more honest if many of them just admitted they wanted to allow Iranian nukes.
[0] https://xcancel.com/laurnorman/status/2028050672583618946
Keyword there. They said they were not pursuing weapon enrichment.
Let's also not pretend that the US and israel care about international law, after all, there are arrest warrants by the ICC against israeli officials.
> They said they were not pursuing weapon enrichment.
There is literally no other reason for Iran to enrich to 60% U235 than for weapons.
Like do people in US realize that countries around the world take notes about what happened to the Libyas and Iraqs and many others (like Colombia recently) and see that the US will attack other countries with impunity.
The US feels threatened by Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs and has the military force to stop them, probably. Diplomatic avenues bore no fruit. Military force is now being used to--hopefully--end the threat definitively.
Yes, of course we are aware of what happened to Ghaddafi. It's very en vogue to point out the game theoretical incentives to develop nuclear weapons.
But seemingly people never bring up South Africa's disarmament. And nobody ever mentions that game theory also incentivizes the US prevent their adversaries from developing nuclear weapons where possible.
Giving up or stopping development of nukes may invite attack. Refusing to stop developing them may also invite attack.
Plus if Israel thinks it's fine to use them, then countries that don't like Israel will be glad to get that approval to go ahead with using their own
Now you're getting closer to the real reason ...
> You invoked scale. Those are the numbers. They don't say what you wanted them to say.
1200 Oct7 vs tens of thousands in annexation and retaliation.
The numbers speak for themselves. No need to cherry pick.
What you're doing now is a different argument entirely: aggregate conflict deaths over 77 years vs. one morning. That's not context, it's a category error dressed up as one.
For what it's worth, the full Palestinian death toll since 1948 is ~136,000 [1] — a Palestinian source, so spare me the bias complaint. That's across eight decades, multiple Arab-Israeli wars, three intifadas, and several state actors. October 7th still isn't a blip. It's a massacre inside a war.
Which is exactly what everyone's been saying.
I've not made an argument. I've provided the proper context that supports the original point.
>> Considering the scale of suffering caused by this conflict, - Jasonadrury
your response:
> That's not context, it's a category error dressed up as one.
You have shifted goalposts in every post. The context was the conflict in aggregate. Continue arguing with yourself. It's not compelling.
You sure have a big stake in defending a genocide, Jan.
How are we supposed to get an understanding of the scale of these events while totally disregarding Israeli actions?
State military action is categorised separately: that's not an omission, it's a definition, but you know that- you're playing stupid. The same database doesn't record US drone strikes or Russian artillery either, weird, right? Must be suppression!!!
If you want Israeli state violence, OCHA tracks it. That data has been cited in this thread already.
You're saying that the numbers don't say what I want them to say, but then you choose a rather weird set of numbers to demonstrate this with. It's weird!
Nobody serious disputes that Gazan civilians are suffering enormously. The argument isn't about that. It's about whether Hamas represents them, and the answer is: less and less, given that Hamas hasn't held an election since 2006, has siphoned aid money into tunnels and rockets for two decades [1], and on October 7th sent men with garden tools to decapitate Thai agricultural workers [2] and film themselves doing it.
You can condemn Israel's conduct (and there's plenty to condemn) without pretending the people who started this particular escalation were freedom fighters having a bad day.
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/hamass-october-7-attack-visual...
[2] https://www.nationthailand.com/world/middle-east-africa/4003...
Why isn’t it?
Israel (and I want to be clear, I am referring to Israel the state) has blood on their hands. This went way beyond a "self defense" thing - flattening the entire country, indiscriminate killing of civilians and children, murdering paramedics and bombing ambulances, destroying schools hospitals apartment buildings etc. By a modern democratic state with the most accurate smart weapons available. It's simply unbelievable to me that they are getting away with it.
This is blatantly untrue. There are people who are saying there's no such thing as a "Gazan civilian".
And how can you claim October 7th wasn't an act if war? The main thrust of the attacks were targeting military installations. Much more than Israeli actions in Gaza before or since, which have clearly been done in service of genocide since Israel was created.
The Palestinian genocide has not been a regular war, it has been an absolute extermination campaign that is still ongoing.
Nobody serious disputes that Gaza's suffering is real or that Israel's conduct warrants scrutiny. But "genocide since Israel was created" is doing a lot of work for you; the ICJ found Palestinian rights were "plausibly" at risk, not that 1948 was a genocide.
Words mean things. Overreaching doesn't help the people you're claiming to defend, it just makes it easier for the other side to dismiss everything else you say.
And if you want to play the number of victims game, even pre Oct 7 one side has always had it significantly worse than the other. After all, one side is a sovereign state that has a technologically advanced military, an air force, a navy, and air defense systems.
If we apply the civilized world's standards of war then yes, Israelis who are also off-duty soldiers or reservists don't count as military targets.
If we apply Israel's standards, however, they are.
Are Gazans not allowed to apply the same standards to their adversaries that their adversaries openly apply to them? Would you be this courteous, in their position?
Sure, why don't we:
- leader with a cult of personality
- an idealized story of the prosperous past (make america great again)
- pinning blame for the nation's downfall on marginalized minorities and persecuting them (immigrants, socialists)
- aggressively anti-socialist/leftist, protection of capital and suppression of labor rights
- glorification of violence (ICE, hate crimes, "department of war")
- ramping up existing and starting new imperialistic conflicts (Venezuela, Cuba, now Iran)
- rolling back personal liberties (freedom of speech, right to due process, women's rights)
- suppression of the free press given unfavorable reporting (revocation of TV licenses, revocation of access to white house)
- clear desire with ongoing attempts to dismantle democracy (capitol attack, violating separation of powers by illegally withholding funding for programs and violating court orders)
- demands complete subservience rather than competence in all appointed roles
- all of this with full support of the elites (clear shift in the 2nd term)
If you want to argue that the US isn't fascist because Trump hasn't completely dismantled the judicial branch yet, be my guest.
But fascism isn't just a concrete political system where a dictator has absolute power, it's an ideology, and Trump and the Republican party are clearly fascist in that sense - that is their goal. It's just a question of whether they'll succeed in dismantling the judicial branch before his term is over.
The only people who benefit from this sort of language policing are the fascists themselves.
P.S. I probably shouldn't be saying this but the fact that you refer to people sounding the alarm as "the far left" really gives the game away.
For instance, the US didn't start a war against Venezuela or Cuba under Trump. America was much more aggressive in the 80´s, if you want to compare.
Immigration can totally be a problem, and voters in the western world increasingly ask their leaders to address it. It's not "democracy" when it suits your ideas and "fascism" when it doesn't.
Opposing socialism isn't "fascist" and afaik the Trump admin has done nothing significant about it: social expenses and the deficit are still growing faster than ever. What is mainly happening is that ressources are being redirected toward the retired, who are influencial voters and a growing demographic. It's the same everywhere in the western world.
Again, all of those measures are very superficial and nothing like what real fascism did in Italy or what Nazis did when they came to power. You can't reason just with outrage and headlines.
By the way, most of those points have their Democrat counterpart with a different style, it's mainly linked to the evolution of the governance style in the US. Democrats also had their DEI unsuited hires, censorships (Meta was censoring on the order of the White House), and so on.
Stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing immigration = fascism, I said that identifying marginalized groups, pinning all of the nation's problems on those groups and then persecuting, victimizing, terrorizing anyone who looks like they belong to one of those groups - that is fascist.
> Opposing socialism isn't "fascist"
Again, stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing socialism is fascist, I said "aggressively anti-socialist", as in, violent anti-socialist rhetoric. Similar to the previous point.
> afaik the Trump admin has done nothing significant about it
That's wholly detached from reality. The only reason he hasn't dismantled all of the social programs yet is because the courts have stepped in and intervened when he tried. See: USAID, withholding SNAP funding, Medicaid, the whole DOGE disaster.
> Again, all of those measures are very superficial and nothing like what real fascism did in Italy or what Nazis did when they came to power. You can't reason just with outrage and headlines.
Those are the core qualities of fascism. I get it, you don't like being called a fascist so you sea-lion about the differences to distract from the overwhelming similarities.
Even when Trump dismantles the judicial branch, people like you will maintain that the US isn't fascist because people aren't speaking Italian like they did in fascist Italy, or German like they did in nazi Germany.
I feel comfortable saying this because we're not just disagreeing on whether the US is fascist right now and there's still room to have argue there, but we're disagreeing on whether Trump has a fascist agenda and whether he's actively working to transform the US into a totalitarian regime following the fascist playbook, which he absolutely is.
January 6th had all the hallmarks of the black shirts marching on Rome. And ICE is definitely pulling people out of cars and homes in Democratic cities. But I guess everything is fine because they're not making them drink castor oil.
Immigration enforcement is necessary, but these actions clearly have less to do with people's immigration status and more to do with political reprisal.
> Trump said that he wouldn't look to be reelected for a third mandate.
They'll always say they'll follow the Constitution to legitimize themselves, but their actions don't reflect it.
> The Iran war is mainly a consequence of the Israeli influence on US politics; it has nothing to do with fascism, and it is in continuity with the previous administration.
It has everything to do with fascism, not because of its motivation, but it's lack of democratic approval. This administration has a clear disdain for the democratic process.
I sincerely hope there was some secret vote by Congress that we don't know about.
> So yeah, populism likely, a plutocracy (evidenced by the role of AIPAC in elections) but not fascism.
I would've agreed with you if we were talking about Trump's first term, that was clearly just populism. This second term goes far beyond what any populist leader has done in Europe.
>You've just made my point. The reason Skåne isn't contested is that there are no living people suffering under Danish occupation of it. You've described the mechanism yourself: time plus resolution. That's exactly what a two-state settlement would produce. You've argued for the process without noticing.
Israel has explicitly rejected that over and over again, and continues to do so every day through ongoing annexations.
There will never be moral high ground for the state of Israel as long as it allows the settlements to exist and doesn't at the very least honor it's internationally recognized borders.
>On citizenship: Israel granting full citizenship to all Palestinians would mean the end of a Jewish majority state within a generation, by demographics alone. You know that. Proposing it as a "simple solution Israel refused" is not a good faith argument; it's describing the dissolution of Israel but painting it as moderation.
A jewish ethnostate is as morally unacceptable as an aryan ethnostate.
>On extermination: you've moved from "perfectly natural" to "perfectly predictable." Those aren't the same thing. Predictable means understandable given the circumstances. Natural means it requires no further justification. You've retreated and you haven't noticed.
No, it's both. It's predictable because it's a natural reaction.
This will be my last comment to you, I don't want to engage with someone so comfortable at defending genocide.
One final fact check for you: a state with 20% Arab citizens who vote, sit in the Knesset and serve on the Supreme Court is not comparable to a state founded on racial extermination. That comparison doesn't survive contact with the facts.
The settlements are illegal and indefensible. I said so already in this thread.
Everything else you've written today you can own.
It is an indisputable historical fact that jewish zionists expelled vast amounts of Palestinians from their homes and forced them out of the territory of what is now modern Israel.
>This will be my last comment to you, I don't want to engage with someone so comfortable at defending genocide.
I'm not defending genocide, that's a ridiculous interpretation of my words. I'm just pointing out the fact that if you keep poking someone long or hard enough, you shouldn't be surprised when they eventually want to get rid of you.
I certainly don't think the extermination of Israeli jews would in any way be a positive outcome.
A discrete incident with a defined start, end, perpetrator and location.
(As opposed to a 77-year conflict involving multiple states, wars and actors.)
Now ask me one on sport.
Providing context in support of a conclusion is making an argument. That's what arguments are.
The goalposts that moved: "blip" (single event framing) -> "scale of the conflict" (aggregate framing) -> "I wasn't arguing anything." Three posts, three different claims, now apparently none of them count.
Noted.
But since you're asking: go up four comments and you'll find it already addressed there in some detail. Keep up.
Trump has no structured paramilitary militias like the Squadras or the SA. The January 6th was mainly a crowd movement, participants were a heteroclite bunch with very different political ideas.
> ICE
ICE is a state agency, which existed before and has never been known for its benevolent and non-violent actions. The problems mainly arise from the overhiring, lack of training, and braindead managers. By the way, many members agency are not white, which contradicts the racism narrative. Alex Pretti was shot by two latino officers, for instance.
> lack of democratic approval
Lack of democratic approval for a war isn't facism. It's a strong presidential regime. France has the same and is not fascist. And it's legal in the current form[0].
> farther than any populist leader
Politics aren't a 1d political spectrum were the ends are facism. Afaik declaring a war to satisfy the billionaires of another nation is clearly not fascism, nor even nationalist in the strict sense.
Words are important because if you earnestly want the situation to change, you need to assess it clearly. The Trump presidency has a more to do with the influence of money in US politics, and the media system which favors outrage and "loud" candidates. Democrats also commited a historical blunder with the botched Biden candidacy and the lack of a credible replacement (Kamala was clearly not convincing from the early start).
[0] https://time.com/7380309/iran-war-legal-trump/?utm_source=ch...
The black shirts were no different.
> ICE is a state agency, which existed before and has never been known for its benevolent and non-violent actions.
Much of the prosecution of minorities in fascist regimes was not done by the militias, it was done by law enforcement.
> Lack of democratic approval for a war isn't facism. It's a strong presidential regime. France has the same and is not fascist. And it's legal in the current form[0].
A hallmark of fascism is the refusal to acknowledge any democratic limitations on the power of the leader. The article you reference states clearly that he has no legal authority to start the war, as he would need congressional approval.
France has the same system as the U.S., only parliament has the power to start a war.[0]
> Words are important because if you earnestly want the situation to change, you need to assess it clearly.
I'm glad we agree on that. I will concede that Trump may never become a true dictator, but the ideology is clearly there and if his power is not checked I worry about who will succeed him.
> The Trump presidency has a more to do with the influence of money in US politics
Fascists regimes have historically been well-funded by money in politics.
[0] https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
And today Ukraine is doing quite amazing, considering 12 years of war. I can only dream what it would be if russians didn't steal a generation. Giving up nukes was a giant mistake.
Back then, giving up on nukes never was about compromising security. In 1993, I remember being full of hope and opportunity to live in peaceful world with less nukes. It felt like we had our backs by France, UK and USA. That was a move full of betrayed optimism, not desperation - giving up third world arsenal because the future is bright.
And pretty sure people who built those ICBMs and strategic bombers would have no issue maintaining them.
USA didn't pressure Ukraine into giving up nukes, at the same time bankrolling russian nuclear program for 'security' reasons.
And now of course you're going to label me an AIPAC nutter, but in this particular case I think the evidence is fairly plain given the collaboration between the two countries on this. If Israel had done this by their lonesome or if the US had not involved Israel then you could make the case that they reached this point independently, right now it looks to me as if collusion is a 100% certainty and that the US is executing a foreign policy that will not benefit it but that will benefit Israel. It also makes me wonder whether this will end up as a Venzuela re-run where the top names change but everything else remains the same, just with US companies the beneficiaries of the oil, which is, besides policy the main driver behind these things anyway.
Also in power balance, Venezuela is a joke militarily. Iran has the capacity to end calm life in the GCC and possibly disrupt oil flows. Really an orange and apple comparison. Case in point today, Iran was able to project its missile to several countries in a couple hours.
I'm genuinely surprised the mines haven't rolled out, to the point that I believe they won't be. (They were–in the initial strikes–destroyed or incapacitated, or they never existed.)
> Iran was able to project its missile to several countries in a couple hours
To minimal effect. And every launch exposes a missile and firing team to American and Israeli jets flyig in uncontested airspace.
Israel needs it, Trump wants it, this was going to happen either now or next year. The potential for escalation is massive and I sincerely hope that it will not. Iran is a problem, but Israel is also a problem and the United States is becoming a bigger problem every day. It would be nice if the people in charge of this planet could hold back from throwing matches into the powder kegs for a while.
The US president hasn't required a new war resolution since Afghanistan. They each keep stretching it farther and farther. It cannot be rescinded without a veto-proof majority. If there was a veto proof majority willing to stand up to the executive, a conviction and removal would have already occurred.
The assertion that the US is a democracy is nisguided. It will be downgraded by vdem this month to an electoral autocracy. It is also worth noting that it only takes senators receiving the votes of <7% of the total population to filibuster all legislation, prevent overriding any vetos, and halt all impeachment trials. The fact it has looked like a democracy for so long is astounding.
Correct. But interests need to be animated to have power. Who was arguing that this should be a priority, and a priority now, who is familiar in the White House?
> The assertion that the US is a democracy is nisguided. It will be downgraded by vdem this month to an electoral autocracy
This is nonsense.
> halt all impeachment trials
False. Senate Rule 193 sets time limits on debate for impeachment trials [1].
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDOC-117sdoc1/pdf/CDOC-1...
Rubio and Walz have been Iran hawks. But I’m not yet convinced they were unilateral. Instead, it looks like a Rice-Powell alignment of vague interests with enough groupthink that dissenters weren't in the room.
Also there are many countries in the middle east that we are friends with which would be happy if Iran falls.
Literally, perhaps true...at least initially. But:
- Take a look at how poorly the fall of the Iraqi gov't in 2003 actually worked out for the U.S. and its regional friends.
- Iran has 92 million people, very deep issues with being able to support that large a population, and very long borders. If things really went to crap there, it could produce tens of millions of desperate refugees.
This is an immensely risky operation. But part of the reason for Iraq being a shitshow was De-Ba'athification. You don't need to clean house to effect regime change. My guess would be we're hoping someone in the IRGC disappears Khamenei and a few senior commanders and then makes a call to Geneva.
I think that from the point of the neighbouring countries, Iran is fine as it is. Israel and the USA keep it in check, it is under sanctions, which are both beneficial for its adversaries.
If the regime in Iran were to fall, first of all you would have repercussions on the neighbors, (refugees and the like), and instability. But also, in the longer run, the chance of a more better government, which could make the country stronger than it is.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt6wpgvg
This is bipartisan. The long term goals were to start with Libya, Iraq, Syria and then Iran. The latter two required Russia to be tied up in another conflict.
They don't explicitly put Iran in their portfolio because for Reality TV it is better to be a peace lover.
Now, undoubtedly the Democrats will pretend to complain, but Schumer and Pelosi want this, too.
[I am expanding on your comment, not trying to contradict anything.]
An uncharitable person would easily debunk this by making claims about the idea that 'because of israel they can't have a state to be civilian of' and then the topic gets super muddy because that's technically not true and we go around and around and around.
It's one of the things that could be stopped to prevent us going "around and around and around."
This isn't a conversation, it's not even engagement: that's just not reading.
On asymmetry: you've accidentally made the case for holding Israel to a higher standard. A nuclear-capable state with F-35s, Iron Dome and a $3.8bn annual US military subsidy [1] bears more responsibility for its choices than a militia in a blockaded strip of land; not less. That's what asymmetry actually means.
What it doesn't mean is that a music festival full of civilians somehow doesn't count. But nice try.
Was this not your choice of words?
> On asymmetry: you've accidentally made the case for holding Israel to a higher standard.
Huh? Are you replying to someone else?
Israel has killed 10s of thousands of civilians, a large portion of which are children. This along with many other factors - in addition to the higher standard expected from a sovereign state fighting an occupied people - is the reason we call it a genocide.
It's almost as if we genuinely believe that because there are more deaths on one side, that the other is deserving and should not be condemned despite innocence.
Isn't that interesting.
would be worse, but wasn't contemplated nor attempted so contributes no weight to the balance.
"from the river to the sea" on the other hand is a statement of genocidal intent.
But "wholesale genocide" and "the plan is obviously to drive them into the sea" are stronger claims than the evidence supports right now, and that matters a lot because the moment you overreach, everyone who wants to dismiss Palestinian suffering has a rhetorical exit. The ICJ's own careful language exists for a reason.
None of that touches the original argument anyway: that October 7th was not a "small blip." Israel's conduct after October 8th doesn't retroactively change what happened on October 7th. Both things are true simultaneously. That's the whole point I'm making.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-wor...
What was different this time was that it was Israel who was the victim, not the Palestinians. And the only way that Israel knows how to respond to these kinds of things is to kill and to destroy.
You are finding what happens when you show this ghouls any respect, in disagreeing or otherwise.
You've just described the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust [1] as a blip because, in your accounting, it was Israel's turn to absorb one.
The "continuum" framing doesn't hold up numerically either. In non-war years, OCHA records roughly 100–200 Palestinian deaths annually at Israeli hands [2]. Hamas killed 1,139 people before lunchtime. That's not a blip in a continuum, it's five to ten years of equivalent deaths in eight hours.
The youngest victim was 14 hours old [3]. The oldest was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor [3]. None of those facts change based on who you think had it coming.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museu...
[2] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/casualties-thousands-killed-...
[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/youngest-october-7-victim-just-00...
You can alternatively read the wikipedia article about squadrism and see that there is nothing in common between the people that did Jan 6th and squadrists, which were a highly organized and violent paramilitary force.
> Much of the prosecution of minorities
There are many latinos in ICE - the Axel Pretti murderers were latino agents. All of this rethoric about ideology hardly matches reality, which is more likely a chain of incompetent people mismanadging the situation.
> illegal war
Article states that "Under the War Powers Resolution, which dates back to the 1970s, if a president enters the military into hostilities without congressional authorization, the operation must end within 60 days unless Congress expressly authorizes it.". Trump is within this framework, similar to the previous strikes on the enrichment plants.
> Succession
As usual with this kind of cesarism, it is tied to an individual and will deflate after Trump's mandate. Since they didn't cancel elections (like a true fascist would do, by the way, as it is not a democratic ideology), it may end up this year when they'll lose the congress.
> money
Fascist regimes had rich donors, but it was for ideological reasons first - Henry Ford's support of the nazi party comes to mind. The current donors such as Miriam Adelson or the tech bros fund him to steer the policy towards their interest, or just pure corruption, as we saw with CZ (Binance). I mean look at it, 13 members of the government are billionaires. This is a classic case of plutocracy - rich people's government. Caesar was also a plutocrat, which fits well with Trump.
There's still time for that, but canceling elections would make it too obvious, then even people like you would realize what is happening. That's why these days autocrats prefer to simply subvert the electoral system. That way people who prefer to look away can simply continue to pretend everything is above board.
Just to be clear I’m not pro war! I take Iranian regime as the first and foremost responsible party in this mess and then US! My people stuck in this disaster of a power struggle.
Obviously the leaders of both our countries want what’s best for all of us and always tell us the truth, right?
The magnitude of human suffering this will bring, civil war, sectarian violence, it all leads to hundreds of millions of people dying, millions of people displaced. Nobody likes the Iranian regime, just like nobody liked Saddam, its not the point. These wars are barbaric, not in the interests of anybody but Israel and a select few American arms dealers and pedophiles that propagandize their way to barely conscious sheep in the west clapping along to the barbarism AGAIN.
The obnoxious sanctimonious behavior of telling random Iranians to “wake the fuck up” as if we have a saying in what either Iranian government or the US side does. Go pound sand.
Most Persians I know will support just about anyone who will go against the regime, there were huge protests all over the world recently by the Iranian diaspora calling for the regime to be destroyed after tens of thousands of protesters were murdered by the regime all over Iran.
It would be foolish for the Iranians to agree to that. But useful idiots will be useful idiots.
The only reason to enrich uranium to 60% like Iran was doing is for nuclear weapons purposes.
Overall the goal is not to stop Iran's nuclear program, though that is part of it. The goal would be to install a government in Iran that is friendly to Israel and the USA, or, failing that, to completely destroy their economy and defense such that they effectively can't act outside their own borders.
By the way, I am a lot more worried about Israel and its actual nuclear stockpile that has zero oversight.
Iran regularly threatens to destroy Israel, the opposite is not the case.
They also have (had?) a very active ballistic missile program, and have conducted implosion experiments.
The constellation of evidence is quite clear: Iran is a threshold nuclear state with all the pieces necessary to credibly threaten the region (and soon the US homeland) with nuclear weapons.
There's a number of reasons this is happening now that I think are more plausible than American interest:
- Saudis want Iran weak as they are primary geopolitical rivals. There are deep ties between the Saudi dynasty and the Trump dynasty. Without Iranian support, the Houthis will have a much tougher time. (Although they should not be underestimated regardless. They are not an Iranian proxy, but an ally, and field one of the strongest armies in the whole region.)
- Israel wants Iran weak, and pro-zionism is a strong wedge in American politics. Again, there's also a lot of personal business interests involved. Iranian allies and proxies are the chief causes of grief for Israel's expansionist agenda, and a very credible threat to their national security.
- This war conveniently moves the headlines away from a faltering economy, the Epstein files, and ICE overreach. There's probably hope that it will improve chances with the 'war president bonus' in the mid-terms. It could also be a convenient cover for and excuse to increase rigging in the elections.
Expecting positive regime change after bombing a school full of little girls is... naive. This is not how you turn an enemy into a friend.
I still don't understand why "aggressively anti-socialist" policies are fascist. Fascism is itself a branch of socialism (Mussolini was one, in France the fascist leader Jacques Doriot was one as well, for instance). Being a totalitarism, it aims at engulfing every aspect of the daily life, which means supporting socialist policies (similar to communism, another totalitarism).
Authoritarian regimes in the 30´s that were "aggressively anti-socialist" weren't fascist. Franco or Salazar are relevant examples, even thought today they would be categorized as such, since you guys seem now to have only single word left to designate populist or authoritarian regimes then don't like.
Trump lacks deeply indeed the socialist aspect of fascism; it would likely be better defined as plutocratic cesarism, even though he did not make a coup (yet).
You don't have to be American to be a fascist-sympathizer, which you clearly are, since you label opposition to totalitarian methods as "the far left", lie about matters of fact, and grossly misrepresent the events that happened in fascist Italy while trying to represent yourself as someone intimately familiar with the matter.
For example:
> Fascism is itself a branch of socialism (Mussolini was one)
> Authoritarian regimes in the 30´s that were "aggressively anti-socialist" weren't fascist.
> Trump lacks deeply indeed the socialist aspect of fascism
Fascism is not a branch of socialism, fascism frames socialists as enemies of the state and pledges to destroy socialism. Mussolini was clearly not a socialist ideologically, as he had them killed. That was the entire MO of the blackshirts.
> since you guys seem now to have only single word left to designate populist or authoritarian regimes then don't like.
No, we're just using the word appropriately and you hate it. You'd rather lie and make up a story about fascism being a branch of socialism than admit that Trump is a fascist.
You should read more about this, the creator of the fascist doctrine stated plainly that fascism was socialism with nationalist characteristics.[0]
Socialism and fascism share many similarities, given that they developed in the same context with the same roots : youth movements, focus on controlling education, citizen's health seen as a responsibility of the State, strong management of the economy, and so on. Both tend to classify political ennemies as a single group ("communists" in the case of fascists, "fascists" in the case of socialists), without distinction, just like what you are doing.
The fact that Black Shirts (which don't have a Trumpian equivalent) didn't like the other socialists doesn't make fascism less socialist, just like the soviet campaign against Trotskists doesn't mean that the USSR was less communist.
> we're just using the word appropriately
Rubio just admitted that the US participated in the strikes against Iran to please Israel. There is nothing fascist about this, and again plutocracy is a much more efficient explanation for the current regime actions. Saying that something isn't fascist doesn't make me a fascist.
"If you are not with me, you're against me" type of thinking... where did I see this historically?
[0] https://fee.org/articles/theres-no-denying-the-socialist-roo...
I'd assume, until further evidence, it's because the Strait is an active war zone.
However, a lot could have happened in two decades, and Ukraine had to go through many issues typical of post-Soviet countries at the time. The risk associated with warheads being sold by generals or oligarchs was seen as a real one, see for instance:
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997-09/press-releases/russi...
As far as vdem goes, Lindberg has recently as much as confirmed they will down grade the us below democracy status.
I mean, that's interesting from a political theoretical perspective. And if you want to put sacred meaning into it, sure. I'm not sure most people would take a decade-old Swedish institute as a harbinger of whether or not America is a demoracy too seriously (versus other sources, to be clear).
I do want to know who the bad guy is though.
The issue with Iran is that it’s selling energy outside of the US system. This was less of an issue 20 years ago when the persians needed to funnel the money back to the Western system at a cost so that they can access world trade. The situation changed today as they can mostly survive on China imports and completely bypass the US financial system. Iran has half the exports (in total value!) of Tunisia at x8-9 the population. Something doesn’t add up.
> It would be nice if the people in charge of this planet could hold back from throwing matches into the powder kegs for a while
That’s not how the world works. The relative peace of the last 20 years or so was mostly because US hegemony was uncontested. This might be no longer the case. Someone in the far East will be watching for opportunities.
Who says these are rational actors. I think it is a bit much for coincidence.
> Iran does x4 times the volume of Venezuela in oil and x10 in gas.
Until yesterday. We'll see whether their infrastructure is going to survive this war.
> The issue with Iran is that it’s selling energy outside of the US system.
I'm well aware of that.
> This was less of an issue 20 years ago when the persians needed to funnel the money back to the Western system at a cost so that they can access world trade. The situation changed today as they can mostly survive on China imports and completely bypass the US financial system. Iran has half the exports (in total value!) of Tunisia at x8-9 the population. Something doesn’t add up.
What doesn't add up is that there are a lot of parties that would like to see regime change in Iran, including a lot of Iranians. The question always is whether the fire that you light remains contained or not and Iran is very much not like Venezuela in that sense.
> That’s not how the world works.
I'm well aware of that too. But that doesn't change how I feel about it.
> The relative peace of the last 20 years or so was mostly because US hegemony was uncontested. This might be no longer the case.
In no small part because of the idiot-in-charge.
> Someone in the far East will be watching for opportunities.
And that's precisely why I think there is a massive potential for escalation here.
None of their energy infra. was hit and I don’t see it happening. Hitting their energy infra. will result in them hitting the GCC oil infra. This is more likely, in my opinion, part of the negotiations. They couldn’t agree to the terms of their power projection, so they went to the field to test it out.
> What doesn't add up is that there are a lot of parties that would like to see regime change in Iran, including a lot of Iranians.
You are buying into Western propaganda. Not that I know about the conditions on Iran and the Mullah popularity. It’s not possible to gauge that since freedom of information is limited there but I wouldn’t trust the latest campaign either. Only time will tell on this one.
> In no small part because of the idiot-in-charge.
This is where we disagree; though I could agree that the democrats will have handled this differently but not necessarily in a non-violent way.
> And that's precisely why I think there is a massive potential for escalation here.
I still think this one will pass. Though China will probably stick to its own deadlines when it’s ready on its own terms.
What they learned was "never again to us".
Just because your family had a holocaust executed against them, doesnt give you any (legal, ethical, moral) right to run your own holocaust.
And Israel is running a holocaust in Palestine, and has been for decades.
"There's a genocide going on in Gaza? Yeah I know, you've been whining about it for years now."
So even by the standard you're proposing, Hamas massacred around 358 people who wouldn't qualify as military targets under anyone's rules of engagement. Including theirs, apparently, since Hamas's own explanation was that they "may have thought" the ravers were soldiers "resting"; i.e. they didn't know and killed them anyway.
The argument you've constructed requires Hamas to have been applying a targeting framework. The evidence is that they found a large crowd of Israelis and opened fire.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-okayed-nova-music-festival...
Do you suppose Israel doesn't consider previous members of Hamas legitimate targets?
>The argument you've constructed requires Hamas to have been applying a targeting framework. The evidence is that they found a large crowd of Israelis and opened fire.
But that's effectively indistinguishable from the Israeli targeting framework where everyone connected to Hamas is a legitimate target.
The argument that prior military service permanently strips civilian status has no basis in IHL. If it did, every Israeli who'd ever served (which is nearly all of them, given conscription) would be a legitimate target forever.
So: not a targeting framework, more like a justification for killing the entire population.
On your second point: Israel's targeting decisions are also subject to IHL, and where they kill civilians unlawfully that's also a war crime. That's not a defence of Hamas... it's the same standard applied consistently.
"They do it too" doesn't make either lawful.
For what it's worth, joining Hamas is a choice; IDF service is compulsory. The cases aren't analogous.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/09/questions-and-answers-oc...
“Nimrod Cohen was abducted from Tank 3”
Building military defenses against crazed, genocidal, racial supremacists who routinely fire missiles at your country seems more like sensible forward planning to me rather than evidence of a guilty conscience.
Neither participant in the Israel-Hamas conflict subscribes to that.
And I'm not really sure how you could expect the small resistance group to follow international humanitarian law when the big state they're fighting doesn't either? That seems absurd.
Many things are settled in international humanitarian law, thus far it hasn't stopped either side from ignoring it wholesale.
They also said the US demands are completely unreasonable, which you conveniently left out.
Can you give me some official sources that explain what exactly was negotiated and demanded on both sides?
I want to avoid linking particular sources because I know it's easy to call this or that biased etc. but it's easy to look up even in Israeli sources.
Don’t you see any similarity between what you say and any colonial. And my brain is broken?
Let me put it in a way that’s easy to comprehend for you. War is bad and Iranian government is as much responsible for this war as the US. I don’t understand how this is so triggering for some.
edit.
> Evidently I care more about the hundreds of thousands of Iranian people that will die in this war than you.
Did you care equally when thousands of Iranians were massacred in the streets by the government or the “care” activates only when convenient?
I'm anti-interventionism, you can't seriously reframe that into western chauvinism.
> War is bad and Iranian government is as much responsible for this war as the US. I don’t understand how this is so triggering for some.
Because its just not true, there would be no war without the US and Israel starting it, PERIOD. It's triggering because you could've said exactly the same thing about the Iraq war, its always the same disaster and people never listen or learn anything, that's why its frustrating.
So you're saying Israel's occupation of Lebanon amounts to 4,000 square metres? About the area of an athletics track, I guess? (Not counting the bit inside the athletics track.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Lebanese_confl...
In Syria, Israel had a buffer zone since 1974. Last year they said the agreement had "collapsed" and went on to occupy even more territoru: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/israel-carries-out-...
Palestine is occupied.
We've gone from, "The amazing Islamic Republic of Iran isn't even capable of building deliverable nuclear weapons and they have lots of peaceful reasons to do enrichment to 60%!" to "Yeah OK, they are capable and they are indeed enriching Uranium for their weapons program--hey, look over here! USA and Israel!!!"
Even if they do it's book reports.
> On the senate conviction, my point is that only 33 senators need to oppose a conviction to stop it
Yes. The bar is high for removing an elected executive. That's not a sign of not being a democracy.
...no? Majority of the House and two thirds of Senators doesn't require 90%. Nixon still had way more than 10% of support in the country when his removal from office was imminent.
> have you already replied with it and it got shadow blocked?
I don't think I've written anything that got shadow blocked for many years.
> The US demands were for Iran to give up all its offensive capabilities
What's your point?
“there would be no war without Hamas starting it, PERIOD.”
See how dishonest and ignorant that sounds?
For everyone else reading this thread as Iran being bombed: In 47 years of constant confrontation, islamic regime has not built one fucking bomb shelter for its people for these days. Let that sink in. Don’t believe these people who suddenly start to care about Iranian lives by taking the regime’s side and also don’t believe US officials when they say they do all these for our freedom.
> In October, UNIFIL peacekeepers conducted a geospatial survey of a concrete T-wall erected by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) southwest of Yaroun. The survey confirmed that the wall crossed the Blue Line, rendering more than 4,000 square metres of Lebanese territory inaccessible to the Lebanese people.
And what exactly is Israel doing there, on that land the size of an athletics track? Something very nefarious?
But I think we're established the answer to the question I originally asked. Thanks for participating.
Attributes that distinguish WW3 from previous world wars were IIRC: Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation. Case in point: North Korea developed nukes without being invaded, and now that they have nukes, other countries are watching and seeing that NK won't be invaded. What lesson do those other countries draw? And what of a world in which many potential belligerents hold nukes? Hiroshima weeps.
I'd like to add an important attribute here: The revolution will be live-streamed, more-or-less. And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons. I predict this fact will not distress many people, such is the state of humanity.
So to the 7 or so decades of stability we and our ancestors enjoyed, here's looking at you, going down me. But Brettonwoods serves the present the least of any time since its creation. Case in point, w.r.t. eastern Africa, the geopolitical bounds of those ~4 countries seems likely meld to a degree. If we are indeed heading into WW3, I expect the world map to be redrawn afterwards, and the only lessons learned is how to win better in future.
And if we are, while disgruntled old geriatrics go at each others throats via their youthful proxies, I greatly prefer the nukes rust in peace.
Reminds me of Blaise Pascal's quote: 'All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.' Aspiration, you gotta take care man, it just might kill ya.
"tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre." -- "All the woe of man comes from one single thing only: not knowing how to remain at rest, in a room"
In the same text, he follows with:
"Le roi est environné de gens qui ne pensent qu’à divertir le roi, et à l’empêcher de penser à lui. Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense."
"The king is surrounded by people who think only of amusing the king and preventing him from thinking about himself. For he is unhappy, though he be king, if he thinks about it."
You're missing the commonalities, what defined world wars: the full might of industrial economies being dedicated to military campaigns.
World War II's theatres' were incoherent–the Axis interests in e.g. China and the Pacific had basically zero stragegic overlap with Europe and North Africa. (The only parties having to consider a unified theatre being the USSR and USA.) But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.
The USSR on the other hand barely had any involvement in the Pacific theatre, entering in August 1945.
This is no longer necessary to inflict the catastrophic destruction we're really referring to when talking about a hypothetical WWIII
I'm less concerned about nuclear escalation than about biological escalation.
It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes: you can only blow up big chunks of it, maybe take out enough power plants and supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age, or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.
We currently have no real safeguards against this. If we ever have descendants, they'll think we were insane during this time period and they'll be right.
Urgh. "No tests, no prototypes".
Imagine trying to write "Hello, World" but there's no programming language. The compilation cycle takes a week. And you can't actually control where the program runs. And also the storage device will be destroyed by light, air, and other programs on your computer if you don't handle it just right.
It is very very clear when people with no molecular biology experience start talking about biology, because it's clear you all have no idea what any part of the process looks like.
Even the vaunted DNA synthesis machines...only synthesize DNA. Which will be completely destroyed if you so much as breathe at it the wrong way (in fact don't breathe on it at all). And that's like step 2, because step 1 is "grow up a candidate organism in sterile conditions, isolate and characterize it".
That stupid longtermism movement is god damn obsessed with this concept, and it's stunning how clueless they are.
How?
If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out. If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ... then I would say it is far beyond the possibility of a basement workshop to remotely design anything like this. I doubt the professional state labs can create something to wipe out humanity. Dramatically disturb? For sure. Covid was not really deadly in comparison, but already problematic.
> supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age,or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
It's defintiely gonna be a hard life if WW3 ever happens but I think with hydroponics and other advancement, a localized community can still have chances of making sense of things.
It definitely wouldn't be this life where we can eat almost anything but it won't be starvation either, hopefully.
For water, we might have to do reverse osmosis or boiling+condensing to remove radiation.
The biggest issue to me seems energy. Solar energy might be hard to get if nuclear storms are made over any region which I do think iirc can even stay till decades.
Temporarily Windmills and then primarily Hydroenergy is still possible tho but it might take some time to rebuild it if it got destroyed by Nuclear attack so energy to just produce food/water is possible but everything to me feels like it would be strictly rationed. You might have some spare energy for Radio.
I am not sure how food is gonna be distributed, perhaps a new system of work would be designed within community where community gives food and you give what the community might need to get work done.
I feel like though we are gonna slowly improve our Energy situations and as we do that, society can progress back to say a mathematician who can work on theorms which might require computers/energy and just computers in general back.
The quality of life would drop but I would consider tho that the people already in war-struck regions where they don't know if they are gonna be the next target of a messy war have their Quality of life significantly dropped as well.
Now the virus point is something that I don't exist similar to Lukan's comment tho.
- very deadly
- asymptomatic spreading for a couple days
- spreads easy
- no tests/vaccine (early on)
It did kill a lot of people, that's for sure, and caused a huge disruption. But was far less disruptive, imo, than e.g. a nuke in multiple big cities would have been, even if the death toll was similar.
what about bio weapons? smallpox in the americas, for an example of many at the page below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...
Ah but this is where modern technology comes in! Social media, Tiktoks, video games, porn...
It is interesting to think about the difference of livestreaming versus television.
That's describing something that's not a world war, though. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is already far worse than what you're describing as WW3. (setting aside nuclear escalation)
old men's*
Hannibal was in his 20s when he lead the Carthagian campaign against Rome.
Napoleon began at 26 and had conquered half of Europe at 35.
War being a business of old men sending young men to die is a modern thing.
If we only still had a few hundred million of them still alive, it's the proven most effective thing anybody has ever had to prevent mindless war and/or nuclear war.
And they would all be between 100 and 150 years old by now.
Now that's elderly, and if the human race were to have been blessed with such a miracle it would be so good for them to continue teaching their lessons to those who never had the chance, and are just not mature enough to have any other clue yet.
It was only when one stood back to regard the whole picture that it became clear that something larger was happening.
OP is making the same point.
US's military power is too strong. Russia is in such a bad shape that it can't even win Ukraine. China never goes to any war; their equipments suck as we saw in the Venezuela occurrence.
Nobody is going to help Iran. China and Russia only see Iran as the enemy of my enemy. Other than that, Chineses and Russians are likely disgusted by Iran's culture e.g. how they treat women. It would be like wtf why are we helping people like this?
The world will continue being policed by US and Europe.
But to quote Fiona Hill in regards to China, Russia and iran.
--------------------
The Chinese have told the Europeans many times when they've been asked, 'Why are you continuing to support Russia? And why do you want Russia to win?' that, 'Well, if we wanted Russia to win, they would have won.'
Also, if they wanted Russia to lose, Russia would probably have lost.
China is, again, just gauging their support and playing all of this out, gaming it out, really, as to how it affects the United States one way or another.
The same is true of North Korea and Iran, she says: support for Russia has been built on antipathy towards the United States and their own beef with the United States.
This one always interested me. I assume they were given a lot of the tech from China, and China probably told diplomats that if NK is invaded China might get involved.
I'm not supportive of these strikes. Iranians created this government, and if they want to topple it they'll have to be the ones to do it, without foreign intervention.
Well, foreign intervention kind of worked in Syria, Libya and Iraq after a few backstops, didn't it? All three countries reduced to rubble and virtually eliminated as threats to the US and Israel. Iran is next on the list, now that they're close to obtaing nukes. Let's not kid ourselves, they're not doing it for the Iranians, the're doing it for themselves. Regime change on their own terms, or if that isn't possible, yet another civil war.
With Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, the US is bottling up Russian and Chinese global influence into smaller regional influence.
Iran basically has no state allies in the Middle East. Russia and China don’t seem any more committed than just arms sales.
What potential problem is upsetting the ethnic Apple cart in the region. We know countries like Iraq are a mix of Sunni and Shia with Iran supporting the Shia side quite significantly.
If the main supporting of Shia in the region (Iran) gets wiped out, Shia in varies countries like Iraq may feel much more vulnerable and make political moves preemptively.
If anyone does it'll be China giving them missiles to hit a US boat.
That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.
As for Iranian leadership, they just need to dig deep and wait this out. I can't imagine they don't have plenty of hardened bunkers.
As for North Korea: I think the situation is not solely about North Korea itself but China. China is kind of acting as protective proxy here. I don't see North Korea as primary problem to the USA, but to South Korea and Japan. Both really should get nukes. Taiwan too, though mainland China would probably invade when it thinks Taiwan is about to have nukes; then again China already committed to invasion - this is the whole point of having a dictator like Xi in charge now.
The situation Russia is in is interesting, because even though they are stronger than Ukraine, Ukraine managed to stop or delay Russia, which is a huge feat, even with support. As Putin does not want to stop, and Trump is supporting him (agent Krasnov theory applies), I think this has escalation potential. Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine daily - I think he does that because he already committed to further escalation against all Europeans. So Europeans need a nuclear arsenal, but european politicians are totally lame - see Merz "we will never have nukes". Basically he wants to be abused by Putin here.
Are France's 240 submarines-launched thermonuclear ballistic missiles not adequate? Despite the need for security, nuclear proliferation is extremely bad. It seems ideal for France continue to maintain their nuclear weapons while the rest of Europe keeps their hands clean.
It's nice nationalistic rhetoric, but there is literally no upside for them.
No way this many rich powerful people would go down without destroying at least half of the world.
Maybe not in the details, but the general geopolitical "axes" (USA/the "West" vs China/Russia/BRICS/"Global South"/etc) have become increasingly obvious in the last years. And so far, most of the recent conflicts fit pretty neatly into that pattern.
Of course there are more things running in parallel, like the general shift to the right, Trump in the US, the specific situation with Israel/Palestine, the emergence of AI, etc.
But I don't see why any of this needs any other "grand secret cause" to explain the current conflicts.
A more accurate description of the way the world is trending:
US / UK / Europe / Japan / South Korea (still tied by defense, if push really comes to shove) vs Russia vs China vs Non-Aligned Nations (India, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc.)
And historically (1960s), in a multi-polar world, middle powers are best served by being ambiguously aligned to force advantageous courting by major powers.
I disagree with you on this. The revolution will never be live-streamed because the ability to do so is gated by the same people whom the revolution seeks to overthrow.
What's being live-streamed is the evolution of the status-quo towards growing hostility, violence, wars, and indeed - fascism.
I'm a little disappointed that the internet and social media had little impact on universal disclosure about geopolitical matters. My sense is that governments updated their playbooks to both defend against them (e.g. minimize leaking) and leverage them (e.g. bury inconvenient information with propaganda). By comparison, I'm more hopeful about cellphones and bodycams generally reducing excessive police violence and discrimination (emphasis on "reduce").
prediction: the nuclear threat will look quaint compared with disposable million-drone swarms on land and in the air, targeting anything remotely interesting via onboard AI.
I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
But their goal is targeted and precise attacks, that effectively destroy targets based on specific, and high quality intelligence.
The other part is that defense against missiles is significantly harder and more expensive than sending missiles. Iran, while relatively poor, has dedicated a significant part of its economy for missile development and production.
How exactly attacking Iran make their country great? Murdered million children in Iraq and now they started their terrorism in Iran.
English is not my first language. If you got a better word other than American terrorists and American terrorism, then suggest me one.
It is, because it might impact normal citizens. Nobody has ever invaded US so coensequences of real war are unknown to most.
Yes, the USA and Israel are putting an end to a 47 year war of Iran vs. Everyone. There will be casualties on every side, that is war. Iran made the middle east into a giant PVP server. That is coming to an end.
Congrats America!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/feb/27/pakistan-...
It would benefit the entire world to see Iran integrated and engaged internationally.
I think they don’t have an argument because technically the missile can be de-activated up until the last seconds before it reaches its intended target
Still it feels surreal to argue about these things , bomb dropping on humans and other humans attacking each other for the privilege to have their bet honored on when said bombs dropped on the other side of the world
I guess people in intelligence communities had these sort of bets going on ever since WW2 and Vietnam , but still it’s uncanny to see it widespread to potentially the whole population of the internet
You can get an edge here by moving your ass somewhere where you can see the planes take off, maybe a team with people at multiple locations - boats near the aircraft carrier, near military bases in Israel, ...
>White House officials believe ‘the politics are a lot better’ if Israel strikes Iran first
>As the administration mulls military action in Iran, officials argue it’d be best if Israel makes the first move.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/25/white-house-politic...
This website lets you zoom in on the Ukraine-Russia battlefront and place Polymarket bets on land being taken by Russia. We may be closer to big private company betting on wars than we'd like to think.
[1] pizzint.watch
"In order to get elected Barack Obama will start a war with Iran"
—Donald Trump, Nov 29, 2011
"Barack Obama will attack Iran to get re-elected."
—Trump, Jan 17, 2012
"Now that Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin watch for him to launch a strike on Libya or Iran. He is desperate."
—Trump, Oct 9, 2012
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2026/02/28/k...
What even is the plan here if the air assault fails? Boots on the ground? In Iran?
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Calling for the people to rise up. You can't bomb your way into regime change. Are we supplying arms to groups?
Is there a plan beyond pointless death and regional chaos the president would like to share?
Not in the sense of "I don't ideologically agree with our decision to do this," but in the sense of, "I do not see how this accomplishes any ideological or practical goal."
What are they trying for? Regime change in Iran? No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before. Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
A US president who vocally and repeatedly promised he would not start new conflicts keeps starting them, and there's not even a reason. It's infuriating. I have my partisan opinions, but that should not be a partisan statement! It's just disturbing!
Spend down my savings and assets till I have almost nothing to exit tax, exit, and then start working again.
I don't want to fund the bombing of strangers I have no quarrel with.
The American political system is captured by two neoliberal (one now post liberal, fascist) parties, and you have to sell your soul to "accomplish" anything, only to watch it yet ratcheted away by your own party, or obliterated by the fascists.
I can't think of a better use of US military power in the world than to take out this terrible regime and let the Iranians do the rest. This isn't Iraq or Venezuela. People saying that we can't bomb our way into regime change apparently didn't follow the protests and massacres very closely a couple months ago. Iranians were begging for help so that they could topple the regime.
Of course people didn’t follow. Did you see any major news outlet doing live coverage of the events like they did for October 7th? No.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but if 89,95M of 90M people are just looking at from the sides for years, I'm still not seeing that this would motivate people to revolt. Same thing as with the young elephant growing up with the chains.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/01/trump-kham...
Successful regime change requires a far more significant investment in soft power than America & Israel's current right-wing leadership would even conceive of.
Israel did not mass bomb civilians, and Iranian agents did not commit sabotage against infrastructure on US soil.
I hope this pattern persists.
A hand full of determined Ukrainians managed to blow up North Stream, some people plunged part of Berlin into darkness for 2 weeks.
Power and data cables as well as pipelines are as vulnerable in the US, as they are here. Maybe even more so.
A regime that truly feared for its existence, might decide to escalate, since there is nothing to loose.
The US is aware of this, that's why they evacuated all their bases etc within range
I missed that press release. Where is it?
Within an hour Israel blew up an elementary school, killing 80 civilians.
Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.
Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology.
Wake up to the real world.
Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize.
Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
"Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.
But religion, and not pure materialism, is absolutely at the center of the motivation of these people, the leaders and the population alike. It's not just, as you say, a sham that the leaders use to control and mobilise the masses. Religious fanaticism is at the source of the actions and the very existence of the Islamic Republic. Just as religious fanaticism is at the heart of the worst excesses of Zionism and the at-worst-genocidal, at-best-apartheid policies of Israel. It's not just materialism! It's not just prosaic greed! These people are moved by a holy fervour.
Like, this is the central mistake of Marxism, for all its merits in analysing the "capitalist mode of production", it is absolutely false that material conditions and class struggle are the engine of history.
Yeah. Because people believe in in and leaders take advantage. DUH. Its not so peaceful religion all the way.
Sure, but it's even simpler.. The Ayatollah Regime funds regional terrorism. It destabilizes the region, gets people killed, and holds back progress.
Also, they are always seemingly always almost done building a nuke.. Which frankly nobody wants(not even them because they know they'd be obliterated the instant the world thought they actually had one or were about to for-reals have one).
They are BAD FOR BUSINESS both private AND PUBLIC.
As long as the rest of the region was developing eventually their number would be up. The recent uprising and massacre was the signal their number is up. Time to go, honestly signed all their neighbors.
Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
Can you provide an example of this in 2026?
It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban.
And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
The American ambassador to Israel recently publicly said that Israel has a "biblical right" to the whole of the middle-east! (Watch these two interviews to understand how cleverly, and strongly, Israeli politics is tied up with American evangelical Christianity to keep American polity tied to Israel's existence - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 and https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-mike-huckabee-022026 . Both these interviews give you a very insightful picture of how religious fundamentalist Israelis in power are total nutcases, supported by the American Christian fundamentalist fruitcakes).
If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
Huckabee one week ago:
"Citing the book of Genesis, Carlson asked whether the modern state of Israel had a right to the lands promised in the Bible by God to Abraham, stretching from the Euphrates River to the Nile, covering much of the Middle East. In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-...
Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor.
That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left.
2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism.
But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.
"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed.
Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.
Shunyata means everything is empty. Empty of what? Empty of inherent, independent existence. That means everything is connected -- not only connected, but mostly illusory, sitting on top of a reality that cannot be understood in terms of objects, processes, distinctions, or boundaries between objects. Sometimes, this connection takes on strange forms.
For example: The horrible reality of war was a direct cause for your compassionate unease. I.e. war acted as a cause for compassion. This is strange. How do we reconcile this disturbing relationship, where a compassionate response is directly the child of war? In other words, horrific war has given rise to compassion, and this is a causal relationship, in the same way that a child arises from a mother. So, violence and love can arise from each other? What? Are they not supposed to be opposites?
The next step is a bit more provocative. Shunyata seems to imply that, since everything lacks inherent and independence existence, then suffering is not a part of the human condition. Instead, it is a mental construct. It isn't that the suffering of humanity does not exist; it's that it is constructed by the mind.
Deleuze and Guattari offers an interesting viewpoint on this. There are various intensities that do arise naturally. Injury, for example, is an intensity. But, suffering itself is not "really-real" unless we reify the intensities as suffering. And eliminating suffering partially involves the non-reification of intensities into suffering.
Obviously, easier said than done.
Anyway I'll leave it there. It's probably quite easy to destroy my points here, so I would appreciate it if people steelmanned my comment instead of strawmanning it. Shunyata is a genuinely useful discussion from a mental health and human flourishing standpoint. And has some very interesting and rigorous logic behind it. (see Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna)
(Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives
(Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
What a time to be alive, again! And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis:
This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict.
The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]:
> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.
In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]:
> [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.
Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3].
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil.
Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including:
1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil;
2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it;
3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and
4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet.
If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it.
[2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...
[3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...
Since the beginning of the Green Revolution¹, no. The source of these conflicts are always ideological. Always. Ideology may come through religion or some other medium.
Countries don't go occupying land because they need crops or slaves anymore. Material is always cheaper to buy than to get from an occupation. The desire to annex some land is always for somebody's pet project, it doesn't make economic sense.
1 - In a very wide sense. Agriculture stopped being the bottleneck for human populations at some point in the 18th or early 19th centuries.
Airstrip one is disappointed.
Including for the U.S. and Israel?
Iran has an unelected supreme leader.
Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
The US has a generally democratically elected government.
If one of these governments is going to fall during military instabilities, it would most likely be Iran. The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
This comment just shows that you have no idea what Iran is, and how it differs from Libya.
Libya is a loose conglomerate of tribes. Iran majorly Persian that see themselves as one nation. Completely different dynamics.
The US and Israel are involved. The only way it’s going to turn out is maximally lethal to all those not involved at all.
See… basically any military operation participated in by those nations in recent history.
We got a couple strikes and already managed to hit an elementary school. Nothing I’ve seen in Gaza or Iraq leads me to believe this will be any different.
I don't think any of these were short.
That would be ideal but unfortunately not likely. Nobody will like this comment but US ships are sitting ducks. They have minimal ammo per the pentagon and no oilers. No oilers and low ammo means no prolonged conflict. Only two of the ships are nuclear powered not counting submarines. Most of Iran's military and weapons are deep underground in a massive series of underground cities and tunnels. The US would require boots on the ground if they manage to breach the tunnel openings under the mountains. Should that fail the only viable targets are civilians and that won't win favor with anyone or accomplish anything.
Iranian military could just wait it out if they wanted and then smoke Israel with supersonic missiles when the US leaves. Then we find out if Israel does have the nukes for the Samson option and that would result in the destruction of Israel. Iran's military could survive a nuclear strike but would have to clean up the fallout and I am not sure they could. Anyone not underground would likely get Acute Radiation Sickness and Cancer.
On a positive note if the US can manage to get into the tunnels and send in enough munitions to start detonating the missile stockpile a chain reaction could crack all the concrete and collapse the tunnels. Satellite could detect which tunnel they try to evac from. They have less than 5 days to accomplish the chain reaction assuming this is the plan. From the videos I have seen the missiles are literally lined up like a double-strand fuse.
[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/us-and-israel-attac...
“Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 80 people”
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-...
Welp, better luck next time
Eventually, it was established that 1) the casualty number had been a fabrication, 2) the explosion was in the parking lot, 3) it was NOT caused by an Israeli strike, but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had fell short.
Soon the press was forced to issue corrections - New York Times [1] , Le Monde [2], BBC [3]...
This incident looks VERY similar. Which is not surprising, since Hamas was trained in information warfare by the IRGC. Note that Al Jazeera (the media arm of Qatar, who funds Hamas and hosts their leaders in Doha) is enthusiastically amplifying this story with no apparent effort to cross-examine Iran's official source.
I predict that this story will turn out to be fabricated as well.
UPDATE: preliminary reports from the OSINT community seem to indicate that the story was indeed a fabrication... https://x.com/tarikh_eran/status/2027784301840846939
[1] https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2023/the-new-york-times-e...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/10/24/a-no...
[3] https://deadline.com/2023/11/bbcs-international-editor-grill...
Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.
Because America and Israel.
It gives us a regional coalition partner. That's never a bad thing, regardless of circumstances.
You missed the point. The fact that it requires two of them to gang up on Iran says something about how capable Iran is in defending itself.
And yeah Iranians out of Iran definitely hate it too.
No, support will never falther.
It was the Druze and they were actually being killed.
"The friend of my enemy deserves to die" is not an attitude you have to adopt, even if you disagree with the Israeli response to the killings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2025_massacres_of_Syrian...
I bet this story is a fabrication as well.
Are you claiming that Iran (or Hamas) site their military bases away from schools (or hospitals)?
https://apnews.com/live/us-israel-strikes-iran-khamenei-03-0...
That said, if the US/Israel didn't do it, we'd have heard a denial by now. Perhaps the target was a nearby military site. Placing military sites next to schools sounds like a tactic from the Hamas Resistance handbook.
Without some confirmation, everything is propaganda, isn't it? Jeez... there is no greater force that that to have one's bias confirmed, is there. That is going to destroy us.
Some people are getting killed so more people should be killed?
Did you see non-stop coverage about it from NYT, WaPo or others? No.
How is the Epstein Regime going to survive this politically? How is the Senate (Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, etc.) going to survive this politically?
Furthermore if Reza Pahlavi does manage to integrate into the society, he will most certainly use his business and political ties here in the US to westernize the society. He's said as much. Some of the more well known Iranian-American business leaders here in the US (CEO of Uber, CEO of intuit, founder of eBay for example) I'm sure would contribute to work towards this also.
There will be push-back from rural areas (just like anywhere else) and the regime will not go away overnight, but the possibility does exist for this outcome. I think the biggest roadblock would be America and Israel intentionally preventing this outcome for the reasons that suit them geopolitically.
EDIT: should have mentioned that after decades of widely known voter manipulation and more or less "mock" elections, Iranians would be happy to finally participate in actual democratic processes where their votes and voices matter
You can hope that (and I can hope that), but the powers that are driving this military action completely do not care about this outcome. Which makes it exceedingly difficult for me to think this will happen.
I know the US proxies keep blabbering about 'regime change', but there's zero intentionality behind the political work to do that. My guess is balkanization, which won't really go how the US/Israel wants it to go
The Taliban ruling Afghanistan and an unstable coalition in Iraq.
You know how much we spent? $5.8 to $8 trillion.
Democracy in the middle-east does not result in Israel or US aligned governments, but the monarchies have proven more interested in preserving their autocratic dynasties and quite easy and eager to work with Israel and the US to preserve themselves.
We saw significant success with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the past. But more recently, similar efforts seem to have ended in failure.
If by that you mean that Iran will become a toothless vassal state of the U.S.-Americans, then God forbid.
I was thinking more along the lines of Japan or South Korea. Militarily restrained, but prosperous and strong.
I understand that recent military actions have often made things worse, not better. I am just trying to stay optimistic. From what I know, many Iranians are not enthusiastic about religion controlling law and politics.
Even accepting this, how exactly are these peaceful, western friendly civilians going to withstand a war better than their country's army?
It's very depressing to see this playbook credulously trotted out yet again. When has this worked?
If he pulls off a regime change, even a Delcy-style swaparoo, he'll get it, and arguably not undeservedly. It will ultimately come down to Iran's capacity to inflict casualties on American forces.
I think IRGCs are much more robust and zealous than whatever Maduro had.
He wasn’t even smart enough to leave America open to attack, manufacture a pretext, and rally people around the flag like 9/11
Heck, there was even a better case in Korea & Vietnam. Even Venezuela. What’s the case this is America’s problem?
The racists love it when Muslims get killed
To be clear, I don't think the chances of that happening are high.
The remaining neocons who have surprisingly managed to weasel their way back into influence.
I'm interested in what makes empires tick, what their basis of power is.
Spain in the colonial era was propped up by looting silver from Central and South America, for example.
The British Empire is what many (including me) like to call the "drug dealer empire". First tobacco then later opium. Any claims that we didn't know about the health risks of tobacco are complete BS (eg [3]).
Circling back to your point, the US is what I like to call the "arms dealer empire". WW1 and WW2 massively enriched the United States. NATO is essentially a protection racket for Europe and the price is, you guessed it, buying arms from the United States.
And the next Budget has proposed increasing "defense" spending from an already eye-popping $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion [4]. Where does that money go? Arms, weapons programs, defense contractors, the ultra-wealthy.
War is good for business even though it's unpopular.
[1]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54158-few-americans-suppor...
[2]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/
[3]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15198996/
[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-proposes-massive...
Congress will not let him have a third term regardless of what he says or thinks.
I can see JD being a figurehead with very public Trump support.
Lol, 'let'. Whose going to stop him?
Trump can literally do all the things that the epstein files accuse him of doing, right on camera in front of everyone, and Americans will still vote for him all because he isn't a "woke" black woman.
because it’s more comfortable than admitting they were wrong.
Trump: "The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties - that often happens in war."
Another republican president starting a war in the middle east, once again sacrificing American lives.
I think the only way to get away from the warmongering is to go for a third party. But even they would likely be corrupted by the excessive influence of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower was not only right, but plainly prophetic.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/list-of-c...
But yes, poor American soldiers.
Americans really have to be among the most gullible people on the planet.
Not to mention that Trump is a paedophile, the open corruption, attempted coup etc... it's like that Hemingway quote. The decline of the USA has been gradual, and then very sudden.
Coming from President Bone Spurs ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/john-kelly-con...
Honinbo-sensei, you seem to have failed to recognize puppy-go for what it is and also to identify the player.
Btw. They ARE not that far away from the bomb, after they enriched uranium as a consequence of Trump (in his first term) cancelling the Obama treaty.
But they ARE a theocracy and Ajatollah Chamenei released an order (fatwa) forbidding Iran from obtaining and using an a-bomb. The new religious leader might change the religious law tho. I mean the one that comes after Chamenei becomes a martyr.
Funny how, knowing just a little bit more, it all really looks like nonsense created for illiterate, just to take their attention off of Epstein Pedophile Scandal.
If that was true, obviously they would have built one buy now. Being one year away from building would be non-urgency inducing.
The constant lying about timelines does not imply Iran does not enrich uranium, but, as you remember, after the last bombing the leaders of the USA and Israel said they had completely obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Except, apparently After six months they are one week away from a nuke again.
This seems to indicate the USA should be bombing Iran every few weeks, forever, just in case they get a bit faster next time.
Except, when we don't have any scandal or other crisis going on, then Iran does not seem to be getting a nuke quickly. I wonder why.
After this, Israel, being the only nuclear power in the region and having massive funding from the American taxpayer, will dominate the entire region. This has always been the goal.
One hopes, anyway. That’s the best chance we have to remove the Nazis currently in power here.
Who say US is not regime? It is the world largest regime in the world, with bidders in every country to do their bidding, mass surveillance including their own country men. People blame only Russia, China, Iran etc when US have been doing the same for years.
Who says it isn't? Regime literally means a system of government [1].
Unless they edited, not GP. 2 things can be a regime at the same time.
Trump is democratically elected, for now.
I'm not actually sure if this is correct, English is not my native language.
Other than nukes that would be the only option if they can blast the doors to the underground military cities. They will have to do it fast as the ships will not sustain combat for more than 5 days with their current ammo per the pentagon.
The Iraqi government was a lot more stable.
What exactly do you imagine will replace the Iranian government that is worse?
Iran has shown that it is remarkably sane actually, given the aggression shown towards it by Israel and the US and has made a lot of efforts to reach a deal.
Remember, it was the US that exited the JCPOA and now it wants Iran to give up all its misses so that they would be defenseless.
I have no love for theocracies, but I do think the Iranian system is a lot better than the likes of Saudi Arabia, which we're buddy buddy with.
Oh and I guess the founder of Syrian branch of AQ and deputy head of ISIS running Syria is better that what was before too, in your book?
So I have hope that they'll find a way to organize when the current regime falls.
A regime that only controls the capital, leaving the rest of the country in a power vacuum leading to internal conflicts and sectarian violence that will eventually spill over the borders into Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq etc...
One of the issues with Iraq was that Rumsfeld didn't want to acknowledge that it takes more personnel post-toppling (to rebuild infrastructure and institutions) than during invasion. It seems like the current government could be prone to make the same mistake.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Cobra II. It's an excellent book.
What are you talking about?
Iraq is >95% Muslim, but there are a few different sub groups. With those numbers there were few in government then and now who are not Muslim.
Are the Americans going to bomb the Saudis next? or only if Israel ask for it?
What is the goal, to overthrow the regime, so success would mean a change of government?
(sorry, I haven't followed)
You mean in 10 years, when the US is a stable and high-functioning democracy with independent media, a universally liked, charming, and polite president, supported by both the right and the left, who finally manage to overcome their minor differences? Is... is this the direction this is all heading?
This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.
Besides, after this the collective west has no moral high-ground anymore, the global south will resent us more than ever. If other countries go to aggressive wars, our condemnation is worthless.
Trump is completely compromised and it was probably the powers that be who told them that this is how it is going to be.
They never had any morals, all for their business gains look at Middle East, Africa and Asian countries where they were involved. Europe always looked other way when US does something and vise versa.
As for moral high ground. Compared to whom? China? Russia? Myanmar?
But liberals will be quick to tell them they don't know best, better to just keep the oppressive ayatollah in power.
So like, I think this is the right choice, but Trump was elected by MAGA to avoid these kind of entanglements even when it was the right thing to do. In fact, I think “liberals” (not progressive) support this action more than many on the right.
Traditional left/right is not useful to understanding people’s support of our foreign policy in 2026 America. Tucker Carlson will hate this way more than Chuck Schumer.
Trump is a coward. He knows that boots on the ground will mean massive losses.
The only way he does that is if someone convinces him that they can go in and out very quickly.
Unlike Venezuela I doubt there are people in the right place to oust Khamenei.
Turns out they bombed him
Sounds like a good idea
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).
After all if your country is too small, it may be worthless to have nukes that probably would be destroyed by neighbors on launch...
The Houthis are still "threatening" to do things today after already being decimated and Hezbollah's strength more than halved.
I don't support any of these creeps but if any of them were minimally rational, they would have all gone to total war with Israel and the US the minute they realized what Hamas was doing on October 7th. They look even more naive than Europeans at this point.
Iran decided to play stupid games and found out.
Not sure it affects the outcome.
One of the recommended solutions was to bring tactical nuclear weapons back into the dialectic of deterrence extended to allied territories, so as to give US decision makers a range of options between Armageddon and defeat without a war. Global deterrence was ‘restored’ by creating additional rungs on the ladder of escalation, which were supposed to enable a sub-apocalyptic deterrence dialogue — before one major adversary or the other felt its key interests were threatened and resorted to extreme measures. Many theorists in the 1970s took this logic further, in particular Colin Gray in a 1979 article, now back in fashion, titled ‘Nuclear Strategy: the case for a theory of victory’.
...
In 2018 Admiral Pierre Vandier, now chief of staff of the French navy, offered a precise definition of this shift to the new strategic era, which has begun with Russia’s invasion: ‘A number of indicators suggest that we are entering a new era, a Third Nuclear Age, following the first, defined by mutual deterrence between the two superpowers, and the second, which raised hopes of a total and definitive elimination of nuclear weapons after the cold war’" [1].
I think the chances we see a tactial nuclear exchange in our lifetimes has gone from distant to almost certain.
1. According to the US and Israel, Iran has been a week away from having nuclear weapons for at least 34 years [1];
2. It's quite clear Iran could've developed nuclear weapons but chose not to. I actually think was a mistake. The real lesson from the so-called War on Terror was that only nuclear weapons will preserve your regime (ie Norht Korea);
3. Israel is a nuclear power. It's widely believed that Israel first obtained weapons grade Uranium by stealing it from the US in the 1960s [2];
4. In a just world, people would hang for what we did to Iran in 1953, 1978-79, the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions (which are a sanitized way of saying "we're starving you"); and
5. The current round of demands include Iran dismantling its ballistic missile program. This is because the 12 day war was a strategic and military disaster for the US and Israel.
Israel has a multi-layered missile defence shield. People usually talk about Iron Dome but that's just for shooting down small rockets. Separate layers exist for long-range and ballistic missiles (eg David's Sling, Arrow-2, Arrow-3). In recent times the US has complemented these with the ship-borne THAAD system.
Even with all this protection, Iran responded to the unprovoked attacks of the 12-day war by sending just enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences, basically saying "if we have to, we can hit Israel".
Many suspect that the real reason the US negotiated an end to the 12 day war was because both Israel and the US were running cirtically low on the munitions for THAAD and Israel's missile defence shield. You can't just quickly make more either. Reportedly that will take over a year to get replacements.
Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon. I suspect that's a big part of why the US and Israel are now trying so desperately to topple the regime and turn Iran into a fail-state like Somalia or Yemen.
I'm not normally one to encourage nuclear proliferation but when it's the only thing the US will listen to, what choice do countries have?
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-n...
[2]: https://thebulletin.org/2014/04/did-israel-steal-bomb-grade-...
1. Routinely calling for death to Israel and America, turning it into part of the national curriculum and sowing hate
2. Funding, training, supplying and directing multiple violent proxy organizations around the region which attacked Israel and undermined their own countries (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in West Bank and Gaza, other organizations in Iraq)
3. Enriching Uranium to clearly non-civilian grade in multiple militarily hardened facilities;
4. Directly attacking multiple Jewish targets around the world (like the AMIA and then embassy bombings in Argentina)
5. Attacking neighboring countries with ballistic and cruise missiles, like the attacks on Saudi Aramco in 2019
6. Holding international shipping and energy markets hostage by threatening to attack ships and tankers in the Persian Gulf
7. Abusing their own citizens, including public executions, persecutions and extreme violence
8. Providing support to Russia in their efforts in Ukraine, and especially drones used for indiscriminate dumb attack waves against civilians and infrastructure
Now we have people arguing that if they had just gotten nukes then they could have continued doing all of that.
I think you'll have to be more specific.
Or I guess to compare with your other observation: """Even with all this protection, Iran [sent] enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences""" -- It's not a binary of "have missile defense or not => every missile will be shot down". An amount of missile defense will make it harder for missiles to successfully hit a target.
Similarly with hypersonic missiles, it's not the binary of "I have a missile that's difficult to defend against, I win".
Having a sword which can defeat a shield isn't in itself sufficient to obsolete the shield. (Infantry can be killed with bullets, yet infantry remain an important part of fighting despite that).
The spring to a nuke is riskier than ever. That doesn't change that nuclear sovereignty is a tier above the regular kind, this is something every one of the global powers (China, Russia and America) and most regional powers (Israel) have explicilty endorsed.
More than taking control of Iranian petrol, this is probably more an attempt at cutting off China access to it (and also generally eliminating one of their allies), same as for the Venezuelan invasion.
In the first Gulf War, we placed the Patriot batteries around Israel, as they said that if an Iraqi biological or chemical SCUD attack hit Tel Aviv, they would vitrify Baghdad.
Having nukes doesn't prevent _anyone_ from attacking you, but it does constrain those attacks to conventional means. And what if you pulled off a decapitation attack against Tel Aviv? Well their fleet of nuclear capable subs would make you pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
I say "public case" specifically here, I don't buy that justification but it is still the one being used.
If Iran had deployable nukes, would they get invaded?
Name a country that got bombed to credibly destroy the government, and had nukes. I'll wait.
Yes. The US supports the monarchy, the Kurds and MeK. The CIA was revealed to have armed MeK (despite designation) and my guess is that they do with the Kurds too. The CIA also talks to the Balochi groups as well although I don't know how organized or armed they are.
Needless to say, "regime change" would in reality mean civil war like Syria or collapse like Libya.
The list of exemple is long enough, no need to add Iran.
We already had ISIS thanks to the mess in Irak and Libya.
Yes we can? Is there any provision in the US Constitution that allows delay of election because of war? We have had elections during most of our recent wars (Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan).
Trump could definitely try. Or pull an emergency card out of his ass. But it doesn't mean there is any provision for cancelling elections because of this 'war' with Iran (which they aren't even calling a war, but a "special combat operation" to get around congress having the war powers)
probably not, outside of making more revenue for raytheon
To be fair that's been the case for decades. Trump's hardly new in this.
I don't support it but there's blanket approval from Congress from the AUMF.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Authorization for Use of Military Force’’. SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. (a) IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Iran has negotiated like no one will ever attack it, and that was a correct assumption for decades
However, due to Iran's overly aggressive use of questionably rational proxies, Hamas has dragged it into a regional conflict where it lost most of its proxies power.
After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state, so the only leverage they had left was ballistic missiles, which were also handled quite reasonably by Israeli air defense.
In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal that heavily restricts Iran's ability to enrich as well as ICBM, trigger with existing uranium stockpiles removed.
As Iran due to ideological reasons refused, and IMO had miscalculated this will be a win-win, as losing will quell the protests, the only thing really left is the metaphorical stick
> The point is preventing another North Korea style nuclear blackmail state
The US and Israel are currently nuclear blackmail states. The rational move for Iran to prevent itself from being bullied is to have nukes like North Korea.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US
Fair if you're the US, sure.
Iran had a signed agreement, trump cancelled it. Israel literally killed Irans negotiators just a few months ago. What is this nuclear level ignorance.
> After the last war, it also is no longer a threshold state
That's also wrong. Trump claimed Iran's enrichment capabilities were totally destroyed, but they weren't.
> In this situation it is a fair request by the US to sign a nuclear deal
America already had a good deal. Trump got rid of it.
You can bomb the leadership all day long.
Without boots on the ground the regime will probably continue.
I don't see how this stops Iran from building nukes. Sure they may have a temporary set back.
But do you think this will change their minds?
Can they even negotiate a resolution with the US. Given that the current administration won't honor its own agreements.
Did Trump issue an ultimatum here? And demand something?
North Korea aspires be to be a Israel-style nuclear blackmail state.
Didn't we have one of those a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it /s
Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Iran is a bad guy state ... but the "fair" atgunent hwre dont apply.
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
I believe the calculation is this is Israel’s last best window of opportunity to leverage the declining American empire with a compromised asset in the White House. The time to strike is now, since in 10 years US military power and US political will in support of Israel will likely be diminished.
What are the strikes even against?
Do they seriously think that after Iran shot all the street revolutionaries, another group will come forward and collapse the government?
Are they treating Iran as Big Serbia? It's a very different situation!
Or is this just for the Posting?
[0] https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians
Wesley Clark: "We're going to take out 7 countries in 5 years":
Seems like it. I can't imagine what else they might try for.
I suppose USA might think some shock and awe will result in iran making concessions at the bargaining table, but that seems unrealistic to me.
> No more Iranian nuclear program? There barely was one before.
That seems very debatable.
> Keeping Israel safe? It's been an open secret for years that Iran is not a real threat to Israel, because any action it took against Israel would be existential for Iran and its leadership.
Well they did take action against israel (you could say they were indirectly responsible for oct 7). Now they are facing said existential threat.
---
Ultimately though. Iran has been a major threat to both israeli and US interests, largely by funding proxy groups that take violent action against those interests. That's your motive for a war.
Iran is currently weak, facing multiple internal and eexternal crisises.
A war is happening because there is a limited window where iran is weak but the window potentially won't remain. That's the reason behind a lot of wars in history.
The protests in Iran today are almost certainly being extensively backed by the CIA and other US organizations. Do not mistake a minority as necessarily representing much more than themselves. Of course they might (I certainly don't have any particular insight in the "real" Iran), but you could certainly see something similar happening in the US with extreme groups, left or right wing, becoming visibly active if they were able to find a strong backing/organizing power that made them believe that they could genuinely overthrow the government. The point being that the actions and claims of those groups would not necessarily represent the US at large.
Decoupling from China while taking out China’s allies is the overarching foreign policy.
It's bound to be incredibly successful at accomplishing that goal.
Similarly, wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were very successful in diverting attention away from 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being from Saudi Arabia, and later on from the funding provided to one or more of the hijackers by Saudi officials. With a certain Ms. Maxwell being asked to join the investigatory committee on the event in question.
Some people here might not be American or were too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq War, but it was transparently bullshit. Many people knew this. But if you dared say that, supporters would actively ruin your life. The Dixie Chicks were one of the most popular music acts in the US at the time, a country band that broke out of country and was getting huge appeal across the US. They dared to say they opposed the war. Their careers never returned.
Now with social media that isn't completely locked down, some voice of opposition can slip through and assure people that, yes, this is crazy. No, we don't need to blow the shit out of towns across the world. But these social media sites are all owned by government-aligned mega billionaires. They're rolling out AI that can comment and act very, very human and endorse everything the government does. They can auto-police opinions and spit out thousands of arguments and messages of harassment against them in seconds. Soon they'll be autoblocking any sense of disagreement.
It's at that point they can say that this is done to defend America. This is done to defend freedom. This desert country that's too screwed up to even manage its own internal affairs is somehow so dangerous that it's going to destroy the whole world with nukes it doesn't even have so we must destroy them all now. Dear leader always has your interests at heart. And you'll have no info to point to saying otherwise. Everyone who dares question it will be mocked, ridiculed, fired. Even if this administration fails, the tools are being built and laid out for the next, and I really don't know how humanity will overcome it. And I hate that I can't have optimism in this situation.
This discussion is one where it's worth looking at commenters' histories. Many have several pages where the bulk of their posts are defending Israel, saying war with Iran is necessary, and various related things. It's kind of spooky
How do you know?
>No other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale, complexity, and consequence as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Yet the Joint Force did so flawlessly and obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/202...
I do not think ceasing work is the right move, but definitely get involved politically and don't equivocate when you condemn our elected "representatives".
It might also soothe your soul to be in the company of like-minded individuals. A Quaker prayer is a sure place to find many.
The whole synthesis pipeline requires so much specific equipment and knowledge that at your kid in his/her basement would actually need a whole lab. By the way, good luck purchasing any consumable on sigma from your basement without accreditation. And I hope you have deep pockets because cell medium is expensive.
Good joke.
They've seen the writing on the wall about independent nukes for decades.
* WWII front collapse being more of a political failure than a military one: politicians dictating unachievable military strategies)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol (that was in 1939).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_Wor...
Of course it took longer for it to blow up into a truly global war (Pearl Harbor etc), but a conflagration across Europe is hardly a "small regional war".
Once Hitler invaded France the "phoney war" turned into a real war. [1]
trump got young men's votes by, inter alia, chanting "no new wars"
evne during obama's presidency, trump (and others) suggested obama would start a war to distract from dropping poll numbers
young men haven't voted for dulce et decorum est in a loooong time
> That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.
The right kind of missiles hitting the right kind of boat could lead to a very grave escalation.
I doubt there is anything Iran can do that make the US put boots on the ground.
There is no appetite for boots on the ground in the US. And no coalition behind the US.
Eight hours later Iran's navy was at the bottom of the sea.
And there is no Iranian leadership right now as far as anyone can tell.
I tend to agree with both of you, and that by extension, we will never see another world war unless society as we know it collapses significantly.
> A world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major powers. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war
> Total war is a type of warfare that mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain war production, blurring the line between military and civilian activities and legitimate attacks on civilian targets as part of a war without restriction as to the combatants, territory or objectives involved. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
It does so happen that the two world wars were also total wars.
In other words, “total war” is a necessary ingredient for a “world war” these days or you’ll have all of these countries claiming they’re not actually at war.
Topical the Israelis just killed Khamenei.
Russians are not under food rationing yet.
More than the war, they’ll feel the peace. More than 100% of the economic growth of the last few years has gone into war production, meaning the civilian economy has shrunk. When the weapons factories are scaled back the economy is going to hurt something fierce. Even Muscovites will notice.
This is why Putin can’t stop fighting. When the fighting stops Russia will face a reckoning. Better to postpone that day hoping that Europe runs out of steam.
I think he meant one of these:
1) Biological agent, but not meant to be a weapon.
2) A biological weapon, but one that fails catastrophically.
While more average US citizens and service members recognized the folly in greater numbers through time because of it.
It was the somewhat more extreme faction of the anti-war crowd that would have been in favor of a revolution of some kind, mainly because Nixon needed to be toppled ASAP without a doubt, they were just the most disruptive when it comes to "whatever it takes."
That's why the old saying was coined, "The revolution will not be televised."
And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).
To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.
> Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).
While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.
No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.
To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".
You could be entirely right. Honestly I hope you are right. We lost far too many in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was probably just being cynical. I trust the decisions of the senior leaders in the military but their commander and chief tends to trust the wrong advice.
The only possible correction I might add is the Air Force probably will not drop bombs but would have to fire missiles. The openings are on the sides of mountains and require horizontal access or I suppose incredibly massive bombs. Earth shattering bombs. Something closer to tactical nukes which the US has not stockpiled in a long time AFAIK.
Israel has enough genocide at home, no need to invade other countries
They left because they were unhappy with things. The former British folks are enraged about human rights abuses and societal collapse in Britain. The ex-Christians will rarely praise the Bible.
Not that there's zero weight, it's still a perspective to consider. But it has to be fact checked thoroughly.
Yeah, so much propaganda. We can see it with our own eyes.
Bigotry has been a big part of the Moral Majority's platform for decades for a reason - it works on that demographic
I have an armchair theory about one possible contributing factor
These are two of the most fundamental beliefs of evangelicals and they don't make much sense when you put them side-by-side:
1. God is the ultimate progenitor and prototype of love
2. God wants to torture a LOT of people forever, some of whom you may know personally and may be all appearances be decent people
This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance
Rather than reconsider those beliefs (which may result in your own everlasting torment), it's far easier to resolve that discomfort by dehumanizing non-Christians. Maybe they're actually really rotten people that deserve to be tortured
(2) It's only the constitution that requires an act of congress, and that document is not considered applicable by the current king.
>In August 2025, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview with i24NEWS that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" and that he is "very" attached to the vision of Greater Israel, which includes Palestinian areas and possibly also places that are part of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.
>Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested that Israel is destined to expand to include Jordan, and even beyond, to parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and even Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
It is absolutely not a coincidence that most of the places mentioned in that list are also places that the US has been waging war for the past generation: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq.
>Hillel Weiss, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, has promoted the "necessity" of rebuilding the Temple and of Jewish rule over Greater Israel.[44][45][46] Francesca Albanese and Amos Goldberg have said that an aim towards a Greater Israel is a factor during the Gaza genocide.[47][48] According to Yoav Di-Capua, one of the beliefs of the Hardal movement is "the obligation to retrieve the biblical land of Israel in its entirety as a pre-requisite for collective redemption which heralds the arrival of the Messiah"
They are driven to continue taking land in the middle east because they have a religious belief that their Messiah will arrive when they fulfill the prophecy.
IT was a dictatorship, of course, but not a theocratic one.
- it costs money and attention
- good is not the same as perfect (there are some casualties from time to time)
That's not technically true, seeing as how Washington DC was captured and burned in 1814. But it's at least true for modern times.
Putting it lightly, many Iranian (within Iran) do not support the current regime. Especially not the educated.
> All we know is that they did launch a missile that blew up a school. That's it. Just a little woopsies!
Ignore what schools are for and who are in them and what communities exist around them. Ignore that a school is clearly not a fucking military target. Ignore the workers digging through rubble and the reported deaths.
No, despite the past 25 years, the US and Israel's governments are not only trustworthy, but the only source of truth. There are no deaths in Ba Sing Se. There were nuclear missiles hidden in that school!
And, of course, I'm sure we'll hear next that any deaths were terrorists. And if any photos of lifeless kids come up, clearly they're some kind of pinatas or AI! And if their names and life stories come out and there are funerals - duh, state actors!
My country has completely lost its fucking mind. Which I guess makes sense enough after spending my entire adult life watching people basically shrug over little kids being gunned down at school.
Which, dang, that reminds me how Sandy Hook was also a conspiracy and I've had to suffer listening to the same exact "state actor" thing with that.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/03/06/pentagon-believes-u-s...
> Al-Shifa hospital was ultimately destroyed by Israeli forces
It was damaged by a series of battles between Hamas and IDF, because Hamas militants embedded themselves within it - like they embedded themselves within all civilian infrastructure. That is the reality of urban war against a terrorist group.
> with grave civilian casualties
Hamas alleged grave civilian casualties. Israel contests it. Again, just like the Al-Ahli incident, Hamas rushes to publish suspiciously precise casualties and reframes an urban battle as a genocidal massacre; naive newsrooms uncritically publish it; wikipedia editors quotes it; then people with an axe to grind endlessly reference it in online arguments like this one.
With Al-Ahli, we got lucky. Independent evidence made it impossible to ignore that Hamas was lying. In many other cases, it is impossible to independently verify how many civilians were truly killed in this or that battle. You have to either believe the IDF, or Hamas.
> and no Hamas tunnels ever found
Al-Shifa was controlled by Hamas and used as a military facility. Hostages were held there. After the ceasefire, Hamas used it as a jail and torture center for Palestinian dissidents.
Or do you believe Israel sent troops inside a hospital in a warzone, at great risk to their safety, to destroy a random hospital with no military value?
In other words, the new "established facts" about Al-Ahli are also questionable, and part of Israeli propaganda. It remains to be seen what the truth is in either case.
The fact of the matter is. Eventually Israel destroyed a fuckton of hospitals and schools in Palestine, on purpose. So this particular story in itself does not really matter.
[1] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...
Isn’t the far more likely explanation here that they (Israel / US) tried to strike an IRGC base and missed?
Before you ask "how's that going", remember that doing nothing wouldn't result in a satisfactory answer to that question either.
The idea that "killing the enemies turns the rest of the world into enemies" is absurd. Other countries wouldn't follow the Iranian regime into martyrdom. What would be the reason: "we don't like war"?
Nobody likes war, but also nobody likes evil dictators emerging on this planet and repressing 90 million of its inhabitants, and waging industrial scale terrorism offensives beyond its borders.
She sat they killed some of those rebels, it would have sparked more rebellions. The difference was political power, even in defeat. Mercy is a big part of survival.
It's a bit like law enforcement. If there's no police, criminals are everywhere. If there's too many police, corruption becomes the standard, along with police brutality and profiling. You can never get it down to zero, just low enough.
This reductionist narrative is absolutely ridiculous and does not at all reflect reality.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-...
I don't think it matters.
This is a short one showing the 2nd to last generation of tunnels. [1] The latest tunnels are painted white including some that are under water. The older tunnels are not painted and one can see what appears to be reinforced concrete. When completed every tunnel is lined on both sides with missiles. This one [2] shows a couple generations of the tunnels. Found the old CNN video. [3]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YQ1R7ZAKxE [video][1m]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQtSPFrnKvo [video][5m25s]
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gu_TjmV0E [video][2m12s]
True however AFAIK they have never once been in this situation. Iran has spent 40+ years digging in and hunkering down. There were plenty of bunkers in WWII but this is a whole new setup, deeper under mountains, higher quality concrete assuming they knew what they were doing and dug in much deeper. To get this done in 5 days will be quite a feet. If they manage to do it I will be very impressed.
It's providing peace and stability after that happens where they tend to run into problems.
I think you are correct, what happens afterwards is usually a crap-fest. That would require a lot of boots on the ground to maintain stability for a very long time. It's not a great example but Korea is one such example. The payoff may be worth it if many of the Iranian funded terror groups are drained of resources as a result. Keeping boots on the ground for years will require funding from congress. Short of that it will just be another power vacuum filled by yet another zealot. The "if's" are doing a lot of heavy lifting in my comment.
I imagine that's the strategy, anyway.
My biggest concern has always been that US military action against Iran would undermine domestic factions pushing for democratic reforms, at best leading to the installation of a different autocratic regime more amenable to US interests, at worst leading to a wellspring of support for the existing regime both internally, and externally in the form of alliances with other nations who stand to benefit from a reshuffling of the existing world order.
An autocrat regime friendly to US interests, who we could do business with, who won't pursue nuclear weapons, and who won't imperil US allies or the Strait of Hormuz would be a drastic improvement over the current state of affairs.
We don't need to nation-build to have a good outcome for the US: that's something we should've learned after Iraq and Afghanistan.
An improvement over the current regime isn't exactly a high bar.
Even speaking as a someone who generally detests the policies of both Trump and the current Israeli administration, while I don't expect the entirety of the IRGC to go quietly into the night, I can't help but see the removal of the Ayatollah as a good thing.
As for the broader question of democracy in the Middle East, I believe the answer is yes, though not quickly or easily. But an independent, democratic Iran coexisting peacefully with Israel and the US, however unlikely, would certainly be a good start.
For what it's worth, I think the American activists on this issue bungled the messaging to disastrous effect (in the same way we bungled criminal-justice reform). It's a saturated issue with low political salience outside a specific (and increasingly constrained) demographic.
A win in Iran will be a short-term boost, in America and in Israel. Then we'll go back to being pissed about rising prices.
Israel chose to trade popularity for having real geopolitical gains on the ground. Popularity could be won back later, but removing the Iranian ring of fire around it is a real and tangible achievement that would last decades and change the Middle East.
It remains to be seen what impact this will have, but it will certainly impact the ability for everyone to claim that criticism of Israel and sympathy for Palestinians is motivated by antisemitism.
The democrats lost the last election in part because of their stance on Israel.
With a bit of luck this could lead to a shift in policy within a generation.
Ukraine and weapons of mass destruction
Ukraine, formerly a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory.[1] The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[2] Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia)[3] and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[4] While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, they were not under Ukraine's control.[5]
In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.[6][7] Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
Btw, reference [5], used to justify the absurd claim that those weapons were in Ukraine's territory but not under its control, goes like this:
{{cite Hansard |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993... |title=Nuclear Weapons |speaker=[[Jeremy Hanley]] |position=Minister of State for the Armed Forces |house=[[House of Commons (United Kingdom)|House of Commons]] |volume=227 |date=June 22, 1993 |column=154 |access-date=September 9, 2018 |quote=Some weapons are also possessed by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but these are controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States.}}
So it's basically the words of a UK MP assuring his audience that, nooo, don't worry, Ukraine doesn't control its WMD.
Reread your parent comment, the concept of a threshold nuclear state is that they are constantly a month away, for years. That's the entire point, being effectively a nuclear state without holding a nuclear weapon
The problem I have with this doctrine is that if it's supposed to deter an opponent who already has a nuclear deterrent, they may decide their deterrent is not so deterring anymore and actively go and use it against you.
The whole idea of nuclear deterrence relies on all parties being rational and sensible about nuclear weapons use, but I don't see a lot of rationality in the current eventuality.
Which is fine.
"In theory, the term need not imply anything about the particular government to which it relates, and most social scientists use it in a normative and neutral manner. The term, though, can be used in a political context. It is used colloquially by some, such as government officials, media journalists, and policy makers, when referring to governments that they believe are repressive, undemocratic, or illegitimate or simply do not square with the person’s own view of the world. Used in this context, the concept of regime communicates a sense of ideological or moral disapproval or political opposition" [1].
> Trump is democratically elected, for now.
He was convicted felon before the election, I cannot believe that he won.
"Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored / He was tryin' to create a next world war / He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor / He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before / But yes I think it can be very easily done / We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61"
Thank you
Maybe they do, but this is also fairly common and cannot be ruled out at this early stage: https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FHCQpcrMbkAAz6Vw.jpg
The problem you have when you try to shield your armed forces with civilians is that you then place those civilians in danger.
What do you expect will happen when an armed force uses civilians as shields? It's not a rhetorical question, I really want to know what you expect an attacking force to do. Stop attacking?
https://youtu.be/SxqipJgtTdk?si=YfWRzjcflhWHR276
(Note: Iran did move some stuff away before the attack)
They’re also nice countries, with governments and organisation. Places like Afghanistan have nothing. You have to try and start civilisation from scratch, in a hostile land.
Iran has a lot though so it could work there.
Covid wasn't "very deadly" at all.
Now, if you want something that will keep you up at night:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
Without a vaccination, it killed 12.9% of people who were infected, killing mostly older people and people who had multiple pathologies (eg. hypertension).
Especially when half of adults in america are hypertensive.
And how exactly would Iran be 'ours' without boots on the ground in this scenario?
I was curious if America's largest base, Fort Bragg, has any elementary schools in it. I found at least 1.
Feel free to disagree with the death tolls and the demographics of the victims, but the bombings are very much real...
I see two issues with this assessment. First, I am not sure how substantial is the support from the people. And second, Assad also had all this control over the military, the local governments, etc., etc., and then his rule collapsed in a week.
While Islamic Republic's repressive machine in the form of IRCG and Basij are in much better shape than Assad's, it is not that great if they had to bus in Iraqi militias to help with the suppression of protests.
I do agree that it is not clear if there are viable opposition figures inside Iran, on the other hand it is naive to expect it to be the case given the tight grip IR had on the country.
I guess we can hope that all this war is not for nothing.
I'm not sure what's the logic behind that PR-wise, but regardless, it didn't happen.
Part of it is the stated idea that Israel still has public support. That such an exchange, even if Israel launches the first strike, would get more support. This is probably misjudging the actual public support for Israel, which is much lower amongst the general public than amongst (esp. Republican) political circles.
The other part of it is that Trump has surrounded himself with card-carrying nazis, who have not at all been subtle about their desires to harm jews.
> but regardless, it didn't happen.
That Israel didn't launch the first strike and instead insisting on a joint strike (despite otherwise being constantly warmongering), suggests to me that it's the latter 'part' of the reason that had a lot of weight here.
I used to believe that, too, until the Russians found a few vials in a random storage cabinet. The fact is we have no idea how many samples exist and where they all are.
Fortunately, we already know how to make a smallpox vaccine.
Yeah IIRC Yudkowski famously said something about a super intelligence could derive the theory of gravity correctly by seeing only three frames of a video depicting an apple falling from a tree. This is the same Less Wrong nonsense, rejecting how vital and irreplaceable experimentation is.
There's an infinite number of explanations for the location of an object in three equally time-spaced instances. Not to mention limitations of the measuring equipment itself.
Thanks for putting it the way you did. I didn't knew it was meant be that way, but it sort of confirms my suspicion that people who use the term 'rational' and 'logic' loosely often to dismiss an opposing view never really seek experimental results before having a point of view.
This is a made up equilibrium that actually does not need to exist in nature.
Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.
> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon,
Trivially: you actually can have a virus that kills everything it touches not soon. Nothing in biology or chemistry or physics prevents it.
Sure, but those two things would tend to work against it becoming a pandemic— unless it managed those two things but also kept its host healthy enough for long enough before becoming lethal to adequately spread it.
I am clearly referring to this specific scenario. There is nothing in chemistry or biology or physics that prevents it.
There was a study showing almost every revolution happened not because of ideology but over the price of bread.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/us-and-israel-launch-a-ma...
Thanks.
So that’s why said Iranians chant Javid Shah?
Iran is a big complex country and is more diverse than people think.
The whole reason the 1979 revolution happened in the first place was because the Shah was a blatant US/Israeli puppet
unpopular shah -> 1979 revolution -> islamists take control, prison and kill the leftists of 1979 revolution.
- Military - their regional proxies destroyed, missile and drone stocks low, provably weak air defences.
- Economically - the currency is worthless, extreme inflation for seven years and hyper inflation for a few months, the economy is currently producing nothing due to unrest, they have a massive water shortage of their own making. They have no goods worth exporting. Their oil is sanctioned, meaning only China will buy from them and at a steep discount. And oil is extremely cheap at this minute.
- Politically - they have no friends willing to bail them out. Russia has no money to spare. China doesn’t care about anyone outside of China. North Korea is even poorer. All sections within Iranian society detest the mullahs running the government. They’re hanging on by killing tens of thousands of protestors.
Trump bets that Iran’s leaders are at their weakest since their war with Saddam ended in 1988. Meaning now is the best time to negotiate a deal where they hand over their fissile material and uranium enrichment equipment. In return they could get a heavy water reactor(s) that produces energy but no fissile material.
If he lets this opportunity slip Iran could fix all of their many problems in a year or three. Manufacture more missiles and drones. Build up their proxies once more. Maybe the price of oil recovers. Russia’s war ends and they aid Iran best they can. The economy recovers and the Iranian people stop trying to overthrow the government. Maybe a conflict starts elsewhere that draws America’s full attention.
Will Trump get that deal? Probably not. That fissile material is the only leverage the mullahs have. If they give it up they’ll be toppled like the other dictators who gave up their weapons programs - Gaddafi and Saddam.
But if you don’t ask you don’t get, right?
It was one of the primary triggers for the protests. People are very upset about the economy and willing to protest and die for it.
Yes, although it had merit it was far worse than what can be signed now, especially the sunset clause was problematic
> Seriously, though: how can Iran both be so powerful we must avoid it becoming a blackmail state, and so weak and feckless it's not a threat to anyone?
that's the nature of nuclear weapons, your conventional force can be abysmal (pretty much NK situation vs US) and yet you can create epic destruction
> And didn't we already attack them to stop them from getting nuclear capabilities?
Yes, the thing here is the long term goal of signing a deal, whose main goal is removing the existing highly enriched uranium from Iran and restricting their ability to redevelop nuclear capabilities. Essentially this is the part where "Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means" (to highly paraphrase), because the alternative to a deal is maintenance attacks such as these every two years
All the people who huffed about Kamala and Trump being sides of the same coin have brought us to this stage. You think Kamala's admin would be anywhere as venal, corrupt, blatantly unlawful as this?
I could be wrong, but I don't buy the public story that this is about regime change. You don't topple a government with air superiority alone, and you don't do it in a matter of days. I also don't expect the US would be okay letting the Iranian people pick who comes next. We have a history of installing puppets and that similarly doesn't happen only via bombing runs.
Khamenei: Dead. Ahmadinejad: Dead.
Maybe the US/Israel have a list of people they plan on making "ineligible" to run Iran? Then let the people choose from whoever's left?
We'll see how many people get ticked off the checklist, but if it's a long list then I would say regime change is a more plausible story.
Will it be as obvious as Karzai? Probably not.
So all it stops is kinetic attacks? Do you not think that's a big deal? I'm pretty sure Iran and Khamenei think that's a big deal.
What do you mean by "How does that factor in here right now?"?
It pretty obviously does. How does it NOT?
> I don't buy the public story that this is about regime change.
They had Khamenei killed.
But this is also a topic very different from the nukes one.
Honestly, maybe? Like if we had high confidence we knew where they were, and Israel consented to the attack, I could absolutely see the U.S. trying to take it out in storage.
If Iran had a nuke that could hit the U.S., I'd say no. But that's a stretch from "deployable nukes."
> Name a country that got bombed to credibly destroy the government, and had nukes
Pedantically, Ukraine.
That's a very big gamble. They only need to have hide one on a cargo ship and the attacker is going to have a Very Bad Day.
Nobody's made that gamble yet. Yes, there's been kinetics between India and Pakistan, and Iran sending missiles at Israel, but not a credible threat to the state.
> Pedantically, Ukraine.
Not sure when you mean. Did they get bombed while they had physical control in the early 90s? They never had operational control, but now that they're being bombed they don't have even physical control of nukes.
I'd agree, it's not a given that the US can count on Europe in a conflict with China.
But probably Europe wouldn't be trading with China or anything.
It's just given the treatment of the US administration, the US probably can't build a volunteer coalition like I Iraq - unless there is an attack on US mainland.
I doubt NK sent anything to Russia without payment in hard currency (gold).
It's true that many countries are trying to have relationship with both sides or are trying to keep all options open - which is the most reasonable strategy, I think - but there are still two power centers emerging between which those countries are aligning themselves.
Yes. There is US and Israel in one side, and countries trying to maintain relationships with everybody on the other.
The most ridiculous thing about people claiming that BRICS is a military pole is that it has both India and China right there in the name. I don't know if you noticed, but those two almost got in an open war just in the last 6 months.
Otherwise you've got some regional issues which is where Iran falls. None of the major players in the region like them, even if they would prefer not to have a conflict they'd be pretty stoked if the volatile regime was gone.
Most of those non-aligned nations are pretty much aligned with the west. Indonesia is absolutely aligned with the USA and the USA it. They are the "Indo" in Indo-Pacific Strategy!
And you already bet this story is a fabrication as well.
This is exactly who media takes advantage of not the one who waits for investigation and acts rationally.
If going by your recent comments, I can say I bet you're just an Israeli propagandist. Would you be happy with that assesment?
You can't be serious about that statement. At best it reflects overwhelming naivete about how governments (let alone those engaged in war) work. At worst, its a deliberate attempt at misinformation.
(Of course some Israel politicians are religious; that's true of any country.)
I agree. But to be fair, I would have said the same thing about Venezuela a year ago. Maybe the term should be a regime slip.
No one’s thinking America cant succeed at the killing partz. It’s what comes after that people are worried about.
Practically speaking, we changed it. The foreign and energy policies we care about changed. The notion that you need to wholesale clean shop to qualify as regime change is misguided and counterproductive [1].
(On the other end of the spectrum, the fact that we kept the Japanese Emperor on his throne doesn't mean we didn't change the Japanese regime.)
Maybe Nukes do not prevent terrorism, or gorilla warfare.
Having Nukes would prevent a large strike from another state, like what US just did.
Nobody is doing this large scale of bombing on any of the nuclear powers.
It ain't Iran.
No. There's a number of reasons for this. #1 is Israel's policy of "strategic ambiguity" and #2 is that it might be illegal to even mention it in Israel. Israel prosecuted a whistleblower nuclear scientist for leaking state secrets, for example.
> And who have they blackmailed with the nukes?
The US, for one:
"Similarly, in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, IDF was again outnumbered by the invading Arab armies. Then Israeli PM Golda Meir authorized a nuclear alert and ordered that nuclear warheads be readied for launch from missiles and aircraft. The Israeli ambassador to the US, Simcha Dinitz, met with Henry Kissinger to inform President Nixon of “Very serious conclusions” if the US did not airlift arms supplies to the IDF. Nixon complied with this demand due to the threat of the use of nuclear forces. This was the first successful use of the Samson option as a threat and tantamount to nuclear blackmail."
from: https://thesvi.org/deconstructing-israels-samson-option/
I also recommend: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/wait-why-is-israel-allow...
The Samson Option enables Israel to blackmail the entire Middle East, and do so silently. Turkey or Egypt can't afford for Hezbollah to overrun Israel, because Ankara and Cairo might get nuked, even if they had nothing to do with contributing to Israel's existential crisis. It basically forces the whole neighborhood to keep each other in check out of sheer self-preservation. Credit given where credit due, it's a smart approach on Israel's part.
I think the strategic rational for unification completely swapped about 20 years ago. Up until the early 2000s it was likely in South Korea's, and the US's, interest to find a way to topple NK and unify the peninsula. The two populations had blood ties and common culture. Technologically the gap was growing but still reasonable. It would have been close to an east/west Germany type of situation where unification took effort but ultimately was clearly beneficial. China (and Russia) would have been losers in that unification would have brought a western friendly government even closer to their border. Additionally, NK still had a chance of re-energizing and becoming a real threat to SK.
Now however NK is in such bad shape that unification would be traumatic. South Korea would take on a problem of epic proportions, caring for and bringing a population of that size back into the broader world would be exceptionally costly and definitely not guaranteed to end well, possibly destabilizing SK in the process. Their cultures have grown apart making it hard for them to understand each other. The blood ties are not really there anymore. China and Russia would likely be the winners in that everyone sees NK as crazy and anyone helping them is hurting the world so they could get rid of that baggage. China especially would gain by having rail access to massive shipping assets to deliver goods even cheaper to the world. Finally, the US would loose a major rationale for stationing forces that close to China. They could, rightfully, say that NK isn't a threat and the massive US assets in South Korea and Japan should be drawn down.
Based on this cold calculation, bombing a school full of children would be counter productive, even if you believe the Israelis are just collecting children's blood to make matzahs (passover is just around the corner!).
On a more serious note, do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
The anti-US spiel is just rhetoric. It helps save face when dealing with China, which it still utterly depends on, and it goes along with decades of internal propaganda lionizing China to its own people. Indeed North Korea wants heavy US military presence in the region, maintaining its status with regards to China as a strategically important buffer state which can act with plausible deniability instead of a resource rich neighbor with uncooperative leadership.
If North Korea only had conventional forces, what would stop China from installing a loyal puppet? The international community wouldn't lift a finger, threats to South Korea would only further alienate the regime, China could bring its full might to bear, the DPRK military would have no effective means to retaliate and would be more likely to turn on the regime than mount a credible defense, and North Korea's own people would probably welcome the change which would dramatically reduce oppression and increase prosperity. Nukes are the only way for a small number of regime loyalists to make such an operation too costly for Beijing to justify.
This is also why talks with the US have utterly "failed" for decades - there is nothing the US can offer that would provide the same security guarantee for the regime and the status quo is advantageous to the US for multiple reasons: justifying its large military presence in the region, justifying its efforts to develop and deploy ever more capable ballistic missile defense systems, and North Korea not being completely under China's control.
We have Ramadan here now. No one cares. Arab influencer come and make videos and are shocked
Everyone eats and drinks during the days we don’t care
Anyway, best of luck in this. Your people deserve better.
Yes, it’s complex. Firstly, the regime isn’t truly theocratic.
There are many online videos of regime family members enjoying parties and alcohol.
The second piece: I assume 10-20% of people were participating in the exploitation of our country. They kept the other 80% in control for a long time.
Many countries have hardcore conservative rulers AND population, but in Iran the problem is mostly just the rulers. With better government, Iran would have so much potential.
I'm pretty sure there are also a lot of people on this site that anecdotally know this from their contact with Iranian diaspora.
- A lot of high-quality data - Some careful design - (Not always) some external knowledge to guide the solutions
And this is using specialized NNs for physics, where you often know underlying equations. Kind of crazy that some people are so delusional about that.
I was in a major car accident, I cannot walk.
Oh the car accident was years ago, I was fine. I cannot walk because I'm seatbelted into a car driving down the road at the moment. Why would you have ever thought there was a connection?
But afaik both are related to the same conflict.
The current hypothesis is that a left wing group triggered the outage in “protest” against Germanys involvement in the war.
But I am willing to change my mind about it if I would see a source on that.
My low effort search suggests no significant oil export to russia https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/irn/partner/r... (2022 data, maybe something changed)
Sadly we know from events in Ukraine that NK artillery works and that they have plenty of it. Yes, it's poor quality, but far from harmless.
Also to be clear: artillery is not exactly rocket science. They idea that NK doesn't have huge stockpiles is ludicrous.
I personally don't believe in such appeals to rationality of parties waging wars. The issue is: if you wage a war, you can't control precisely what is going on. No one can. Like MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists: who was interested in it? No one was, but still MH17 was shot down.
Israel bombed schools, it probably did it without clear intent to bomb them, but at the same time it means it is not very concerned about a couple of hundred of underage causalities. Like it was (and it is) not at all concerned about Palestinian causalities in Gaza. Moreover to my mind, it is the strategic stance of Israel: to be as brutal as possible to make neighbors to fear Israel. Israel does it for decades, it does it every time it wages a war. It means that now it just cannot wage a war without demonstrations of brutality. Even if it wanted to it just cannot, because on all levels of command people were taught to demonstrate brutality, and they were not taught how to wage war surgically. You can't overcome such a training on so many levels with a carefully crafted prompt.
> do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-two-...
"Mizan News Agency, the judiciary’s official news agency, reported the death toll..."
"Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shared a photo of the attack, which..."
Seems like we’re on such polar ends, there’s no hope in discussion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-sch...
https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/1rh2f41/the_residence_...
That photo is taken directly from AP news reporting, taken by Airbus.
Israeli neighbors that are at peace with Israel are safe as well, e.g., Egypt and Jordan.
As far as I know they do not have peace treaties with Israel, so they are less safe by definition, no?
Also, Iraq and Iran are not neighbors of Israel, only Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are.
Of course Trump and the GOP can try all sorts of voter suppression, which is what they're doing now.
Claiming this strike on Iran is an attempt to suspend US elections is exactly as ridiculous as claiming the last round of strikes on Iran, or the Maduro raid, or any of Trump's other previous military boondoggles were attempts to suspend US elections.
But the reasons wars existed didn't go away, so this just resulted in more and more people getting killed in "special military operations" or similar things. See e.g. "Why States No Longer Declare War"[0].
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228896825_Why_State...
Not declaring war provides a workaround, allowing the states to do whatever they desire, without constraints, while avoiding being accused that they do not observe their obligations assumed internationally.
Seems plausible.
In fact, after Vietnam war congress specifically created a law to restrict hostilities without congress approval to up to 60 days, which is what the current (and prior) administrations are acting on.
And these countries are supposed to be Iran's closest allies due to having a common enemy.
Not sure where you get the idea that people don't care who they are friend with. They absolutely don't want to be friend whose culture is considered as disgusting.
They may form an alliance due to having a common enemy but in practice the alliance is just checking a box.
I can't make up a story that will be good for iranian people in the end. Is there even an example in last 100 years that started out like this thing is starting out and ended well for the people?
What hasn’t come up enough in this thread is the currency crisis that triggered the protests. The economy is in shambles and they’re still simmering anger about the Mahsa Amini killing.
There Iranian people are tired of being under the thumb of the mullahs. They don’t want to live under an Islamic theocracy.
Millions of Iranians all over the world and inside Iran are cheering us on. They’re done. Yes, they’re scared and they don’t know what will come next, but they know what they have now is intolerable.
it’s possible this could all go badly, but what the Iranian people have now is worse. We have to try. Every Iranian person I’ve met is hopeful something better will come.
There was a huge shortage of labor in the countryside after the war.
So while there was less labor, they were far more productive labor thanks to post-revolution, post-WWI measures
Basically, Russia up to WW2 had economic growth because it was "catching up" to the West. Industrialization was one place. Literacy was another. There was a huge effort to improve literacy after the Tsar was killed.
Finally, because the Nazis occupied Ukraine during WW2, Russia/the USSR had to develop other places during WW2 just to feed its people, which accelerated growth post-war.
These conditions do not exist today, I don't think. But this isn't my area of expertise. I just know that Russia was a feudalistic shithole until the Tsar was overthrown, and then they worked hard to turn the serfs into educated and literate people, right as they were forced by invasion to economically develop previously overlooked lands.
If you want a very pro-1% take on this, check out Anna Karenina. The "good guy" main character of the novel is a large landowner with a lot of serfs (read: slaves) whom he visits and instructs, based on latest science, how to farm better.
Same thing happened in Japan about a generation or two earlier. There's ar eason tiny, flyover Japan beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Russia was totally backwards, even by "barely industrialized Japan" standards.
And where are they wrong?
Probably in all of it. Iran wouldn't have a MAD arsenal, they'd have a small handful that they could pop on a ballistic. We know we can shoot down Iran's missiles. And we know they can't reach America. I'm entirely unconvinced that we wouldn't have launched an attack on Iran even if they had nuclear weapons, because we think we can intercept them, and if we can't, they aren't hitting the homeland.
The point of having nuclear capabilities is to make the risk calculation more difficult. It doesn’t mean you need to have state of the art capabilities.
Why would Iran attack Argentina? There's plenty of Jewish Iranian citizens. Did they run out of people to attack?
There is a hardline element in the IRGC that personally profits from autarky. If the Iranian markets opened to the world, it would decimate their incomes.
They replaced the last democratic choice in Egypt with another military dictator, they keep the widely unpopular autocrat in Jordan on his throne with military and intelligence subsidies, have established and propped up a network of autocratic Gulf states that toe the line...
So yeah, I would not be surprised that Israel and the US would be more than happy to but a scion of the previous Iranian autocratic dynasty back on the throne there.
As a life long D voter, I am personally going to vote R every election now because I want US to sink into the ground so low that people like you experience actual pain and suffering.
The same sentiment that cause Nazi party to rise in power has never been eliminated, its just resurfaced itself years later. USA is not the only one with conservative problem, multiple countries in Europe have signs that right wing populism is on the rise.
And in order to be eliminated, we have to be able to get to extreme levels of social policing. And the only way to get there is through a social reset where people forgo all the comforts in life and are forced to confront the things that are actually important.
This statement shows that the person has voted Trump in the past election, not sure how thats a presumption.
This is not salvageable without justice and accountability.
> This is not salvageable without justice and accountability.
Do Palestinians have to be held accountable for their actions?
And what existing virus comes close to this trait?
But the Black Death mixed high contagion and high mortality as an actual example that shows they aren’t mutually exclusive.
What topsy-turvy land have I wandered into?
They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades. They've assassinated dissidents on foreign soil. They sentence people to death for apostasy and flog women for not wearing hijab correctly.
The sanctions aren't about race. They're about behaviour.
> Many conservatives voted for trump because they thought he wasn't a "war hawk"
I doubt their honesty. Considering they blamed Biden for Russia invading Ukraine and October 7 with the galaxybrain reasoning of "It didn't happen while Trump was in office", I am convinced the isolationism thing is just an unserious talking point.
Even the Joe Rogan MAGAs should remember when they cried on social media about how they were about to be drafted after the Soleimani thing under Trump.
There was no reason to believe Harris will be more likely to start a war. They did not cared about that bit. It just sounded better the "I would never vote for democrat" or "she is black woman" or "I want to harm trans people" or "I want to stick it to liberals".
I don't think this means the GOP keeps the House. But Trump got a bump from Venezuela, particularly within his party.
Why do you say it's customary?
I quipped that it is 'customary' based only on a few previous instances I noticed on HN. They drew my attention because with ME issues, I feel like most takes here (including my own) are based on received ideas, rather than first-hand experience.
I question everything, and in this case I'm choosing to believe it. Such fakes are hard to forge, and as recent history shows such news are not fakes. Look at Russia which claimed that it did nothing wrong for how many times? Russia all the time tried to declare that everything is a fake forged by Ukraine. And if we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, we can't find a single example of a fake news forged by Russia.
A priori probability of this being a fake is low, and if you look into it, it is a pretty good "fake". No one still questioned it, while you can see some news from Iran that are clearly anti-regime news.
So, no, without clear evidence for this being a fake, I believe it is not a fake.
I mean, I'm just quoting the Gill Scott Heron song (well worth a listen, if you like 60s spoken word protest music). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUi580gA5BQ
Reddit is a shithole, even more so after it went public a year ago..
Anyway, I don't think the AP pictures are too convincing. Sure it might look like smoke in there, but it looks more like the entire right side of the image was carpetbombed - not just the building complex in the middle
Iraq and Iran are both in the region, if not directly sharing borders with Israel.
So to answer the question I originally responded do, "did nuclear weapons make Israel safer", the answer is evidently yes.
Anyway, here's a reminder that two weeks ago the big war on everybody's head was USA against NATO.
Obviously it's not geographic as Australia and New Zealand are in the Eastern Hemisphere but would always be assumed to be part of the "west" when discussing geopolitics.
Meanwhile, delaying or canceling elections through executive order would be blatantly illegal, particularly when no conflict is taking place on U.S. soil. The case likely wouldn't even make it to the Supreme Court, but if it did, I have no doubt elections would be promptly reinstated.
I'm not saying the Supreme Court has a perfect record, of course. Not even two years ago, they essentially ruled that the president is above the law. But at least in matters regarding the balance of powers between branches, the Supreme Court is wary of the power of the executive branch, and that should certainly include the president's ability (or lack thereof) to interfere in elections.
Gaza was not occupied. There was zero military presence in Gaza prior to October 7th.
Lots of factions in Iran, including within the IRGC. Khamenei's bunker gets hit, oh no, new dude knives the competition and then makes a call to the White House.
If they’re using a novel, supercritical core mechanism, maybe. Otherwise, unlikely. (You would get fallout instead.)
If they’re using a novel, supercritical core mechanism, maybe. Otherwise, unlikely.
Anyway, democracy is not a binary. You'd be unlikely to call ancient Athens a democracy by modern standards and yet...
This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.
> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).
What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.
Nobody said that. But they are a sovereign country that did not attack America. Bombing them because you find their internal politics distasteful is appalling, to say the least.
you call their official slogan "Death to America, Death to Israel" - distasteful internal politics?
P.S. downplaying their behavior to “distasteful”, is, well, distasteful.
The US doesn't need an interventionist policy with Iran any more than we need to invade North Korea. Israel needs it though, and their entire strategy is to risk American lives for their meaningless expansion campaign.
No. But they are a sovereign nation who didn't directly bomb the US or its allies.
>They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades. They've assassinated dissidents on foreign soil. They sentence people to death for apostasy and flog women for not wearing hijab correctly.
You want to know who the US has funded? You want to know who Israel has funded?
I mean, shit, the US took out Iran's democratically elected government in the 1970s and was a huge fan of the Mullahs because they let us steal Iranian oil. The same secular Iranian government that was quite literally the first middle eastern country to recognize the existence of Israel, and was a leading secular state in a region of ass-backwards religious nutcases.
Israel has refused to acknowledge the obvious existence of its nuclear weapons program while Iran is a full member of the IAEA and allows for full international inspection of its uranium facilities.
Fuck, the Israelis engage in massive blackmailing operations of their own "allies" (see Epstien, Jeffrey) , attack their own "allies" (see USS Liberty attack), and have tried to goad its "allies" into carrying out attacks on their behalf. They are a tiny bully that starts shit they cannot handle themselves, and American lives are sacrificed because of it.
How can you even make this comparison?
This is nonsense. If you actually believe this, spend some time around your elected representatives and in Washington.
His name was Marx. ;)
Yeah. We'll see. Under what conditions will you consider yourself right or wrong? My prediction is after killing a few more heads of state, disabling some more striking capability that they'll back off under pressure from the Arab states. Trump will declare it as a victory regardless of what happens and everyone will forget about it. Iran will eventually rebuild itself as it just did, but this time it will take longer (Trump even said that himself, contradicting himself earlier).
No, my worry is whether it will be a regime change that benefits the Iranian people or some kind of sick puppet state. But of course:
> Trump will declare it as a victory regardless of what happens
...This goes without saying.
Edit: worth noting the Arab states tend to hate Iran as well, and Iran has already sprinkled some ballistic missiles on them just in this war. They're not going to speak up for Iran unless they think the escalation is getting too dangerous for themselves.
It doesn't matter. There are zero cases in history of successful regime change by air only. Iran, of all countries, has an extremely robust succession plan and at a last resort the IRGC itself will take over.
> Iran has already sprinkled some ballistic missiles on them just in this war
I can see you're not following this too seriously.
You didn't give objective criteria for how to judge whether you're right or wrong yet.
Trump this time around didn't inherit a major us deployment in a conflict area. No Iraq, no Afghanistan. Also, he's doing military strikes by himself, no Congress involved.
Syrian and Libia were both essentially civil wars with an oppressive regime with Syria using allegedly chemical weapons.
Your source is a very weird site. Countries Obama bombed 2026??? What does that even mean. Is it just a typo in the main heading and the title?
And places being in a state of internal conflict, conflict which is itself often backed and fomented by US intelligence agencies and backed proxy forces, is hardly some reason to go bomb them. Even moreso when you look at results. See what Libya turned into, and what Syria is now turning into. It turns out that Al Qaeda in a suit is still Al Qaeda, to literally nobody's surprise if you're even vaguely familiar with our history of backing extremists and putting them in power, something which we have done repeatedly.
This war, if it escalates, is not going to be good for Iran, the people of Iran, or likely even the US. The only country that might come out a winner is Israel, but even that might not end up being the case, as Iran's retaliation will likely focus on them. To say nothing of longer term consequences.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-preside...
Agreed with most of the rest you said though
This isn't true. Small-scale targeted raids, not B52s recreating Dresden.
That nuclear threat was contained under a plan backed by US, EU, Russia, China and Iran, in which Iran would not pursue nuclear expansion and let a team of international experts in to verify this on a continuous basis, in exchange for some sanction relief. A solution Trump threw in the trash, reinstating the sanctions, pressuring Iran to pursue nuclear again as one of its few levers of power it can pull on.
In other words he created the necessity for violence by throwing away a unique solution that the entire world got behind including US allies & enemies, throwing away goodwill and trust in future deals (why would Iran negotiate now if it's clear how Trump views deals, as things to be broken even irrationally?)
Those who claim this is an anti-war president have no clue, even in the context of a 'just war' argument it simply falls flat.
It does seem that military action is correlated with increased coverage in the media of the Trump/Epstein files.
Regarding politicians: Gustavo Petro was the most vocal protester; now that Trump told him in the White house to shut up, he is wagging his tail happily.
That said the justification for it made no sense to me and many others. Trump accused Maduro of narcoterrorism - profiting from the drug trade and violence. Where's the evidence? And the whole bit about the oil ... Usually that's the critique of US actions, not the reason we give; we should be moving full speed towards adopting renewables so an oil grab really doesn't make sense. Though Trump's energy policy has always been entirely backwards.
And we should probably also worry about the example we've set - that we'll just intervene when it suits us with a cooked up justification certainly incentivizes dangerous behavior - how many countries are now thinking about the deterrents they could acquire? But most Americans don't think about unintended consequences of laws or government actions.
One last thought re oil - the smart move would probably be to invest in Venezuelan oil not for sale in the US but for export to India and maybe Europe - try to use it as a replacement for Russian oil. That would in turn hurt Russia's economy and thereby reduce their efforts to wage war in Ukraine. But if that's the plan, Trump has never said that. And it also doesn't really fit his worldview that the Ukraine war should be Europe's problem and not the US's problem. But maybe it'll end up happening anyway, if Venezuela's oil production picks up and the US doesn't actually have the demand for it.
And in any case, the "most religious" (ie those whose politics are most totally driven by Judaism) bloc in Israel are at best ambivalent about the Israeli state and the settlement enterprise, and actively hostile to military service.
Israeli hostility to Iran is driven by a "defensive" paranoia, not a religious mission.
Also God didn't say when. But he did promise, according to the Book.
(Which is also not referred to as "the Book", since it's a collection of books. This may seem like a nitpick, but I think is indicative of you getting your information from non-Jewish conspiracy theorist circles rather than anything related to Jewish theology or culture.)
Well not really , most Orthodox definitely don't believe this in fact some of them are anti Zionist and the ones who accept Israel's existence definitely do not think Israel needs to expand its borders like that. So no to that.
The Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox) are more complicated, and in general don't want all the promised land (they believe that the state established militarily/politically isn't the "spiritual" state that was promised). But, when it comes to the currently occupied land, they have been shifting right in recent years. They vote in coalition with the nationalist right, and their communities increasingly overlap geographically with settlements.
More examples are:
- Rabbi Yehuda Amital and the Meimad Party
- Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein
You are confusing politics and religion.
Bennet is dati leumi and represents a big chunk of the mainstream/modern dati leumis. Any signs he's after conquering Saudi Arabai and Egypt ? Not really. Even Smotrich "only" wants the West Bank.
Only certain Hasidic groups oppose Israel, including Satmar Hasidim (over 100k followers), and Neturei Karta (fringe, only about 1k supporters). That's less than millions, and a minority within the Hasidic world.
Theologically, they oppose it based on an interpretation a Talmudic passage saying that establishment of Israel has to happen after the coming of the Messiah.
Additionally, there are a lot different denominations of Jews within Israel, some of whom have more pragmatic views. But a significant, politically influential minority believes in their duty to govern all biblical land.
Consider that we haven't had a Sanhedrin (supreme Jewish council) for a while, which makes a bunch of Jewish law unenforceable. While there's some fringe interest in reinstituting the classical system, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
Similarly while there's some fringe interest in recapturing all historic Jewish lands, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
You can find a few weird individuals anywhere if you look hard enough, but portraying "religious Jews" broadly as aspiring to conquer the whole Middle East is way off base.
I would say this is generally false.
There are many religious Jews who believe there should be no state of Israel until the Messiah comes. Judaism is very open to interpretations and certainly within the question of modern state politics doesn't have as much to say as you seem to think it does.
There are many different Rabbis in Israel with different political opinions and generally their followers will tend to hold similar beliefs. There are right wing Rabbis and left wing Rabbis, it's not uniform at all. During the Oslo peace process there were many religious people supporting and many opposing, pretty much the same as secular.
What is true is that some Israelis view their right to the land in the context of the biblical promise God made our people. That is not the same thing. Funny enough I'd say more Christians believe the literal promise and it's implication on current day politics than Jews. It's also true that religious people these days tend to be more right leaning politically. But the religion isn't mandating those world views it just that they can align.
Will you grant me this: religious motivations for violence exist within Israel, including the ruling political class?
"safety" for whom? Definitely not the people. They starve.
Better to have privation than to get bombed and massacred in large numbers.
Russia would not have attacked Ukraine if they still had their nuclear weapons and Iran wouldn’t be under attack now if they had them too.
I’m not saying whether it’s goods or bad that any or specific countries have nuclear weapons, that’s beside the point. The point is that this attack sends the signal that the only way to guarantee your safety is to have them.
I don't believe any country having nuclear weapons is good.
Iran's funding for these groups is a part of its 'defense in depth' strategy since it doesn't have the capability to project power otherwise. I am not saying that it is the right thing to do, but I am also not that surprised that backed into a corner, they're trying to build regional proxies. It's not like the US and Israel are not doing the same in and around Iran.
But I like how these statements, like yours, are always made with zero context and hope for an uninformed audience to upvote them.
That's the rationalisation. Not a justification. Defence in depth was Hitler's rationale for invading Russia, is Israel's strategy for pacifying neighbors, and is Russia's excuse for invading Ukraine.
Creating weak neighbors is checklist-item one for any classical aspiring land empire. It's also tremendously destabilising to its neighbourhood. (It's not a coincidence that China and Russia are bordered by (a) shitshows or (b) countries militarily posturing against them.)
I believe there's a much better change of democracy / sane regime in Iran, than there ever was in Iraq and other Arab states.
Same as the Gaza and Lebanon ceasefires where one side stops attacking and the other (Israel) keeps bombing?
I see how this works.
Nonsense. Iran has been stirring up trouble in the region for a long time.
Perhaps you forgot that it was Iraq who attacked Iran and Kuwait while Iran attacked no country but hey.
Would you consider blowing up a bus with civilians a crime?
Nobody said you claimed they were harmless. People are taking issue with your assertion that biological agents can be either contagious or lethal (not both), and therefore you discount its risk. This implied tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality simply is not enforced by anything in nature.
The natural emergence of a pathogen that's both highly contagious and highly lethal would be a much rarer event than the natural emergence of one that's either contagious or lethal, but we're talking about engineered pathogens. There is no reason to think that pathogens cannot be deliberately created that are both of those things.
What happened afterwards in reality was 20+ years of escalating corruption and sale and systemic destruction of any valuable assets - culminating in the government of Aleksandar Vucic, member of Milosevic's regime, who in the recent years pumped out absolutely incredible amounts of money out of the country and is a de-facto dictator.
If you ask people who remember living under Milosevic about how it was, they all say the same thing - bad in some ways, but certainly better than this, and that he was a "little kitten" compared to the current fully criminal organisation.
Umm, people of which ethnicity?
Fuck. That. That is not the world I am fighting for. Go live in North Korea if you want that.
> its a symptom.
We have very different ideas of what Trump is a symptom of.
Even for those that are doing political outreach, while the effort being put in is more than the average person, the direction is misplaced - in 2024 it was pretty clear that no matter how much information you give people, they are going to vote a certain way because of extreme polarization.
If people were willing to actually FIGHT for what they believe in through offensive means, physical or cyber, with direct results, I would have a different opinion.
But at this point, its pretty clear where society is headed. I don't want to live in that world either, but shit is going to boil over at one point or another, and delaying the inevitable just means we all get fucked when we are senior citizens instead of within the next decade.
Oh man, are you gonna get a shock when you look at the news from the past 3 years.
Syria is the prime example of this. A major reason for the civilian slaughter was foreign intervention trying regime change.
If you're trying to say that had NK not had nukes we would bomb it for 'humanitarian purposes' or 'on behalf of its people' then I have a couple of bridges for sale.
Now if they didnt have the bomb, i dont think they would have lasted this long. I think the US would have gone and "democratized" them to smithereens a while ago.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and does what a duck does, it is a duck.
There is "religion" in the broader sense which can be any set of beliefs but Netanyahu is as secular and logical as can be. He may be overly logical in the sense of advancing his personal agenda (avoiding standing trial) over the interests of his country but he's still very different than the religious crazies in Tehran where logic plays no role and g-d is everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against...
That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.
Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.
This has been painfully obvious since aerial bombing became possible, but we’ve had so many generals and executives obsessed with the concept that it continues to be a core doctrine, like Kissinger and Curtis LeMay, neither of for whom I have anything but deep contempt.
Both regimes were deeply racist.
Anyway, I don't think that information entered on the US decision making in any way.
Desert Storm also wasn't really fast, it led to containment operations lasting a bit over a decade in total, ending only when we decided to invade Iraq with the objective of regime change and nation building. And that one, predictably, turned into a quagmire.
Sure, if the choice is between drone bombings and conventional bombings.
But no, not expected if the choice is between bombing and not bombing.
But even so, if there was a serious threat of war, which is unlikely because China would stop North Korea, the US would place assets in the region and as we got close to a confrontation the US and South Korea (and as things are looking, probably Japan) would begin an aerial and missile bombardment to destroy in place North Korean offensive capabilities. Some would get through of course, perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of South Korean casualties, but in the context of a conventional war North Korea's capabilities would be quickly overwhelmed, at least in my opinion.
But honestly, the current status quo works pretty well for everyone except the people of North Korea, but there's not much we can do. It's a tragedy and the blame for that falls squarely on the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist Party.
This seems rather optimistic considering an incredibly dense South Korean city of 10M people is 20–30 miles from North Korea.
They understand that a defensive war is not the same as an offensive war. Besides, going on the offensive isn’t something they - as a regional power - have the firepower or diplomatic “street cred” for.
They are already painted as a so-called irrational actor. Doing something reckless will only prove their detractors right.
The other part to this is keeping the negotiation door open. The idea is to demonstrate to other state actors that they are cool headed & rational - even in wartime conditions.
Which is why they're sending missiles and drone strikes on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
It made sense for iran to try to negotiate with the US because the alternative was a war they had no chance to win. Arguably it also made sense for them to not come to an agreement because USA wanted concessesions the Iranian regime probably couldn't do while still staying in power given how weak they are domestically.
> I don't support any of these creeps but if any of them were minimally rational, they would have all gone to total war with Israel and the US the minute they realized what Hamas was doing on October 7th.
Israel's ability to divide and conqour its enemies here has been pretty impressive.
They have no chance of winning no matter what. At least inflict some damage on your enemy while you die like Hamas chose (although I disagree with the fact that they chose that for a lot of innocent people too.)
The US isn't ever going to leave anyone, let alone Iran, alone. The options are a) fight and cease to exist and b) don't fight and cease to exist.
Oh boy, I see we learned nothing from Afghanistan. The US will eventually leave you alone, There will be a power vacuum, and the local warlord will rise to that opportunity.
The "military operations" don't end in decisive vistory. They end with death and destruction for the young men sent into battle, and more enemies in the surrounding areas.
Well i think this is true in the present moment, i think its also important to recognize that we got to this point by a series of decisions that Iran made. They boxed themselves into this corner via long term strategic blunders.
E.g. if they threatened US & israeli interests less (i.e. did not support proxy groups), US and Israel probably wouldnt find it worth it to go this far. Alternatively if they paid more attention to the home front and kept their people happy, there would be less pressure for them to not lose face during negotiations which might allow them to make concessions they cant currently.
Ultimately? If the people who are going to kill you were elected into power by those "innocent people", why would you not lash out at them too? Some twisted sense of morality or taking the high road?
But that's hard to grok without corroborating evidence. Like maybe an analogous social dynamic where the American mainstream maintains a hostile posture towards a particular ethnic group, stereotyping them as violent and irrational and criminals and parasites, and doing things to them that have triggered sustained, armed uprisings in other times and places, but who, in fact, have historically and in-aggregate been steadfast in a commitment to non-violent resistance, integration, and endurance of oppression.
Safe to say that this is the first time America's ever encountered that kind of thing, though, so I guess that we can be somewhat forgiven for not recognizing it.
If you have been following Iran over the past two years (and even before), you would know that this is empirically true and not just a hypothetical. American propag- sorry, media does its job well.
Better to play the long game, corrupt them from within and wait for them to destroy themselves.
The world in which America is a military superpower.
> if any of them were minimally rational, they would have all gone to total war with Israel and the US
They have been. They've been getting levelled. If the U.S. can staunch the flow of arms to the Houthis, they'll become irrelevant, too.
No, you missed my point. Iran dies no matter what happens. Better go down after eliminating Israel, taking out a huge % of the world's oil supply and banging up some Americans. Instead they were extremely restrained, squandering their capacities.
> They have been. They've been getting levelled. If the U.S. can staunch the flow of arms to the Houthis, they'll become irrelevant, too.
Incorrect.
One, they tried. They don’t have the capability. Two, that means more Iranians die. Cultures that choose pointless vengeance over pragmatic survival tend to get weeded out.
> Incorrect
Which part, why and based on whom?
Hezbollah did. They did it before and they were predicted by all analysts to be able to do it again, which is why Israel took the route they did with the espionage, assassinations and terrorism instead of confronting them on the battlefields.
The Houthis also are doing that right now.
Someone in the Middle East gets hit.
> would the risk calculation for an attack on Iran be as easy as it is right now?
The risk calculation isn't easy today. Nukes would make it harder. But I'm pushing back on the notion that it would make it a non-starter.
(MAD arsenals and long-range ICBMs, on the other hand, make it a non-starter.)
Wow so no big deal then right?
Jesus Christ dude
Are you arguing it would be in this White House?
This is an actual question. It seems to me that you only care about Arabs dying. Jews can die left and right in the hands of Arabs and you won’t blink an eye. Am I correct?
I just want to clarify it for others who reads your comments to see.
Obviously it's not going to be done 100% from the air. The Iranian people will have to play a big role. I just hope they manage to seize initiative from Trump and Netanyahu as far as how their government is run.
I do note that we've strayed a bit from the thesis of "Iran is so powerful Israel and the US have to gang up on it". :D
Eh, shit happens.
You think the US would just leave them alone as a communist, sovereign country without nukes, bordering china???
I have no idea what strategic value the nation of Israel has for the nation of the USA, but there is clearly strong cultural and political relevant of the former to the latter.
OR
Violent resistance to said plan.
Idk, I wouldn't judge Palestine either, especially if Israel is immune to any kind of repercussions.
Religious Zionism is a religious denomination.
National Religious Party–Religious Zionism is a political party.
It feels unfair and unjustified that you are accusing me of confusing them without substantiating your accusation. I am still open to learn anything that you might want to share with me that you think is important.
I feel like I lost track of the discussion. At some point I thought you were claiming something along the lines that says religious Jews believe they are under an order from God to expand Israel to its maximal biblical geographical area.
If your claim is that the current day Mafdal's political (not necessarily religious) position is that Israel should annex the West Bank and Gaza. Ehm, sure, maybe. I think it's a bit more nuanced even than that but I won't argue on this point.
It's possible I just lost the thread, and if I did I apologize. HN isn't very good at facilitating this sort of discussion. If I mis-stated your position above and am agreeing with the wrong thing I'm sure you'll correct me.
[EDIT: correcting myself a little bit Burg actually ended up as a member of the Labor party in politics, but his politics did originally align with the Mafdal, the party is/was supposed to represent all Zionist Religious people but has obviously diverged a bit from that)
I just meant that there's a part of the religious spectrum prone to that interpretation, and it mixes very well with nationalism, and expansionism. And that it isn't a meaningless fringe, but has a significant political representation. What I wrote was a reasonable way the scripture can be interpreted by someone who believes it's a true word of God.
If I'm wrong, and e.g. the Miflaga Datit Leumit party explicitly rejects this kind of intepretation then I stand corrected, but judging by what its leader says publicly this isn't the case...
Ah yes, give any discussion enough time and Hitler inevitably gets to be whoever your opponent is.
Unlike Hitler, unlike Israel and unlike the US, Iran has not proactively attacked.
Hitler had no reason to fear attack from Russia, Czechoslovakia or France. Iran has every reason to fear an attack from the US and Israel, look at what is happening right now ffs.
Western governments provide funding and shelter for extremist Iranian groups like People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran and various separatists movements inside the country, so please spare me this Hitler nonsense.
Because it fits. Nazi Germany was an aspiring land power. You can see the same effect in Imperial Rome and the Persian empires. (And, while America was conquering its own continent, on the peripheries of Manifest-Destiny America.)
> Unlike Hitler, unlike Israel and unlike the US, Iran has not proactively attacked
Of course they have. Its proxies are constantly proactively attacking everyone in their neighbourhood.
> Hitler had no reason to fear attack from Russia, Czechoslovakia or France. Iran has every reason to fear an attack from the US and Israel, look at what is happening right now ffs
Everyone has reason to fear attack from everyone. Defence in depth is a regionally-destabilising response to that security imperative. And by the way, Russia and Germany did wind up going to war with each other. Same as Iran and Israel, that same one whose anihiliation the former has been chanting for since its revolution.
Arguing Iran has been some peaceful country minding its own business is totally inaccurate.
Compared to Israel and the US, it would be a massive understatement to call Iran peaceful.
Look at the mass murder by Israel in Gaza. Or how the US just overthrew Venezuela and seized their resources, threatened to take Greenland, taunts Canada and suggests more countries are in their sights.
And now the two of them teamed up to bomb Iran, unprovoked, saying it's going to "annihilate their Navy" as their citizens run for cover.
And your conclusion is Iran is the one that resembles Nazi Germany?
Are you seriously arguing that Hitler was rational for preemptively attacking Russia because AFTER Hitler attacked Russia, Russia did not simply sit back and let itself be attacked but in fact started defending itself? And are you arguing that Israel doing the same is rational because AFTER Israel attacked Iran, Iran launched some missiles towards Israel IN RESPONSE TO THE ISRAELI ATTACK, therefore proving Israel right that Iran is going to attack them?
> that same one whose anihiliation the former has been chanting for since its revolution.
Oh and Israel has been nothing but wishing them happy Ramadan?
The reason Israel does not want the current Iranian system to survive is because it sees it as the only possible threat to its eternal domination of the Palestinians and its ability to dictate its borders in the Middle East.
Even now most experts agree the chance of success is extremely small, every time this was tried you got shit returns (think Libya, still a failed state after Ghadaffi fell, and Iraq is reasonably stable now but we're 2 decades in and +1m dead Iraqis).
So it's certainly a useful distraction for Trump. It's also certainly true Trump would want to pursue this objective (despite it being a stupid move to reach it) regardless of the Epstein files.
And he went quite quickly from being called a "critical partner in the fight against terror" to being overthrown and summarily murdered by US backed extremists, leaving Libya in a complete state of turmoil and deterioration, and even seeing the rise of organized slavery. [1] 'Regime change' in a nutshell.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Libya#Slavery_in_th...
I find it astounding that the U.S. population aren't storming Washington and demanding his removal. Other countries are removing people from positions who were involved with Epstein due to the massive corruption and yet the USA seems fine with allowing Trump to continue destroying everything he touches.
I was speaking of the Gazans who originally elected Hamas to protect them but where Hamas eventually decided to sacrifice masses of them to achieve some of their goals. They knew what would happen and did it anyway, without the people's consent.
As it is now, I agree and Hamas is about the only group in Gaza that has any weaponry, so they can continue to oppress.
If Iran's regime had nukes, I guarantee you'll see UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and several others go all in on their own nuclear programs immediately. They'd be fools not to.
Israel's nukes are troubling, but the weird "nuclear ambiguity" doctrine has already stood for so long and managed to avoid nuclear flare-ups so far. I'd still like them to not have nukes, but they won't be launching any nuclear first strikes for sure - since we've seen them not do that even while fighting many major wars and suffering losses without taking that step...
The region will have chance at peace once the regime of Iran is removed.
No, they didn't, not at the peak of their power. They waited until many of their tools were hit and THEN responded. Everything they've done is unfortunately in self-defense after their capabilities have been extremely degraded. They sat around and waited for Israel to strike first every time.
> Two, that means more Iranians die. Cultures that choose pointless vengeance over pragmatic survival tend to get weeded out.
Again, you're missing the point. They are going to be weeded out no matter what.
In part. Khamenei also pointlessly spent down Hezbollah supporting Hamas instead of writing the latter off and saving his firepower. If Hezbollah had maintained its massive-launch capability, instead of drip feeding rockets into interceptors as a messaging exercise, maybe this would have gone differently.
More broadly, if Iran ran itself without a C-list vengeance plot at its core and focused on its massive resources, it could have developed economically and geopolitically.
Care to elaborate? As far as I know, this is false. All Israeli citizens 18 or older can vote; there are no voting restrictions based on race, religion, gender or property; prisoners can vote (unlike in many US states for example); permanent residents who are not citizens cannot vote in national elections but may vote in municipal elections (not the case in the US). National turnout ranges between 65% and 75%.
Minorities are well represented: Arab and Druze citizens vote and have representation in the Knesset.
I struggle to find any dimension in which your statement is correct.
Palestinians in Gaza have been governed by Hamas since 2006. Before that, they had been governed by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) since 1994.
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria ("West bank") have been governed by the Palestinian Authority continuously since 1994, with the exception of Area C.
Palestinians who live there are NOT "de facto governed" by Israel. They pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority; receive birth certificates, IDs, business licenses and social security payments from the P.A.; Go to schools, hospitals, courts, police stations and jails run by the P.A. And most importantly, they vote in elections run by the P.A. To say that they are "de facto governed" by Israel is ridiculous, and shows a lack of basic understanding of Israel and Palestine, and the conflict between them.
Because a functioning democracy would ban a nazi party.
I think it makes sense that both are categorised as flawed.
I mean I can start my own magazine and create my own index however I want. Doesn’t mean it’s right.
Democracy is the directness by which social participation equates to governance. The US is a federal republic with only two parties each bound by the same hostile funding system that benefits political contributions over the vote. That is far from democratic.
In my thinking regime change doesn't only refer to the complete collapse of the political system, just change in direction of the leaders.
Had. Israel probably has a list with the next 3 or 4 in line to replace Khamenei and is currently working towards eliminating them, like they did with the Hezbollah.
Regime change could also be triggered through impeachment or PM losing support and government coalition getting dissolved in the case of Israel.
And The Constitution.
Just ask the folks who tried on January 6.
> The US will have significant regime change in November if polling holds.
Assuming elections are held fairly. "Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency":
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2...
Does it?
The distinction being de jure and de facto control is something worth debating, but it’s trivially true that Israel controls large swaths of territory where people are not eligible to participate in that government.
- sovereignty
- border
- population
In that order, in the context of that region. Then consider their meanings in the context of (say) Canada. Consider how conventional applications of those terms are different for the two.
Especially not when they’re mass murdering protestors and funding islamic extremism left and right
What recent months show us, is that it's a rough world - there are no friends. I'm rooting for European countries to accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. In an ideal world, of course I would be against. But the world is far from ideal. The current alternative is being dictated the rules by Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Thanks, but no.
North Korea invaded South Korea, stole a US Navy ship (the Pueblo, which they still proudly exhibit), dug large infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, kidnapped hundreds, or even thousands people from SK (and Japan, to a lesser extent), and have assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, multiple SK heads of state, and perpetrated acts of terror like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
What did the US or SK do to them before their nuclear program that constituted "bullying?"
Neither of these states have at any point said anything on the modern era that can be implied to be a threat to nuke anybody.
Part of that is because it would be a bad strategy for them, but nonetheless "nuclear blackmail state" and "nuclear state" is not the same thing.
The NPT did not exist at the time of the US developing nuclear weapons, and it explicitly allows US (and other pre-existing nuclear powers') weapons.
Israel, like India and Pakistan, simply never signed it, forgoing the international nuclear technology market as a consequence but also avoiding a treaty obligation not to develop them.
Perhaps you will argue that the US or Israel or Pakistan or North Korea have conducted themselves in a way where they do not have that moral right either, but that is a different debate, and either way it is moot because they do have them.
Iran signed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
No. If they wanted self-defense and sovereignty they should have become stronger not weaker after the revolution.
Smotrich, e.g., says and does lot of things. Some of them resonate with some members of his party, others don't.
As to the party's platform you can read it here: https://zionutdatit.org.il/en/party-platform/
I would push back on the idea of expansionism. I don't think that's a mainstream view in the party at all. The party does support annexing the West Bank and Gaza which to be honest is the only workable solution anyways regardless of where you're coming from and really the best outcome for Palestinians as well if they become full Israeli citizens.
The Dati Leumi, the Religious Zionists, who constitute the ideological backbone of the settler movement, and have a lot of political influence in Israel, absolutely believe in their duty to govern the biblical land. For many, holding the West Bank is a religious obligation, and they consider the Golan settled and annexed. Religiously, the same principle that justifies them holding Golan applies to these territories.
Here are some recent statements from political leaders:
Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister, Religious Zionist party) "it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus."
Daniella Weiss (prominent settler leader) said in 2024: "We know from the Bible that the real borders of Greater Israel are the Euphrates and the Nile."
Benjamin Netanyahu said he's on a "historic and spiritual mission" and that he is "very" attached to the vision of Greater Israel, which includes Palestinian areas and possibly also places that are part of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.
Yair Lapid, the secular centrist opposition leader (!). "I don't think I have a dispute on the biblical level about what the original borders of Israel are... I support anything that will allow the Jews a big, vast, strong land."
Mike Huckabee (US Ambassador to Israel) "It would be fine if they took it all."
I would say a lot of Jewish people and Israelis get upset at what you're saying and so maybe our reply will be a bit adversarial. Here's trying to be more factual (I used Gemini to research though I'm personally familiar with these figures as well).
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013): The highly influential former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. While his political party (Shas) later shifted rightward, Rabbi Yosef issued a landmark religious ruling in the late 1970s stating that Israel is permitted to cede land in exchange for a genuine peace treaty, prioritizing the sanctity of life over holding territory.
Rabbi Menachem Froman (1945–2013): An Orthodox rabbi and resident of a West Bank settlement who famously engaged in direct dialogue with Palestinian leaders, including the PLO and Hamas. He supported the creation of a Palestinian state, arguing that shared religious reverence for the land should be the foundation for peace rather than an obstacle.
Rabbi Michael Melchior: An Orthodox rabbi and former Israeli cabinet minister who leads the Mosaica religious peace initiative. He actively works on "track-two" diplomacy, fostering dialogue between Israeli rabbis and Palestinian imams.
Rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994): A highly influential Orthodox Jewish philosopher and scientist. Immediately following the 1967 Six-Day War, he became a vocal opponent of the military occupation of the Palestinian territories, warning that it would corrupt Israeli society and Judaism itself.
Rabbis for Human Rights: An active Israeli organization made up of over a hundred Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbis. They physically protect Palestinian farmers, advocate against settler violence, and largely support a two-state solution based on the biblical mandate to protect the vulnerable.
On the question of the applicability of religion: "Does Judaism Mandate a Specific Political Solution?
No. Judaism predates the concept of the modern nation-state, so the religion does not explicitly mandate a "one-state" or "two-state" political framework. Instead, different religious camps emphasize competing core values within Jewish law (Halakha) and scripture to justify their political stances"
There's a lot more to explore and I encourage you do that on your own.
My country and my Government, sent people from my generation down there to die. My countrymen died in that war, and the only thing we got out of it was more enemies in the region. The Afghan is still getting persecuted for styling their beard wrong, and the Afghan woman is still getting opressed. We have nothing to show for that sacrifice.
I see no reason to believe the same thing isn't going to happen in Iran.
The US keeps coming back is what I'm saying. The US was kicked out of Iran in 1953. That's what all this is about. They will do the same to Afghanistan eventually. That's what I meant by time didn't stop. The Taliban isn't safe by any means. It's just a temporary reprieve.
As far as i understand, the US propped up an unpopular governmet that many of the locals did not like (there were rumours about turning a blind eye to moral impropriety because it was politically expediant).
The thing about democracy is its not really democracy when forced from the outside.
No. I'm saying Hitler's theory of attacking Russia was the same as Iran's simultaneous proxy wars with its entire neighbourhood. It's not theoretically wrong. Just antiquated, destructive and–in the trade-based modern world–increasingly counterproductive. (You're trashing and alienating your natural trading partners.)
And I'm drawing analogy between (a) "Iran has every reason to fear an attack from the US and Israel, look at what is happening right now" and (b) the nonsense argument "that Hitler was rational for preemptively attacking Russia because AFTER Hitler attacked Russia, Russia did not simply sit back and let itself be attacked." In both cases, retaliation is being used to justify the preceding (note: not initial) aggression.
> Oh and Israel has been nothing but wishing them happy Ramadan?
If your neighbour is developing ballistic missiles and explicitly calling for your anihilation, you're not going to "simply sit back and let [your]self be attacked."
> reason Israel does not want the current Iranian system to survive is because it sees it as the only possible threat to its eternal domination of the Palestinians and its ability to dictate its borders in the Middle East
Iran isn't a material threat to Israel's power projection into Gaza and the West Bank. Its ballistic missiles and nuclear programme, on the other hand, are an existential threat to Tel Aviv/Jerusalem. And yes, it's a regional competitor to Israeli (and Saudi and Emirati) hegemony.
Except that's not happening and is complete BS. It also assumes these proxies have no agency and would not have acted on their own.
> It's not theoretically wrong. Just antiquated, destructive and–in the trade-based modern world–increasingly counterproductive. (You're trashing and alienating your natural trading partners.)
Guess what would allow Iran to peacefully trade with Israel. The end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The reason Iran cannot simply ignore that occupation is because it would loose the moral high ground in the Shia/Muslim world. And having that moral high ground (i.e. its support for the Palestinian cause) is also part of its power projection strategy.
> If your neighbour is developing ballistic missiles and explicitly calling for your anihilation, you're not going to "simply sit back and let [your]self be attacked.
Given that Israel does indeed have ballistic missiles and is explicitly calling for for the annihilation of Palestinians, or even 'Arabs' in general, does that in your mind justify October 7th?
> Iran isn't a material threat to Israel's power projection into Gaza and the West Bank.
Not Iran itself, but Israel insists that Iran support for 'proxies' is. Maybe not to Israeli power projection, but to its security at least.
In this strategic aspect, yes. So does Israel. So do Russia and China. They're all acting like land empires. And they're all pursuing a strategy that seeks weak, unstable neighbours.
It's a shitty strategy that does't earn one friends. The fact that it's theoretically coherent doesn't make it less shitty.
The issue is that you seem to be ignoring the context and using this (weak imo) comparison to defend the US and Israel's decision to attack them.
Its self-definition as a "Jewish state" is deliberately vague about its definition of "Jewish", and is in practice closer to Western ideas of ethnicity/nationalism than to "religion".
The NPT has much stricter terms for withdrawal, which in any case Iran has not followed.
(The better and much more relevant analogy would be the JCPOA. That's what happens when the US does foreign policy by "executive agreement" instead of treaty. Foreign countries should not value them more than the paper they're written on.)
From what I've read it's not that simple. The American system was more well liked in the cities than the alternatives. Outside the big cities, which is most of Afghanistan, the government really didn't matter much. They were still dominated by local malitias, "elders", and gangs.
To add insult to injury, the US led effort to build up an internal defense force in the country found that the only people willing to fight for the country were the very same people who had fought for the Taliban only years before.
The question left unsaid of course is if all of these problems could have been solved by a more competent actor. I would argue they couldn't have, that you can't bring peace through war, but reasonable minds can disagree.
Sure. Which makes Iran a decidedly not-peaceful country.
They are practically Gandhi in this story.
Looking forward, the problem with being irrationally hateful is that its irrational. What's the plan here? Persia will still exist, and its unlikely any future rulers will like Israel, given what's going on. So what's the win condition?
They've also, simultaneously, tried to escalate.
> All of these attacks completely unprovoked except for the fact that they are friendly with Hamas and Hezbollah
"Friendly with" in the way America was friendly with South Vietnam and South Korea. (Also, the IRGC has directly sponsored attacks, e.g. Bondi Beach.)
> They are practically Gandhi in this story
This is either stupid or dishonest.
> What's the plan here?
Don't confuse specific criticism with endorsement of the war.
Do we expect occupied peoples to have a vote? sort of depends how you define democracy. Under an American interpretation (no taxation without representation, 1 person 1 vote) there’s a good argument that you should count occupied peoples.
It’s never so simple is it
Palestinians are not taxed by Israel. They are taxed by the Palestinian Authority, and participate in Palestinian elections. So they do have representation - just not in Israel.
Stop spreading misinformation.
We can play the “whose saying it game”, or look at the arguments. Democracy is rule by the lowest - and it’s easily manipulated by the popular. Buying votes, focus on the carnal, and immediate is a clear sign of democracy in decline.
The US founders didn’t believe in democracy. More people do today, mostly out of a sense that it’s moral obligation. Very few actually will argue it leads to better government outcomes.
It's a macabre study. But one could honestly argue that several countries in the latter category's populations are better off than North Korea's.
But I'd also point out that a lot of what makes it really suck to live in the worst places in the world isn't often the government but rather the international relationships. Turkey has a particularly brutal government, but it's Nato and EU ally status means that the civilians enjoy modern trade and travel.
The worst times to be in NK was the 90s when there was an ongoing famine and the US refused to lift sanctions thinking it'd spark a civil war that overthrew the regime. It didn't.
You can live a perfectly normal life in Kiev. It’s not exactly an active war zone, you see luxury cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on every corner. You can buy bottles of Petrus in 24 hour supermarkets and eat decent food at countless fancy restaurants.
Goodwine in Kiev will also put US luxury grocers to shame. Ukraine might be at war, but the quality of life is hardly bad.
To each their own. I wouldn't. In part because once you're in North Korea, you're not getting out. That isn't the case for Ukraine, Syria or any of the other war-torn countries.
...nobody argued the proxy wars were good for those countries. Just that if you're turned into a random local in one of those theatres, chances are you're better off a decade or two later than if you're turned into a random North Korean.
Me as me? Gaza. Because I'd get out. That's a bullshit answer, though, so I'll answer as a local. And there, it's honestly a coin toss because Gaza is possibly the shittiest war zone outside Africa right now. But if you said North Korea or Syria during its civil war? North Korea or Myanmar? I'm going with not Pyongyang.
The only one where I'd honestly choose North Korea hands down is Sudan, because that's the one nobody really gives a shit about which means it's going to go on forever.
Are you sure about this part?
War isn't glamorous. It's mechanized death and torture destroying communities, families, and loved ones. And when it's powered by foreign governments, it's worse. Because the two colliding sides are armed to the gills with the best weapons in murder along with mercenaries and no oversight.
Living in a dictatorship is hard but doable, There are literally generations of people that have survived and thrived in that sort of an environment. It's not preferable, for sure, but you still have your family, friends, and neighbors. None of them are trying to actively kill you. So long as you follow the rules, life in a dictatorship is generally predicable and the odds of the state making you specifically an example are low.
And also your neighbors absolutely will sell you out.
Thriving in a dictatorship, even not as an enforcer, is possible. It's a worse life in general but still a life you can live.
Generally speaking, the only life that truly sucks in a dictatorship is if you become an enemy of the state. That doesn't generally apply to all citizens because, if it did, a dicatorship would quickly end in revolt. That is the theory behind strong sanctions. It's believed that if you starve a nation eventually the citizens revolt. The problem is it takes little resources to keep people happy, ultimately.
If you can’t enter and leave your country freely, you don’t that autonomy.
I’m not even some Palestinian political advocate. We still cannot pretend that Israel isn’t effectively in control of the Palestinian Territories.
The issue is that israel is attacking, invading, occupying, annexing, and genociding the state of Palestine.
NK does actually allow people to leave, mostly to china and mostly after they attain a high social class. A decent number of tourists, including US citizens, go on tours of NK.
I didn't know this. Source? I thought Pyongyang controls its elites' movement even more strictly than its commoners'.
I guess I shouldn't have written leave, but to visit other countries. I don't think you can change your citizenship.
[1] https://www.youngpioneertours.com/can-north-koreans-travel/
Of course it isn't, it's entirely porous to the IDF. I'm an American citizen. If I were teleported to Gaza I'd probably be fine. At material risk of being fucked up. But I'd take my chances there over being an American teleported to North Korea.
Iran has had civil unrest over the last year, they weren't in the position politically to be doing much of anything to the "democracy" of Israel.
The entire reason for the US Israel attack on Iran is because of that civil unrest, not because Iran was a threat, but because both nations see an opportunity to install a puppet government that does their bidding.
What remains to be seen is if Russia sees a similar opportunity and we end up with another Syria.
It’s because your logic is flawed. It doesn’t hold up a very simple scrutiny test.
> the people there should not fight and let them take over, because war is worse than dictatorship, right?
No, I think the people should fight back, obviously. A country being actively invaded has a right to fight back. The war isn't their choosing and laying down arms is a mistake because captured civilians are rarely treated well after a war.
I'm specifically talking about an established dictatorship vs war. Specifically, as I said, a civil war which is a proxy war for foreign agents. Starting a war to end a dictatorship is bad. A dictatorship starting a war is bad. However, a dictatorship not starting wars is ultimately a better place to live vs anywhere under and active civil war.
Sure. And yes, it's risky. But there are two million people in Gaza and half a dozen to a dozen, on average, being killed each day. If I, literally I, were teleported into Gaza, my primary operational concern would be avoiding Hamas. (My primary operational goal, getting to an internet-connected device.)
> no one is launching rockets onto North Korea
Correct, their security forces are undisrupted.
To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system? The checkpoints which lead to the outside world? The airspace? The ability to import and export goods? The roads? The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B? The decisions on building new settlements?
Aside from the municipal things you mentioned, which in most places in the world are controlled by subnational entities, Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea", roughly half of them Jews and half of them Arabs, while only one of those groups has what anyone in the West could consider to be a normal existence.
Area C is less than 10% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, 6% of Palestinian population if you count Gaza. Interesting that you chose to focus on territory! Last I checked, square kilometers do not vote, people do.
In any case, you are right that Area C is more complicated, since it is controlled by Israel and there are Palestinians who live there.
However, Palestinians living in area C can also vote in Palestinian elections. So although it is true that they live in a territory governed by Israel (unlike the other 94% of Palestinians), it remains false that they are a "large part of the Israeli population that is disenfranchised" (the original statement).
> ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).
Obviously the choice of name for this region reflects a political preference. But that works both ways. I prefer to call it Judea and Samaria because that's what it was called until 1948, when Jordan invaded and annexed it. "West bank" is a relic of Jordanian occupation, chosen by King Abdullah to absorb the region into his kingdom, not just politically but semantically. Jordan hasn't controlled the region in 60 years - longer than the occupation itself. It seems reasonable to stop calling it by its colonial Jordan name.
You seem to take particular issue with my use of the term "Judea and Samaria". That is also a political preference. Do you care to explain it the same way I explained mine?
> To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system?
In areas A and B, the Palestinian Authority.
> The checkpoints which lead to the outside world?
On the Israeli side: Israel. On the Jordanian side: Jordan.
> The airspace?
Israel
> The ability to import and export goods?
The Palestinian Authority, but subject to stringent security control by Israel.
> The roads?
In Areas A and B: the Palestinian Authority.
> The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B?
That was jointly defined by the bilateral agreement at Oslo. So, both sides agreed on that.
> The decisions on building new settlements?
In area C: Israel.
In areas A and B: there are no settlements (Jews are not allowed to live there).
> Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea"
We're straying from the original topic of disenfranchisement... I will just say that, in my opinion, your view is simplistic and manichean. The closest we ever got to a resolution of the conflict, in 1994, was with a bilateral agreement. Neither side is fully in control of the outcome. Denying that Palestinians, too, have responsibilities and agency, is the surest way to perpetuate this conflict.
> We're straying from the original topic of disenfranchisement
What a laughable statement. This is entirely the point of the disenfranchisement claim.
At best the Palestinian Territories have “quasi-governmental control.” I’m saying this as someone who isn’t particularly pro-Palestine. Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position.
By de facto I mean explicitly not de jure.
If you don't like to argue, may I suggest not making controversial claims on controversial topics, in a place that encourages constructive debate?
> Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel.
That is mostly true. On the border with Jordan it is jointly controlled by Jordan and Israel (like most international borders).
> Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position
I already explained in great detail the specific ways in which the Palestinian Territories are, in fact, governed by the Palestinian Authority. Taxation, elections, justice, police, education, healthcare, roads, sewers, business regulation, population register...
So far your counter-argument is that Israel controls the border... and therefore Palestinians should vote in Israeli elections? Should they also vote in Palestinian ejections? Or should the P.A. simply stop to exist? What point are you even making exactly?
Calling me "unserious" doesn't make you automatically "serious", or right.
You’re making my point anyway, by conceding that the West Bank is effectively governed without representation in the governments controlling them.
Shame on you.
They said Palestinians are "a large portion of the Israeli population [that] is disenfranchised". That is a wrong statement. Palestinians are not part of the Israeli population and there is no expectation (on either side) that they would participate in Israeli elections. That issue has been largely settled by the Oslo framework in 1994.
> As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
I'm not sure which elections you mean.
- Israeli elections are for Israeli citizens. The 20% of Israelis who are Arab (sometimes loosely referred to as "Palestinians" as a loose synonym for "Arab living in former mandatory Palestine") can participate normally
- Palestinians in the West Bank vote in Palestinian elections. ' not aware of any citizenship-related restrictions there. Possible issues might be: logistics of getting to polls because of Israeli checkpoints; or simply the absence of elections (PA hasn't held a national election since 2006, although there are municipal elections).
- Specifically in East Jerusalem, on which Israeli claims sovereignty, Palestinians are classified as permanent residents of Israel. They may apply fot Israeli citizenship but that's probably a difficult process. As permanent residents they can vote in Israeli municipal elections, and as Palestinians they can vote in Palestinian national elections. But not being Israeli citizens they cannot vote in Israeli national elections. Perhaps that is what you're referring to?
A process that's alive and well, just like Yitzhak Rabin.
The ostracized Aussies then can vote for their own leaders but will be blamed if they vote for the wrong ones and embargoed, regularly shot and even bombed from time to time to remind them who the place belongs to.
They're arguing that due to the failure/stalling of the two-state solution, the PA is effectively not a national government. It administers local services, like policing, courts, infrastructure. But it doesn't control borders, tarrifs and duties, or airspace. The Israeli military operates a parallel legal system that can detain and prosecute them, all under a legal framework that they have no vote or say in. I think its fair to call this a kind of disenfranchisement?
The legal framework for the Palestinian Authority's existence is a bilateral treaty. Israel did not unilaterally create this flawed administrative entity: it was jointly created with the PLO, as an interim step towards a fully sovereign Palestinian state. The negotiations that followed were also bilateral. These negotiations failed, leaving both sides with an incomplete interim solution. As a result Palestinians are neither citizens of Israel, nor of a wholly sovereign state. They are stateless, that is undeniable. But the reason they are stateless is not that they "have no vote or say". They had a say at the negotiation table in Oslo. They also had a say in Camp David in 2000, when Yasser Arafat walked away from a deal that would have given him a state with its capital in Jerusalem, and started the second intifada instead. They had a say in 2005 when they elected Abbas over reformist alternatives. They had a say in 2006 when they elected Hamas in Gaza. And they have a say now, as Abbas maintains the "pay to slay" program that rewards attacks against Israeli citizens with welfare payments to the attacker's families. There's a reason Israel insisted on overriding security control in the interim state. They couldn't trust the PLO, the very group that killed countless Israeli civilians in shootings, stabbings and bombings, to become the sole guardians of Israeli safety overnight. In Oslo the Palestinian Authority accepted the responsibility to prevent terrorist attacks against Israel. They are free to deliver on that commitment anytime.
My issue with your framing ("the PA is like an HOA"), the parent comment's framing ("Israel solely controls the fate of Palestinians"), and the original comment that started this whole debate ("Palestinians are a disenfranchised part of Israeli population"), is that it strips Palestinians of agency and shared responsibility. It's annoying when you do it. But it's tragic when Palestinians do it to themselves. By perpetuating this myth that they are helpless, blameless victims of external forces, they are making internal reform impossible ("what is there to reform? All our problems are Israel's fault") and any resolution to the conflict impossible ("we are the rebels, Israel is the empire. The only resolution is to blow up the death star").
To tie this back to the original topic of disenfranchisement: even in the flawed interim state created in Oslo, Palestinians have had the opportunity to vote. Not in a state, but in an institution created specifically to chart a path to a state. They elected a president, who then proceeded to cancel presidential elections (the last one was in 2005). They elected a legislative body, who started a civil war and established one of the most violent theocracies in the world. None of this was Israel's doing. To the extent that Palestinians are disenfranchised - denied the opportunity to vote - it is by their own leaders. If anything, it makes me glad Palestine isn't a full-blown state: with leaders like that, the more limits to their power, the better.
