Pointlessness of this war aside, I fail to see how the situation is materially different than it was prior to the war begining.
Iran has generally been an active and persistant threat for many US firms long before this war began, and I have a hard time thinking they have had the restraint and the resources to collect together an arsenal of zero-day exploits they have yet to unleash.
To me, this just reads as empty threats intended more for the potential economic fear it can produce.
Iran has always lacked an ability to project power at a distance.
Outside of sympathetic lone operators, there really isnt much to suggest they can do anything more than ramp up rhetoric and calls for violence.
The reason why I call it empty threats is because it accomplishes its goal no matter the outcome.
If a sympathetic lone operator uses this as an excuse to start shooting, they can claim the credit. But if all it does is stoke fear that "Something somewhere might happen" then it's still a win for them.
There is a big difference between iranian agents sneaking onto us homeland and conducting an attack vs just inspiring a sympathetic person to commit a violent act.
> Iran has always lacked an ability to project power at a distance.
Sure. Now they maybe able to reach Greece. Give them five years and they will develop missiles that can reach France, or even UK. I am sure europeans would love the idea of fanatical regime having arms that can reach them, especially, if we consider that EU today does not have very robust air defense. Even Israel that planned for this war for a while has rockets that penetrate their defenses.
I would prefer the politicians not to take those gambles.
Great logic. China and America might find themselves at war in the coming years. Should we just get it over with and attack them now? Where did you pull Greece from? The Iranians can barely hit anything next door. Maybe in five years the regime would have collapsed during a succession or economic crisis. Perhaps this perhaps that.
Initiating a war is a gamble in of itself. Now Americans all over the world are potentially at increased risk from lone wolves. A failed Iranian state might be the site of horrible atrocities to come.
For a post that seems to contemplate the future you seem to exhibit a strange lack of reflection.
What a powerful response to an outright attack on their country. This is the capability we are supposed to start a war over?
Sorry it does not follow that politicians in Greece and beyond in Europe were gambling with their citizens lives by entertaining the possibility Iran might launch a drone to crash unceremoniously off-target in Cyprus if their regime was attacked. I don't think anyone in Cyprus cares, actually the only thing this really seems to have kicked off in Cyprus is a protest movement against the American military presence there.
I would think people killed by the machinery of needless wars would appreciate the same fate not falling on others.
You omitted that part out of your quote to do what, imply I don't care about dead drone victims? Because I believe we shouldn't launch wars needlessly?
What point are you trying to make? Should we bomb Toyota dealerships because of all the automobile fatalities? If you disagree should I imply you don't care about dead car crash victims?
China has both the nukes and ballistic missiles. Obviously, the calculus for the war with China completely different: you create a situation where China prefers not to attack Taiwan.
> Maybe in five years the regime would have collapsed during a succession crisis. Perhaps this perhaps that.
Maybe, but the war in Iran is not about Iran itself, at least from the US standpoint. It's about cutting China off from cheap oil that they buy from Iran with a huge discount. For Trump, to get a win is enough to get a new supreme leader who is more aligned with the west, like in Venezuela.
> A failed Iranian state might be the site of horrible atrocities to come.
Why would it fail? Iran is not Iraq or Syria or Libya. Like, nothing in common at all. If you analyze Iraq, Syria, and Libya pre-war and Iran pre-war you would see that none of the conditions that lead these countries to become failed states exist in Iran. IF you are interested, I can elaborate.
> For a post that seems to contemplate the future you seem to exhibit a strange lack of reflection.
> China has both the nukes and ballistic missiles. Obviously, the calculus for the war with China completely different: you create a situation where China prefers not to attack Taiwan.
The same can be said of Iran re creating off-ramps from conflict or bad outcomes. That's what the "nuclear deal" was meant to be about. The one the current President tore up because his predecessor was responsible for it.
> Maybe, but the war in Iran is not about Iran itself, at least from the US standpoint. It's about cutting China off from cheap oil that they buy from Iran with a huge discount. For Trump, to get a win is enough to get a new supreme leader who is more aligned with the west, like in Venezuela.
Afaik the administration has not articulated that view. It's not appropriate to take a scenario that might be plausible and put it into the President's mouth. You don't get to say what the war is about "from the US standpoint". That's the President's job.
> Why would it fail? Iran is not Iraq or Syria or Libya. Like, nothing in common at all. If you analyze Iraq, Syria, and Libya pre-war and Iran pre-war you would see that none of the conditions that lead these countries to become failed states exist in Iran. IF you are interested, I can elaborate.
This is simply incorrect on so many levels I don't know where to start. But since you invited elaboration, please by all means.
> The same can be said of Iran re creating off-ramps from conflict or bad outcomes. That's what the "nuclear deal" was meant to be about.
It was a bad deal that structurally did not prevent IR from building a bomb. This deal did not allow for "Anytime,Anywhere" inspections, had a sunset clause, and simply put provided financial relief to IR for the next 20 years or so. You can read the conditions yourself, and you will arrive to the same conclusion.
> Afaik the administration has not articulated that view. It's not appropriate to take a scenario that might be plausible and put it into the President's mouth. You don't get to say what the war is about "from the US standpoint". That's the President's job.
No, it is not. Politics are not about putting all the cards on the table, especially geopolitics.
We may not like it, but it is the way it is.
> This is simply incorrect on so many levels
Like what?
> But since you invited elaboration, please by all means.
Sure, first of all, Iranians see themselves as one nation despite their ethnic differences. Even in areas with separatist ideas, like the Iranian Kurdistan or Baluchistan, separatists are an absolute minority. Unlike Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya do not see themselves as one nation. These countries had minorities ruling over majorities under the idea of pan-arabism, which is not a nation-centric movement at all. Obviously, when the regimes fell you have a situation where majority is pissed at minorities for years of oppression, and neither the minorities not the majorities do not see themselves as one nation. Add to this external funding, and you get prolonged civil war.
In Libya you have Qatar vs. UAE.
In Syria -- Turkey vs. Iran
In Iraq -- you have Iran vs. US (that backed transitional government).
Iran is nothing like that. Iranians see themselves as one nation for the most part. You can see it via the Women Life Freedom movement, which is supported by most of Iranians and is centered about women rights. Nothing like that can ever exist in Syria, Iraq, or Libya due to insane cultural difference between these countries and Iran.
> It was a bad deal that structurally did not prevent IR from building a bomb. This deal did not allow for "Anytime,Anywhere" inspections, had a sunset clause, and simply put provided financial relief to IR for the next 20 years or so. You can read the conditions yourself, and you will arrive to the same conclusion.
These are well-known talking points. Yes in a deal the other side gets something. That's what a deal is. Sorry it wasn't a totally awesome deal like Trump would have totally signed that got us everything we wanted. You have a choice start a war or make a deal. That's basic geopolitics. Instead you seem to want to invent a third option out of thin air - come up with the perfect deal. I don't arrive at the same conclusion because it's ridiculous. I have no reason to believe the administration that negotiated that deal was blatantly incompetent or let Iran off the hook. If they could have gotten a better deal and still avoided war I think they would have. What plausible explanation is there to the contrary? Instead, we have a successor who was also unable to negotiate a better deal, and now war. I'm not sure what point you are making. The idea that the Iranians were really any closer to getting a nuclear bomb is a lie. There is no evidence. Iran has been a weak pariah state that can barely keep its top officials alive. This has been the status quo for decades. The same president who negotiated that deal also unleashed Stuxnet. We already bombed more sites last year. Their leaders and scientists have had constant assassinations over the years. Why do you believe that they were any closer to a bomb a month ago than they were when that deal was signed? And what is your evidence?
> No, it is not. Politics are not about putting all the cards on the table, especially geopolitics.
So the President is lying about the motivations for war? So despite what pours out of his mouth you simply pick the most plausible (or easily defensible) explanation and then say "this is what the war is about"? Why would it be putting his cards on the table? You think it escapes anyone in China that it imports Iranian oil and this creates a problem for them? Or do you mean politics is about lying to your own electorate? I noticed you originally led with the same fear-mongering lie about the reach of Iranian missile capabilities. But now you've retreated to we are doing it to stop oil from getting to China. Maybe you, like the President, know the American people don't want to see their own troops and citizens killed to stop the flow of oil to China? Maybe they can also see that when oil stops flowing to China, gas prices also increase at home? We are spending billions of dollars and lost American lives to increase gas prices at home but hey also in China? Is that your claim?
> Sure, first of all, Iranians see themselves as one nation despite their ethnic differences.
You can just stop there. This is a lie. It's like the "we will be greeted as liberators" claim in Iraq. I can tell from reading the rest of this that you know very little about this region. I don't mean to insult you it's just such a disingenuous claim and makes this back and forth barely even worth it. You are conflating so many things - pan-arabism with majority/minority conflict or even the notion of having a nation. That's wrong. You think Egyptians don't see themselves as Egyptians because some of them believed in pan-arabism? Wrong. You know there are Shia Arabs, right? Do you think all Shia are Persian?
You also walked back from your original claim again.
You said:
> Iran is not Iraq or Syria or Libya. Like, nothing in common at all.
Emphasis on *nothing in common at all*
I mean, really? Let's just rattle off a few that anyone with basic information literacy over the last few years would be able to come up with:
1. Countries that were under the grip of an authoritarian leader. Little to no evidence of recent civic institutions or culture of responsible governance.
2. Leaders who are not only authoritarian but flagrantly violent. In the absence of responsible governance, they resort to extreme violence to maintain power, creating cycles of pent up resentment, retribution and fear on both sides. The resentment of the powerless is obvious, however the fear of the powerful is equally as destabilizing.
3. Sizable minorities who even if aligned against the common dictator, will inevitably disagree with each other on the direction of the state. Once their common enemy is removed (to say nothing of a sizable loyalist faction) and given the lack of existing civic structures with broad buy-in, they often resort to violence. Persians only make up about 60% of Iran. Shia Muslims made up about the same percent in Iraq. I mean truly I have no idea what you are talking about. "They see themselves as one nation" based on what? Literally there have been multiple reports that the CIA is arming a separatist movement as we speak as their "boots on the ground" in Iran. You also ignored so many other cleavages - such as level of religious conservatism, class, geography. You think every person Shia or Persian is the same? Do you think when protestors in Iran were gunned down it was only because they weren't the same religion as the people shooting them? Or the same ethnicity? Do you not realize that the very notion of an identity, religion or ethnicity is itself often a point of contention?
4. In a region with a lot of other unstable states where domestic conflict can quickly spill over and spread across borders. Gee that should be obvious. And how about that in basically the same region as those other examples. Great track record of intervention here. But not this one. Trust me. Even though I'm also lying to you about oil being the cause of the war? Because god forbid I put my "cards on the table" aka a fact anyone with an internet connection can look up?
Why don't you actually answer some of the questions that led me to this long digression with you instead of continuing this constant walk back?
You could answer this:
> Where did you pull Greece from? The Iranians can barely hit anything next door.
Or I guess wait that's not important anymore because it's not really about that... it's about stopping oil from going to China.
So more importantly then, this:
> Initiating a war is a gamble in of itself. Now Americans all over the world are potentially at increased risk from lone wolves.
Perhaps the answer to this last question is you are so self-satisfied of the future and of your knowledge of Iran that you don't think it's a gamble? Maybe the price of dead Americans is worth it to stop oil flow to China? Where this started was this self-satisfied extrapolation from Greece, to Europe, to presumably the shores of America? How dare politicians risk lives by allowing this trend to develop, that you somehow saw as inevitable through your powers of clairvoyance. That was your position, right? Somehow we got from that to your supposed knowledge of oil flow grand strategy and Iranian nationalism. So I'm asking, what makes you so confident that this war is worth it? You see no risk? You have no doubts? Could you at least acknowledge the act of war is itself a gamble?
I'd appreciate an answer on that since this back and forth has gone on for a while and I've tried to respond to all the points you have brought up. Thanks
What is your evidence that given all we know about Iran, and the fact that they have 60%-enriched uranium, they are not building a bomb? Why do they need 60%-enriched uranium?
> Is that your claim?
No. My claim is that from a geopolitical point of view containment of China is the goal, and the war in Iran is just one step. Politics never about telling the truth -- it's about achieving goals.
You may not like the reality of it, but it is what it is.
> You know there are Shia Arabs, right? Do you think all Shia are Persian?
What does it have to do with anything? Can you form a coherent argument?
> I mean, really? Let's just rattle off a few that anyone with basic information literacy over the last few years would be able to come up with: <...>
> Little to no evidence of recent civic institutions or culture of responsible governance.
Iran has no civic institutions and no culture of responsible governance?
> Sizable minorities who even if aligned against the common dictator, will inevitably disagree with each other on the direction of the state.
The sectarian dynamics in Iraq, Syria and Lybia do not exist in Iran.
Yeah, "reports" about CIA are real. Sure.
> Great track record of intervention here.
There is no intervention though.
> Where did you pull Greece from? The Iranians can barely hit anything next door.
Have you seen the map? Open it, and then see where Cyprus is located.
Barely hit next door. Yeah.
> you don't think it's a gamble?
Of course it is. Like any other decision. You make the calculus and decide if the reward is worth the risk.
I am not sure any answer of mine you will find satisfiable. In your view, only 100% result justifies the risk. The reality is that you will never have 100% guarantee. For you inaction regardless of the consequences is the answer, for me it's better to act with uncertainty.
Finally, you assume (without evidence) that Iranian Regime is a rational actor. Once you change this assumption, the calculus will change.
I never said a 100% guarantee. You may put words in the president's mouth if you wish, please don't put words in mine.
You aren't answering my questions at all. You are evading them. The argument is clear. This war is not worth the potential cost. Iran was not closer to getting a weapon. Americans are at more risk today than they were yesterday.
Your walk back has now reached its peak.
> There is no intervention though
I mean what to even say to this?
The rest of it is more or less the same. But I want to highlight how you ended, as really that takes the cake. It's a talking point that comes up a lot so I want to call it out.
"The Iranian Regime is not a rational actor". I saw that coming from a mile away. Thanks for finally putting your cards on the table. So now you can inflate the boogeyman to be as big as you wish. Iran isn't rational, they crazy. Time to bomb!
This the refuge of unserious people. It was a rational actor, as terrible a regime as it is/was. The evidence of that is clear. They were a regime/nation-state that negotiated, declared war, sold oil, prioritized their own existence and acted to preserve their own power. Why aren't they rational? Because the Supreme leader wears a fundamentalist outfit? Because his religious fundamentalism comes from a religion that isn't yours? Because they make threats (which they for the most part never carry out)? You know that many times in the past they warn their neighbors (including Israel) of their so-called reprisal attacks ahead of time so they don't cause a booboo miscalculation and accidentally get annihilated? Like how they are getting annihilated now? If they are so irrational why didn't they send off all these weapons at any time before this? Why did they wait to get attacked? How does Israel penetrate so deeply into their command structure if its such an irrational regime? You would think any attempt at infiltration would be confused by the totally crazy irrational society they have. I mean what a nutcase regime. Jeez what a crazy irrational country attacking the countries that attacked them and bombed out their entire leadership or tacitly supported it.
Totally nuts man.
Disappointing. This just means you don't want to have a serious argument. What is clear is the projection, and that there is nothing more to be gained from this exchange. I have tried to argue in good faith this whole time. Have a good day.
This sounds like a straw man. What reason does Iran have to attack Europe? They don't engage in "mowing the lawn" like some other entity in the region.
"Iran has always lacked an ability to project power at a distance"
I'm curious what you're basing this on, since Iran has been supplying Russia with drones, etc. for much of the war in Ukraine and so far has launched attacks into Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Cyprus since the US began its attacks.
Iran may not be able to strike at sites in the US, but it could certainly target data centers in the Middle East with some hope of success. I'm not at all confident the current administration has accurately assessed Iran's capabilities or has the ability to protect the assets of US-based companies (or US citizens) in that region.
Your post is extremely misleading. Shipping drones in a box or whatever they are doing so Russians can use them is completely different from what we mean by projecting power. In many cases the Russians are actually manufacturing the drones themselves based off the Iranian plan. That's not anything like the USA's power projection, where B2s can takeoff in Missouri, bomb Iran and come home without ever landing or even being shot at. I mean it's just not even close.
Launching attacks and having "some hope of success" is weak. And that's what Iran is and has always been, weak.
Yes they launch attacks. Most of these fail. They have nowhere near the level of lethality, precision, force projection and penetration of Israel or the United States.
When are Americans going to learn nationstates and some radical blowing themselves up are two different things? The latter is the threat to Americans here. You don't stop it by blowing up the former. History has always shown in fact that doing that makes the latter problem worse.
It would be pretty dangerous to attribute such a thing (if it ever happened) to Iran without concrete evidence. Some stateside lone wolf nut might claim to be acting on behalf of Iran, but it doesn't make it true. It's pretty easy in America for anyone to get a gun and attempt a murder. It doesn't mean any government provided any meaningful capability, nor should we believe so until confronted with strong evidence.
Apparently the FBI recently stymied a plot that involved using drones deployed from offshore vessels targeting california. As to what that vessel might be, a submarine, a missile cruiser, a civilian vessel knowing or not, a container on a ship, the report left no indication.
Either way the target is tempting. Japan attempted it using the technology of their time which was entirely unguided. Today drones are precision instruments vs random dart balloon bombs.
And the evidence of this plot and Iranian involvement is what?
A quick Google search yielded nothing in that regard... honestly it just doesn't sound that credible in an age where increasingly anyone can say anything. Why believe such a claim without evidence? Because it was the FBI that said it?
There are tempting targets all over the place. Like in the Middle East itself that Iran can barely hit. Their defenses and their leaders are being blown to smithereens. But you want me to believe they might have a submarine off the coast of California?
"The FBI warned police departments in California in recent days that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by ABC News.
“We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” according to the alert distributed at the end of February. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”"
What is this supposed to prove? I asked for evidence. This is "the FBI said so" and as another commenter noted, in the vaguest terms possible.
Am I supposed to be impressed by this? "Allegedly aspired" so it's not even a credible plot, the allegation is they have aspirations to do something and that's all we got. We have no information about how they would actually ever carry this out. Jeepers, I'm scared. We're blowing their country to smithereens and they have "aspirations" of doing something back. Shocking. Those police officers must have been positively shaking in their boots.
What an amazing standard of proof you operate under.
Luckily our legal system more often than not makes it literally illegal to operate under your standard. How many were victims of people like you before they had to codify that principle I wonder. Truly stunning. If only the same level of rigor were enforced for presidents of the United States taking the nation to war. Think of how many more countless lives could be saved.
In support of your comment, the FBI under Trump has become increasingly politicized, to the point it's merely doing and saying whatever Trump's administration wants them to say. Nothing coming from them is credible. Of course they are going to inflate the chance of the Iranians magically developing a mini-sub and striking Florida or whatever.
And we all figure out it's possible on our own. Eveywhere possibly important might possibly be a target. Just because our emasculated FBI doesn't sniff it out doesn't mean it's not possible.
China and/or Russia might have a collection of zero-days they've been sitting on, which they could surreptitiously provide to Iran. Of course, there's attribution risk there, and the opportunity cost of not saving those zero-days for their own later use.
It seems kind of unlikey to me. Cyber attacks are unlikely to meaningfully change the result of the war, so it would kind of just be a waste from the china/russia perspective. They so far havent lifted a finger to do anything for iran that wasn't free for them, so i doubt they would waste exploits on this.
We just gave them a grudge to last another generation. They will be more actively seeking any opportunity to cause havoc than before.
I'd expect employees of Iranian descent to be under greater scrutiny than before, though most here probably escaped the regime with great hatred of it.
This is not a pointless war. You may not like Trump or Bibi, but geopolitics-wise this war make perfect sense on many levels.
First, it limits China's ability to hoard cheep oil as Iran has to sell its oil with a discount due to being sanctioned. China hoards oil as it plans to attack Taiwan and it understands that there will be sanctions on oil trade. So, to minimize the shock on its economy China hoards oil. [1]
Second, Iran is the reason why Gulf states are surrounded by instability: Houthis, armed and funded by IR, in Yemen make Saudis and UAE uneasy. Iraqi militias funded and armed by IR as well sabotage internal politics of Iraq the same way Hizballah destabilizes Lebanon. No one in the Gulf (except Qatar maybe, up until recently) wanted strong IR. These countries and their peace is essential for US and the world economy.
Third, if IR gets nukes, most of the Gulf nations would want nukes too. They already see themselves surrounded by IR-funded militias. We do not need more nukes, we need less nukes in the world. And I have no idea how people simply ignore the fact that IR already has 400+kg of 60%-encriched uranium. Why if not for bombs?
So yeah, geopolitics-wise this war makes perfect sense. Islamic Republic is major destabilizing factor in the region, and this war attempts to resolve it.
Why the current admin cannot articulate it clearly, idk.
I call it pointless because I and many other Americans have been told these things before.
We are always in a constant "Red Queen's Race" with other nations as a means of establishing dominance.
We subsidize allies like Israel with billions of dollars that have never been allocated by our congress, and which only serve to subsidize the healthcare of Israeli citizens while we continue to have nothing of the sorts.
"Bro, just trust me Iran is SO CLOSE!" for the past 40 years is not convincing us that this war has any benefit to us.
Americans are already on the hook for trillions of dollars in debt we cannot pay as a country, and now we want to continue exploding the deficit to the tune of $1 Billion per day.
Its existential threat after existential threat with no consideration to the actual troubles americans are facing in the here and now. Its just endless wars with no end in sight. Outside of manufacturing consent on behalf of Israel, posts such as yours seem highly dedicated to trying to convince nobody aside from the wealthy few Americans with international holdings.
> I call it pointless because I and many other Americans have been told these things before. We are always in a constant "Red Queen's Race" with other nations as a means of establishing dominance.
Well, if it's not the US, then someone else will. So, it can be US then.
> We subsidize allies like Israel with billions of dollars that have never been allocated by our congress, and which only serve to subsidize the healthcare of Israeli citizens while we continue to have nothing of the sorts.
Aid to Israel is basically giving them weapons for free, i.e., paying US-based companies. I have no idea how did you jump from weapons to subsidizing Israel's healthcare.
> "Bro, just trust me Iran is SO CLOSE!" for the past 40 years is not convincing us that this war has any benefit to us.
What is the purpose of having 60%-enriched uranium if not for bombs? If Iran has 60%-enriched uranium today, it means that they did start to work on it 10s of years ago. So, these people who said it were right.
I am not sure why you advocate for the spread of nuclear weapons, especially with regimes that are known to spread instability in the region.
> Americans are already on the hook for trillions of dollars in debt we cannot pay as a country, and now we want to continue exploding the deficit to the tune of $1 Billion per day.
This is a valid issue, and it has to be resolved. However, it has nothing to do with the war. With this war, or without, the debt is a structural problem of US politics. So far, for the past 20 years, everyone just kicks the can down the road.
> Outside of manufacturing consent on behalf of Israel, posts such as yours seem highly dedicated to trying to convince us that this isnt a pointless war from the American perspective.
It is absolutely not a pointless war. If this war is won, it secures long-term peace in the region, which will absolutely benefit the US. I have no idea why you think that having a regime that funds most of the terror groups in the regions, and spreads instability is good for the US.
PS And I am not even talking about how this would enable the US to focus on defending Taiwan from China.
>Aid to Israel is basically giving them weapons for free, i.e., paying US-based companies. I have no idea how did you jump from weapons to subsidizing Israel's healthcare.
Sick and tired of this old argument: Its still adding to the debt, so its socialism to increase military contractor stock prices.
Not really, this increases the profits of American oil and gas exports, USA is one of the countries that benefits from higher prices.
You could argue that just benefits petrol companies, but overall USA doesn't really lose on this its mostly the rest of the world that pays for it, and it might redistribute a bit inside USA.
> Houthis, armed and funded by IR, in Yemen make Saudis and UAE uneasy
I mean, I also would be uneasy if the 3-year old I tried to kill multiple times and failed were suddenly given a firearm, but maybe next time we try to prevent Saudis from killing their neighbours first, to avoid creating yet another resistance group that use terrorism and asymmetrical warfare?
> but maybe next time we try to prevent Saudis from killing their neighbours first, to avoid creating yet another resistance group that use terrorism and asymmetrical warfare?
It was not us that said to Iran to fund Houthis. Some things are due to choices that are made by others, and not the US. I do not get this whole idea of denying agency.
I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that if Saudis don't want to feel uneasy, they shouldn't meddle and bomb their neighbours.
Also they shouldn't execute a hundred unarmed Africans after bringing them to work on neom (I wonder if they were surprised to be shot at, did they run? Did the police execute the one who survived the first hits?), and let their vanity project kill more than 53k 'workers' (slaves?) in 15 years, but I mean, most of them are African or Indian, so who cares?
Don't get me wrong, Iran is an abhorrent country, who jail and execute people to make examples. Saudi Arabia is just way, way worse. And at least average Iranians seems empathetic and ok human beings. Average Saudis aren't.
Weird of you to neglect to mention the hundreds of dead Iranians, including not only many civilians on their own soil but also layers of the Iranian leadership. Including of course the assassination of the supreme leader. I'm not saying his death is a bad thing. But that would be the most "materially different" part of this time vs "business as usual".
The other reason this is relevant is because it might lead one to reasonably conclude Iranian options for retaliation have already been exhausted.
If they have some capability in reserve what are they waiting for?
> I have a hard time thinking they have had the restraint and the resources to collect together an arsenal of zero-day exploits they have yet to unleash
The semi-official IRGC account warns of attacks on offices and infrastructure of US & Israeli firms in the ME with drones and missiles, not zero-days.
In a just world many people would go the gallows for the decades of harm the US has inflicted on Iran for basically no reason whatsoever other than to benefit oil companies.
We overthrew their democratically elected government to install the Shah as a puppet dictator because the British goaded us into it by hand-waving about "communism" after Iran nationalized their own oil reserves from the Anglo-Iranian Company (which became BP). What followed was a brutal era of repression where American companies took a slice of oil revenue.
Once this became untenable, another of our puppets, Saddam Hussein, ejected the future Ayatollah Khomenei from Iraq in 1978. Why? Because we wanted the religious fundamentalists to win instead of the communists, which might bring Iran into the Soviet sphere of influence.
we then propped up a decade of war with Iraq by supplying Iraq with weapons. More than a million people died.
Iran has weathered decades of sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "we're going to starve you and deny your citizens basic medical care". The death toll for this is also likely in the millions.
We've let our rabid attack dog in the region, Israel, bomb Iranian consulates (eg Damascus), assassinate scientists, diplomators and negotiators, bomb them with impunity and otherwise commit regular war crimes.
We've gone to war for no other reason than Israel wants Iran to be a fail-state because it threatens the Greater Israel project [1]. It's clear that there was no military planning in any of this or, more likely, military planners probably said "this is a bad idea, we can't win" and they were ignored.
Iran continued complying with the JCPOA for at least a year after Trump cancelled it at the behest of Sheldon Adelson [2].
All of this while Saudi Arabia, our "ally", provided material suport to the 9/11 hijackers [3]. Our attack dog spies on us. A lot eg Jonathon Pollard [4]. And Jeffrey Epstein was almost certainly a Mossad access asset that compromised every level of our government, our companies and our educational institutions.
We are the bad guys here and I hope one day Iran gets some justice for the harm we've inflicted upon it.
> Iran has weathered decades of sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "we're going to starve you and deny your citizens basic medical care". The death toll for this is also likely in the millions.
Hi, I think millions is a drastic overstatement here which undermines the rest of your (often legitimate) claims.
Also Israel seems to have fairly normal relations with many countries in the region, the difference seems to be they are "countries not publicly calling for the destruction of Israel".
Which "millions"? There's a lot to choose from. Oh, for context, John Mearscheimer puts the estimate on those killed by US sanctions (across all countries we've done this to) at 38 million [1].
I always have to bring up the sanctions on Iraq after Saddam was no longer our puppet. A UN report in the mid-1990s claimed US sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright responded by saying "the price was wroth it" [2].
As for the Iran-Iraq war, there are many estimates of the total deaths (across both sides) exceeding a million eg [3].
Iraq I will grant you, those sanctions were a travesty. Cuba bad too.
In general, I don't find the argument that there were 38 million deaths from sanctions very convicing. That estimate is based on excess deaths and correlation. It is serious work. But it doesn't establish causal structure.
What I mean is, those studies don't have the power to distinguish between (regime -> sanctions -> deaths) vs (regime -> deaths + regime -> sanctions).
I would definitely agree that sanctions cost lives (e.g. unavailability of specialist medicines) but I don't see a specific mechanism whereby they cause "millions" of deaths without a complete failure of local governance.
> A UN report in the mid-1990s claimed US sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeline Albright responded by saying "the price was worth it"
These kind of statements make my blood curdle. Much like Iran today, Iraq back then posed no threat to the US. So when Albright made these calculations, that "as much as it pained her", those 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it", as long as Iraq threatened its neighbors blah blah blah... she's was being very, very callous. A war criminal wouldn't have said it better.
"I'm willing to sacrifice children from some other country, as long as our military objectives are met, for the greater good!".
I wonder if Albright would have made the same calculus were those children from her home town.
Also, this in my mind goes to show this isn't a partisan issue. Democrats/Republicans, they are all pretty callous with wars in foreign lands. Trump is just very obnoxious about it, and pretty bad at planning, but they are all universally terrible.
It's only pointless as long as you ignore their legitimate attempts of building nukes. If you don't want them to have nukes, then military action is the only way to stop them unfortunately. Because if/once they do get a nuke, it'll be impossible to stop them after that, and they'll hold the entire middle east hostage, so might as well do everything you can to prevent that before it happens, now that Russia is too busy to lend them a hand.
>Iran has generally been an active and persistant threat for many US firms long before this war began
I doubt this. Iran's leadership, like any dictatorship, just wants to be left alone to subjugate its people and enjoy the masses of wealth and power they have. When you're in such a privileged but fragile position, you don't go around poking the hornet's nest looking to start a fight with the biggest military in the world, because it would mean your end.
But Iran will probably retaliate now that they got attacked. OR, it will be a false flag to justify boots on the ground. IDK.
They held most of gaza hostage, blocking their access to international waters off gaza's own coast, based on the actions of a much smaller subset of those people. That seems about the most classical example of holding hostage as it gets.
But it was closed after a civil war within Gaza where Hamas took over circa 2007, not in response to a war with "other" countries. The blockade has been in places for nearly 20 years.
I think if Israel believes that weapons can be smuggled via sea, which is reasonable given the smuggling via Sinai and Rafah crossing, then they took the rational step of mitigation this risk.
Gazans could smuggle in arms, ergo refugees can't escape out into international waters towards whoever might receive them?
That doesn't make sense, it seems as if they're held hostage by Israel forced to stay in the very land where their own terrorist government might impress them into servitude towards use against Israel.
"I doubt this. Iran's leadership, like any dictatorship, just wants to be left alone to subjugate its people and enjoy the masses of wealth and power they have."
So ... that is why they only cared about themself and did not involve with Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, ..
> It's only pointless as long as you ignore their legitimate attempts of building nukes. If you don't want them to have nukes, then military action is the only way to stop them unfortunately. Because if/once they do get a nuke, it'll be impossible to stop them after that, and they'll hold the entire middle east hostage so might as well do everything you can to prevent that before it happens.
Obama had a perfectly good deal in place with Iran before Trump fucked it all up. Military action was not the only way to stop them.
>Obama had a perfectly good deal in place with Iran before Trump fucked it all up.
What makes you think the Iranian regime is trustworthy to actually respect that deal and not just continue building nukes on the side while using diplomacy to string everyone along that they aren't?
You know who else had a deal? Ukraine. Did that deal stop them from being attacked by Russia? Can you stop a military invasion by waving the piece of paper with the deal in the enemy's face? Because that's why nukes are the best insurance policy over deals and why Iran desperately wants them.
How can people be so gullible to blindly trust Iran's word thinking a deal means anything?
The two deals you mention are not at all comparable.
Ukraine's deal was vague promises with vague consequences, which of course materialized into zero ability to stop a land invasion.
The Iranian deal before its destruction was very much concerned with safeguarding against any attempt to "potentially circumvent" and gave auditors alot of freedom to investigate without obstruction.
Your partisan posting in regards to the notion of the war being pointless indicate that you're coming more from a place of emotion than logic. I can empathize, but strongly caution that its important we discuss the facts of arguments rather than gesturing that all but you fail to see the light.
That is some Reddit logic. It is the very semantics of the deals that keep those armies from invading in the first place. Of course they care about them.
Diplomacy is never a bad thing, war is never inevitable. And allow me to cast some serious aspersions on the idea that the US/Israeli military wouldn't be just as confident performing a decapitation strike on a nuclear Iran.
> What makes you think the Iranian regime is trustworthy
I don't think anyone believes the Iranian regime has ever been trustworthy. Probably why part of Obama's deal included inspections, surveillance, and monitoring.
Obama’s deal specifically excluded surprise inspections (often referred to as "Anywhere, Anytime"). So, if you are trying to hide something, and you know that the inspection is coming, you will succeed.
You're right, but neglect to mention that infrastructure necessary to enrich uranium is not something so easily squirrled away and hidden while also dealing with radioactive isotopes.
It was a treaty, many concessions existed to ensure both parties were comfortable with the arrangement. But that does not at all suggest that the agreement didnt account for foul play on either side.
It was an incredibly solid diplomatic option employed for several years, during which the perpetual "months away from nuclear weapons" rhetoric never proved well-founded.
Iran's existance is perpetually an existential threat when the only alternative to diplomacy is its total destruction at the expense of American and Iranian lives.
> You're right, but neglect to mention that infrastructure necessary to enrich uranium is not something so easily squirrled away and hidden while also dealing with radioactive isotopes.
But Iran did violate the agreement. The agreement was not just between the US and Iran, it had other parties as well. Yet, when US withdrew, Iran immediately violated it. Why? If they had no goal to pursue military-grade enrichment, why violate the agreement?
Biden's admin did not resume the agreement as well due to those violations by Iran.
I see this agreement as failure for the reason that it did not prevent in a structural way Iran from acquiring enriched material, with or without violations.
> Iran's existance is perpetually an existential threat when the only alternative to diplomacy is its total destruction at the expense of American and Iranian lives.
I do not believe that Iran is interested in diplomacy at all. They were never interested in diplomacy. Why did they fund all these groups around the Middle East if IR is so peaceful?
No, Iran kept following the accord during almost a year. I think they broke it after a french company got sanctioned in the US (or menaced with sanctions) for dealing with Iran, and french government, as usual, did nothing. Basically acknowledging US laws power over Europe.
The NYT also reported the 30k protestors killed number, when the HR watchdog report 7k confirmed, 11k to be confirmed, so at most 18k, which align quite nicely with the numbers OSINT groups found.
I'd rather have a paper from non- partisan source.
The "legitimate attempts of building nukes" as claimed by the same folks who, ~9 months ago said "Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated, and suggestions otherwise are fake news" (https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...).
>They've been claiming Iran is about to destroy Israel every 6 months for the past 40 years too
Remember STUXNET? Have you thought for a second that maybe if their centrifuges and nuclear facilities weren't constantly attacked and sabotaged by US and Israel every step of the way for the past few decades, plus having their top nuclear scientists assassinated every now and then, they could have had nukes a long time ago when those warnings were issued without those constant roadblocks setting them back?
So what? Pakistan got nukes and still has them. Despite decades of antipathy and ongoing conflicts over Kashmir they have managed to restrain themselves from firing one at India, or even saber-rattling.
The thing about nukes is that they massively disincentivize military attacks on your sovereignty. That strikes me as a perfectly legitimate reason to acquire them.
Sorry, I feel no need to accept your premise that Iran simply cannot be allowed to have one.
India (which also has nukes) may hate that Pakistan has that capability, but there's nothing they can do about it. I'd say Pakistan is considerably more secure with than without. And despite being an Islamic country with a nexus to terrorism they haven't blown up any western countries.
Having nukes seems to be the only way to not be bullied by the US, I'm not going to blame them, especially with Israel next door who has the same level of religious dumb fucks AND nukes
So the administration lied and Iran‘s nuclear capabilities weren’t “completely obliterated” back in June, and saying otherwise isn’t “fake news”?
It can’t be both ways. Either way the administration is lying, so I just don’t trust any of the reasons given for the current conflict.
The sad part is this is exactly what Trump and his administration, as well as the larger Republican Party, have wanted for years. My inherent distrust of every government action until I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Needlessly patronizing. But moving past that, how could their capabilities have been “completely obliterated” months ago and yet they are now so close to making a bomb that it warranted all this? That doesn’t make any sense. Just like the tariffs or any other controversial decision, the administration is giving different answers to different people at different times. They seed talking points, they do not provide useful information.
So again, either June was a failure and they lied or they are lying about this attack.
The moment IR gets nukes, Saudis and all the other countries around them will get nukes as well.
I don’t understand why everyone is so hell bent on not preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. We have enough of this crap already, and the last thing we need is more nukes.
I think you're missing the crux of the point: why is anything the Trump administration says taken at face value? They have no commitment to the truth, whatsoever.
If Iran was on the path to developing nukes, the correct path here was to:
1. Show the evidence to congress, and declare war legally based on the facts.
2. Get international buy-in, and work with our allies (all of whom would very much like to prevent Iran from procuring a nuclear weapon).
This was a hastily started war with flimsy goals and seemingly no real urgency. And one of the first things we did as part of our attack was to bomb an elementary school, killing hundreds of children.
Critics of this war aren't "hell bent on not preventing the spread of nuclear weapons". We're mostly looking at the situation, and thinking "this is not great".
> I think you're missing the crux of the point: why is anything the Trump administration says taken at face value? They have no commitment to the truth, whatsoever.
No, I am not. It has nothing to do with Trump his abilities to speak only truth or always lie.
Indeed. Remember this is the same regime that was insisting their leader was alive and about to make a speech when he had been dead for hours in the opening strikes of the conflict. They said they would sink American aircraft carriers if attacked. Meanwhile, the American president went on TV and stated they've blown through so many layers of leadership they are not sure who they could even reach out to.
Iran can clearly barely defend itself. The idea they will suddenly pull off something meaningful now strains credulity.
Cutting taxes has consequences.
Americans have enjoyed a huge increase to their living standards over the years and have become decoupled from many of the services that their taxes fund. In turn, large swaths of the populace are insulated from the consequences of degrading government services and infrastructure. This has caused a shift in attitudes towards taxes as most of these Americans no longer see the benefit of paying their taxes, incentivizing politicians to focus on cost reduction and tax breaks.
The problem here is that this attitude of Anti-Taxation has translated into no longer addressing the root cause, and people believing things like unproven stories of government corruption as being the sole cause of these degrading services despite the evidence for such being low to non-existant.
They dont want to address the real cause, so look to a convenient scapegoat that explains the degredation without accepting that they should pay more taxes.
Just like how at the federal level DOGE found almost no waste and corruption during their crusade against the federal services (stoked by similar anti-tax sentiment) it seems that every time a narrative of "corruption" takes hold enough to actually tackle the issue and launch a program to handle it, the program in turn finds its just wasting money.
People just need to accept paying more taxes in order for their society to flourish.
This is not supported by good data,
Car manufacturers are pushing to make bigger larger vehicles because they require very little additional manufacturing overhead over smaller vehicles and the manufacturers are able to sell them at higher prices.
What people want are Inexpensive vehicles, not necessarily larger ones. American car manufacturers have been actively suppressing cheaper smaller vehicles for their own benefit.
Many would disagree, the narrative that X is running smoothly and without issue is undone by any read over the many cotroversies its been embroiled in.
It is insulated from its failures by Elon's money and little else.
Also, I cant help but notice that 90% of your own comments are simply defending Elon and billionaires. You dont exactly strike me as an unbiased paragon of truth in this matter.
The state department is proving themselves far more competent than the defense department. This just looks like further evidence to the poor leadership.
"Pete the Pathetic" looks to be using ham fisted measures to try and make companies compliant to his will.
Zero precision or intelligent application of force.
Conservatism has largely been unpopular outside of rural townships, and the nation continues to undergo a process of urbanization as young people continue to move to cities.
Normally, a healthy response to this would be to realign and target a more popular set of messaging and policy objectives. Instead the American Right has decided instead that this popularity (and the reflection in media) is a threat to its ability to continue serving a shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors.
It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
Republicanism doesnt work for anyone but the wealthy, it will do everything in its power here.
Language changes over time, and I remember recent memes where a cute girl says something like "claiming you're moderate means you know conservatives don't get laid" (presumably because of abortion politics). It makes me wonder if the moderates actually became liberal or if they just don't want to use that word any more.
After all the polarism in "reality show politics", my diehard liberal friends seem less liberal to me, but they'll state which team they're on more fervently than ever.
> It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
To be clear, they were “handed power” by decisively winning a national election, which sort of undercuts your opening statement about how unpopular they are.
Well the problem I see with this is that the population means very little in terms of national politics in comparison to most modern democratic nations.
So you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives. Now I get that the idea here was to avoid a dictatorship of the majority that can just ignore smaller states, but the way it is now it is a dictatorship of the minority, even if you ignore all the blatant ways of voter disenfranchisement.
Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you. Ideally you'd want a party to have to listen to their voters. Gerrymandering, predicting voter behavior and throwing out the ones who might not vote for you are all the shameful behavior of traitors to democracy.
This has to be stopped and punished on every political level, as long as you still have a say.
No. There is a long history of Republican voter disenfranchisement:
- In the 1980s The RNC created the Ballot Security Task Force [1], which was a scheme to strike people off the voter rolls by sending them a mailer if they didn't respond. This led to a consent decree requiring "preclearance" for any voter roll enforcement that lasted 25+ years [2];
- Republicans lead the charge in restricting access to mail-in voting because it's used more by Democratic Party voters [3] despite there being no evidence of fraud;
- In response to Arizona turning blue in 2020, Republicans went on a massive voter suppression spree [4], which disproportionately impacts Native Americans [5];
- Nationally, the push to have a street address unfairly impacts Native Americans who often don't have an official sstreet address if they live on a reservation. That's not an accident. It's the point;
- Even the push to force people to have birth certificates is aimed at Native Americans and poor people. There are quite literally millions of Americans who don't have them [6];
- Even if you have the necessary documentation to get an ID, you may have problems getting access. Again, this is by design. For example, Louisiana closed a bunch of DMV offices in minority areas such that the only DMV in certain black-majority areas was only open one day a month [7];
- The so-called SAVE Act recently passed by the house required your birth certificate to match your ID. Well, that's a problem for married women [8].
- States such as Florida have used private firms to strike people off the voter rolls if their name sounds like a convicted felon anywhere else in the country [9].
And why are we doing all this? There is zero evidence of voter fraud on a large scale [10]. And those convicted of voter fraud are most commonly Republican anyway [11].
But let's just say that we want an ID to vote. Why don't we fund the Federal government to issue it and make sure it is readily available and cheap or free? No, we can't have that because it's never been the point.
At some point you have to realize that they don't care about "integrity". Voter suppression is the point because it's the only way they can win elections.
Lastly, I feel compelled to remind people of Lee Atwater's famous 1981 remarks [12]. Republicans went from overt racism to being ever more abstract but the goals remained the same: to disproportionately impact black and brown people.
It's an assertion not backed by data. Non-citizens voting is infinitesimally small. Between that, Noem saying out loud "we want the right people to vote", and Trump calling for nationalized elections, it's clear what the real purpose is.
Early in-person voting and making election day a federal holiday are things everyone on all sides ought to be able to rally behind, together. Idk if any of that is in the SAVE Act though
As if that ever was a huge problem in the US. If you want people to vote and want to avoid disenfranchising US citizens there are ways to do that as demonstrated by the majority of countries on earth. When I vote for example in the EU (Austria), I proactively get a letter from the state (since I am in the voter register). With this letter and some ID card I can show up in the polling location on the weekend and vote after proofing I am the person on my ID card.
What if I am not home? I go to a website a month before the vote, they send me a letter and I vote whenever I like before my election.
Everybody has such an ID card since that card is what you would also show to proove your identity elsewhere. And since we have working social welfare every slice of the citizen population can also afford it.
If you want to solve that problem, it is possible. If you want to solve it, that is. Right wing parties will always use non-citizens as scapegoats that are at the same time draining the welfare state and stealing your jobs. Oh, and you votes. Believing them without citation is the problem here.
>you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives
Doesn't California have 54 reps, out of 485? And 90 out of ~800 Article III judges (lifetime appointment). It also collects $858 billion a year in state and local taxes that it gets to do mostly what it wants with
Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming.
In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?
The people who wrote the constitution had plenty of experience with the First and Second Continental Congresses, and the Congress set up by the Articles of Confederation. And Parliament, and state legislatures. They both loved and feared democracy. Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic.
Senators were originally appointed by state governments to prevent the federal government from slowly weakening the states ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-2-3/A... “To further allay Anti-Federalist concerns regarding concentrated federal power in Congress, the Federalists emphasized that bicameralism, which lodged legislative power directly in the state governments through equal representation in the Senate, would serve to restrain, separate, and check federal power”). That’s not really “democratic.”
In grade school, we focused on the fact that states with small populations weren’t enthusiastic about letting larger states set national policy. Sure, New York would have been happy to have more influence in both the House and the Senate than any other state, but Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut weren’t going to sign under those terms. Horse trading to get them to join wasn’t “democratic” either, but they wouldn’t have joined any other way.
You completely avoided my question and just gave a lecture on why it is the way it is.
I am well versed in why the Senate is structured the way that it is. That is beside the point. The simple fact is we have a legislative structure that does not properly give voice to voters in larger states while over-representing people who choose to live in small states. It is patently unfair and should be fixed.
There is no universe in which the vast swaths of unpopulated land in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, or the Dakotas deserve the same amount of legislative power as the densely populated states of California, New York, Texas, and Florida.
But here we are, and this country has borne the painful lessons of a Constitution that over-represents residents of these lightly populated states through the tyranny of minority rule.
"Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming.
"In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?"
I answered "Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic."
I'm sorry if you are not capable of understanding how that answers your question.
Don't think it was ever supposed to be. The Senate was set up by the founders to be picked by the State Legislatures anyway, not a direct vote. Did you read the Federalist Papers?
The idea was that the House of Reps exists to represent the people of the state, and the Senate exists to represent the state itself. The 17th Amendment did away with state legislatures choosing senators, so we have this wonky system left for no good reason.
And don't get me started on freezing the rep count to 435. I certainly don't feel represented by my congresscritter.
Both you and the other person who responded to me completely avoided the question I posed and hid behind "The Founding Fathers said it should be this way, so it is that way."
I didn't ask why it is the way that it is or if it is operating to the plan presented by the Founding Fathers.
I asked in what universe is it remotely fair or democratic. Care to try and come up with an answer to that question?
If California was apportioned the same as Wyoming, it would have 68 or 69 representatives (depending how you round). Not to play favorites: Texas would have 50 or 51 representatives.
Even if you just count the House of Representatives, smaller states have a per capita advantage.
Well, it's two days later now, and it turns out Colbert just lied. He didn't want to abide by the 95-year-old law about equal time, and didn't extend an offer to Jasmine Crockett.
Then he lied about it and the network corrected him.
But okay, yeah they pushed the boundaries and all that bullshit.
> Well, it's two days later now, and it turns out Colbert just lied. He didn't want to abide by the 95-year-old law about equal time, and didn't extend an offer to Jasmine Crockett.
How did Colbert lie? And do you have a source for the supposed lie? The equal-time rule does not obligate proactive actions from the broadcaster such as invitations or "extend[ing]" an offer. The equal-time rule requires an equal opportunity for political opponents to use a broadcast station, and it is up to each political opponent to reach out and assert their intent to use the equal-time rule. Jasmine Crockett did not request to be on Stephen Colbert's show, much less was denied such a request.
> Then he lied about it and the network corrected him.
No, CBS lied about what the equal-time rule requires.
> He didn't want to abide by the 95-year-old law about equal time
Don't pretend that the "law about equal time" is the same in 2026 as it was in the 95 previous years [1]:
> Late-night and daytime talk show interviews were long considered to be bona fide news segments until FCC chair Brendan Carr issued new guidance in 2026 signaling that these types of shows would no longer be automatically granted the bona fide news exemption.
[break to avoid mixing quotes from different parties]
> He didn't want to abide by the 95-year-old law about equal time
Could you explain how you reached the number 95? I don't get 95+-1 from 2026-1927 or 2026-1934 [1].
> and didn't extend an offer to Jasmine Crockett.
CBS didn't want to air the Talarico interview because CBS didn't want to be forced to provide equal time in case Jasmine Crockett would have used the equal-time rule to get her own interview. Colbert did not oppose and has not opposed having Crockett on in relation to the equal-time rule.
I get the feeling that you're pretending to be angry on Jasmine Crockett's behalf. What's more, it seems like you want to be angry at Colbert and are projecting your feelings onto Jasmine Crockett. But why does Jasmine Crockett seem to have no issue with Colbert's actions [2]?
> Jasmine Crockett did not request to be on Stephen Colbert's show, much less was denied such a request.
I should have written: Jasmine Crockett did not request to be on Stephen Colbert's show, so her non-existent request couldn't have been denied by CBS or Colbert. CBS does not violate the equal-time rule until CBS were to deny an interview request that relies on the equal-time rule.
Conservatism is a set of political principles and values, which somebody like Trump overtly does not possess, and never did. The whole Republican party feels like a country wide gaslighting operation at this point. They claim to be conservative and Christian, but are clearly neither.
While I agree with much of what you say, there are a lot of urban, educated, socially left, economically right people (including myself) who complicate some of this analysis. Many economically right-wing people believe a free market is the most effective and helpful path to improve the standard of living for the working class and the poor. ("Progressive neoliberal social democracy", one might call it.)
The issues with Republicans right now go far, far, far beyond "they care more about the wealthy than the poor" (though that is definitely one of their core problems). They're basically destroying the rule of law, the country's internal and international reputation and credibility, all of our most important institutions, our ability to discern what is true, our sense of decency, our civil liberties, our basic respect of human rights... The class stuff is secondary or tertiary to the bigger issues, in my opinion.
Is it? Citizens in Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota have ~3x the voting power as citizens of California, seems pretty easy to win many of the things you mentioned on rural townships.
i believe you have that backwards, senate gets 2 representatives per state. house gets based on population (less gerrymandering!). but your point still stands
Palantir is a fantastically straightforward example of how a country experiencing an era of averice quickly degrades in the quality of its leadership.
Karp and Thiel are examples of certain types of personalities that make their way into positions of influence where they start to expel toxic cultural pollutants responsible for an empire's decline.
More people need to realize the parasitic relationship the wealthy in America currently occupy.
I'm wondering which of the PayPal mafia or other billionaires best represent Marcus Licinius Crassus taking food out of poor people's mouths and abolishing the republic for authoritarianism/oligarchy.
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies.
Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets.
If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.
I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
There is a very, very clear and specific problem: "free" advertising supported sites incentivizes farming user engagement. Farming user engagement needs be sharply curtailed because it's proven to be broadly damaging to society and the direct way to do that is to reduce the incentive, advertising revenue. It's as straightforward as that.
Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy.
"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)
Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.
As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
without human influence or directive, capital ceases to be become anything meaningful beyond [insert data type] at which point, it spreads like a cancer, ie: universal paperclips
Capitalism is revered due to how it has significantly impacted the living standards of populations that participate in it. But increasing the living standards of populations was never the purpose of capitalism, it was a simply a side-effect.
Capitalism started with the East India Company. That is the real Capitalist world choice. We treat our strongly regulated society as 'Capitalism' for some reason (while the Capitalists tell us we need to get rid of all the regulation that keeps them in check).
Capitalism left to it's own authority creates payment in company scrip and company towns. Capitalism WANTS labor trapped with company script/company towns. Just because society outlawed that doesn't mean Capitalism isn't working in other ways to recreate that. What Capitalism does not want is empowered labor or labor lifted out from dire situations. Society is what has done that, not Capitalism.
Without strict government oversight Capitalism is horrible and gives horrible results to society at large. It just has done an incredible job of painting modern society as Capitalism and claiming all benefits of things that aren't inherently from Capitalism but from Government oversite.
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